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After Herodotus had visited Egypt in the fifth century B.C., he was convinced that it was from the Egyptians that the Greeks had ob- tained their notions and beliefs of the gods; writing for his country- men, he employed the names of Greek gods to describe the comparable Egyptian deities. His conviction of the Egyptian origin of Greek theology stemmed not only from comparable attributes and meanings of the gods' names, but also (and mostly) from similarities in the tales concerning them. Of these, one uncanny parallel certainly must have struck him as no mere coincidence: it was the tale of the cas- tration of one god by another in a struggle for supremacy. The Greek sources from which Herodotus could have drawn are. fortunately, still available: various literary works, such as Homer's Iliad; the Odes of Pindar of Thebes, written and well known just before Herodotus' time; and first and foremost, the Theogony ("Divine Genealogy") by Hesiod, a native of Askara in central Greece who composed this work and another (Works and Days) in the eighth century B.C. A poet, Hesiod chose to attribute the writing of the Theogony to the Muses, goddesses of music, literature, and art, who, he wrote, encouraged him "to celebrate in song" the histories "of the re- vered race of gods, from the beginning . . . and then to chant of the race of men and strong giants; and so gladden the heart of Zeus within Olympus." This all happened when he was "shepherding his lambs" one day near the Holy Mountain which was their aLaae abode. In spite of this pastoral introduction, the tale of the gods as re- vealed to Hesiod was mostly one of passion, revolt, cunning, and mutilation; as well as of struggle and global wars. In spite of all the hymnal glorification of Zeus, there is no apparent attempt to cover up the chain of bloody violence that had led to his supremacy. 49 THE MISSILES OF ZEUS AND INDRA