Zeus

Zeus was the youngest child of the Titans Cronus and Rhea, and according to Hesiod's Theogony he survived only because Rhea, having watched Cronus swallow each of her previous children at birth for fear of a prophecy that one of them would overthrow him, hid the infant Zeus on Crete and gave Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to swallow in his place. Raised in secret, Zeus grew to maturity and returned to force his father to disgorge his swallowed siblings, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon, who emerged in reverse order of their swallowing. Zeus then led his freed siblings and a group of allied gods called the Olympians in the Titanomachy, a ten year war against Cronus and most of the other Titans, a conflict Hesiod describes as shaking earth and sea alike. Victory let Zeus and his brothers divide the cosmos by lot: Zeus received the sky and became king of the gods, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the underworld, while earth and Olympus remained common ground. Zeus went on to father a vast number of children by both goddesses and mortal women, unions that generated much of the rest of Greek myth, from Athena and Apollo to Heracles and Perseus, and that regularly drew the jealous anger of his wife Hera.

Zeus received more cult worship across the ancient Greek world than any other god, though that worship was never centralized: he was honored under dozens of local epithets and titles tied to specific functions and places rather than through a single unified priesthood. Dodona in northwestern Greece housed his oldest and most famous oracle, where priests and priestesses were said to interpret the god's will from the rustling of a sacred oak tree, while Olympia in the Peloponnese held his most prestigious sanctuary, home to a colossal gold and ivory cult statue by the sculptor Phidias and to the Olympic Games themselves, held every four years in his honor and used by ancient Greeks to date their own calendar of eras. Athens kept a great unfinished temple to Zeus Olympios, only completed centuries later under Roman rule, and cities across the Greek world maintained altars to Zeus Xenios, protector of guests and strangers, and Zeus Horkios, guarantor of oaths, roles that made him a figure invoked in everyday civic and legal life rather than only at festivals. That combination, a single great god worshipped locally under many faces, is one of the clearest patterns Greek religion as actually practiced displays, distinct from the more unified portrait later literary retellings can suggest.