Zeus Was Here

Question: So I have a few questions about Zeus and his birthday. 1) When/how is his birthday celebrated? (i.e., is there a festival?) 2) The majority of the Greek writers say he was born in Psychro Cave in Crete - what info is available on the actual cave? & 3) (connected to #2) What other roles does the cave have in the myths?

Lots of Zeusing today. Zeus all around!

Well, to start with, there actually isn't a "birthday" festival for Zeus as far as we know. While a few of the Greek gods do have festivals that commemorate their births, most of them don't thanks to their cults being so widespread and the general Greek preference for action over existence. They preferred to celebrate particular acts Zeus performed, such as his marriage to Hera, his defeat of Typhon or his smiting of evildoers. Also, because a number of these myths stretch back into an area of antiquity where no one was bothering to date anything, most accounts of Zeus' birth don't include a particular day that he was born. There are tons of festivals to Zeus, however (and barrels more if you include the Roman festival calendar's many days honoring Jupiter), so there are plenty of sacred festivals to choose from when trying to find Zeus-centric times in the year.

There's no foolproof consensus on where Zeus was born, either, which shouldn't be surprising for a god who was incredibly popular and therefore said to have been born wherever the reteller of the myths thought would bring most glory to his people. The Cretans, naturally enough, said he was born in Crete; but Callimachus also mentions that the Arcadians (inventors of the zany werewolf cult of Zeus Lykaios) claim Zeus was born there, and furthermore characterizes the Cretans as liars. And then within Crete there are also arguments about where exactly Zeus was born, whether in the Diktaean Cave (popularly supposed to be a reference to the Psychro Cave in modern Crete) or on Mount Ida, a place sacred to his mother Rhea and her later form Cybele (and, in one trying-to-bridge-the-gaps account, born in the cave but then moved to Mount Ida to be raised there). Furthermore, there's another Mount Ida, this one in Anatolia, that has also been speculated as the place of Zeus' birth, usually by scholars who point out that it also has a strong tradition of an ancient Zeus-alter and that he uses it as a base of operations for other actions later in his stories. The Cretans are the loudest about their claim to Zeus' birthplace, which you can see even up to the modern day, when the supposed birthplace is regularly trumpeted as a major tourist attraction; over time, they've pretty much won the war, at least in the popular imagination.

As for the Diktaean Cave, its role in mythology is simple and doesn't stretch much beyond the nurturing of the king of the gods; in the relevant versions of the myth, he is born there and left in the care of a nurse - the goat Amalthea or the nymph Adrasteia, depending on the storyteller - while Rhea goes off to fool Cronus into believing he's devoured him. That's the only mythic event to really feature the cave, which thereafter vanishes from the Greek stories, having fulfilled its purpose. Modern archaeologists believe that the Psychro Cave in Crete might be the cavern of the story, based on evidence of an ancient Zeus-cult there, but that's not necessarily a sure thing; it could just as easily be that the shrine to Zeus was here to reenact his birth in a local area, and that the actual cave was elsewhere on Crete (or Arcadia, or in Turkey, or whatever) or even somewhere entirely inaccessible to mortals, perhaps a safe Terra Incognita Rhea set up to make sure no one accidentally stumbled across the boy before he was old enough to take matters into his own hands.

If you do want to use the Psychro Cave as the for-reals legitimate birthplace of Zeus, there's not really much to tell about it, unfortunately; it and its place of worship were ransacked and mostly destroyed by centuries of worshipers, looters and archaeologists making a hash of things, and most of the surviving relics from it are now in museums around the world. The cave itself is still there, now outfitted with walkways and tour guides for those who want to go see it.

A pretty great place for a Scion plot to have some juicy happenings, eh?