ZEUS AND THE KEY DAYS

Times of year we tell by our astronomical clock, watching constellations which Zeus himself has fixed in heaven as signs to us. This what Aratus tells us in his Phaenomena, a work of the third century BC consciously building on the work of Hesiod 400 years earlier. The Greek word for a sign is sema and revealingly it also becomes the word for a constellation. This leads us to a form of expression in the epic which takes 'day into the realm of fate! Homer speaks of such things as the 'due day(for death), evil day, pitiless day, day of slavery, day of freedom, day of return' (Schwabl 1978: 1022). It is Zeus who manages these key days, which determine our own thoughts and behaviour if we are to believe the disguised Odysseus:44 The thinking of men on earth is such as the day that the father of men and gods brings on.