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Here is a little about Zeus' marriages and affairs.
The earliest of Zeus' wives was Metis, the daughter of Oceanus. Metis took on several forms in order to try and escape from the god, but finally submitted and conceived a daughter.
Gaia predicted to Zeus that if Metis gave birth to a daughter, she would then produce a son who would dethrone his father. So Zeus swallowed Metis and, when the time came for the delivery of the child, Prometheus, or Hephaestus split Zeus' skull with an axe, and the goddess Athena emerged fully armed.
Zeus then married Themis, one of the Titanides and had daughters by her who were called the Horae, Named, Eirene[Peace], Eunomia[Good Order], and Dike[Justice]. Then he fathered the Moirae who were the agents of Destiny.
Zeus fathered Aphrodite on Dione, one of the Titanides, in one Tradition. By Eurynome, he fathered the Charites. By Mnemosyne he had the Muses. Finally, by Leto, he fathered Apollo and Artemis.
It was only at this moment that, according to Hesiod, the sacred marriage with Hera, his own sister, took place, but it was generally considered to of happened much earlier. Hebe, Eilithyia, and Ares were born of this marriage.
By another of his sisters, Demeter, Zeus had a daughter, Persephone.
Zeus' intrigues with mortals were countless. There was hardly a region in the Greek world which did not boast an eponymous hero who was a son born of one of Zeus' love affairs. Similarly, most of the great families of legend were connected with Zeus.
The Heraclids, for example, were not only descended from the union of the god and Alcmene but also, earlier, from the union of Zeus and Danae.
Achilles and Ajax were descended from Zeus through the Nymph Aegina, and the ancestor of Agamemnon and Menelaus, Tantalus, was said to be the son of Zeus and Pluto.
The race of Cadmus was connected with Zeus through Io and her son Epaphus.
The Trojans, through their ancestor Dardanus. were born of the affairs between Zeus and Electra.
The Cretans claimed connections with Europa and the three sons she had by Zeus, who were, Minos, Sarpedon and Rhadamanthys.
The Arcadians had an ancestor called Arcas, son of Zeus and Callisto and the Argives took their name from Argos, the son, like his brother Pelasgus, of Zeus.
Finally, the Lacedaemonians claimed descent from the god and the Nymph Taygete.
There were particular reasons which led the god to father children on mortals. the birth Of Helen was explained as a desire to diminish the excessive population of Greece and Asia by provoking a bloody conflict.
Similarly the birth of Heracles was intended to provide a hero capable of ridding the world of destructive monsters.
Many of these unions took place with Zeus disguised as an animal or in some other form: with Europa he took the form of a bull, with Leda, a swan, with Danae, a shower of gold.
These adventures often exposed Zeus to Hera's anger.
One explanation given for by ancient writers for the God's Metamorphoses was the desire to be concealed from his wife. Zeus' lovers often took animal forms, thus Io was metamorphosed into a cow, and Callisto a She Bear.
Blessed Be
Cyreon Hp
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