Most glorious of the immortals, many-named, forever almighty,
Zeus, first author of nature, steering all things by law —
hail! For it is right that every mortal should address you.
From you we were born, and we alone received the likeness of god
of all that lives and creeps mortal upon the earth;
therefore I will hymn you, and sing your power for ever.
To you this whole cosmos, wheeling about the earth,
is obedient wherever you lead, and is willingly held by you;
such a servant do you keep in your unconquered hands —
the two-edged, fiery, ever-living thunderbolt:
beneath its stroke all the works of nature are accomplished.
By it you steer the common Logos, which passes through all things,
mingling with the lights both great and small,
‹which, grown so great, is the highest king through all.›
Nor does any deed come to be on earth apart from you, divinity,
nor in the divine vault of the aether, nor upon the sea —
save what the wicked do in their own folly.
But you know how to make the excessive fitting,
and to order the disordered; what is not dear to you is dear.
For you have so fitted into one the good with the bad
that one Logos comes to be for all, eternally.
From it those mortals who are wicked flee, and let it go —
wretches, who, forever longing to possess good things,
neither see the common law of god nor hear it,
though obeying it they might live well, with reason.
Instead they have turned to gain, in no order at all;
others to idleness and the sweet works of the body;
. . . . . . ‹and are carried now to one thing, now another,›
‹striving with all their might for the very opposite of these.›
But, Zeus, giver of all, dark with cloud and bright with lightning,
deliver men from their baneful ignorance;
scatter it, father, from the soul, and grant that we attain
the judgement by which, trusting, you steer all things with justice —
so that, being honoured, we may repay you with honour,
hymning your works unceasingly, as befits
a mortal: since neither for men is there any greater prize,
nor for gods, than to hymn the common eternal law in righteousness.
Commentarius · Commentary
The best-known prayer of Greek philosophy — and the strangest in this collection. Cleanthes led the Stoa after Zeno, in the second half of the third century BC; the text survives because Stobaeus copied it into his anthology.
An ordinary ancient prayer asks for something definite: a harvest, a fair wind, recovery from illness. Here there are thirty-seven lines and a single request, right at the end: deliver us from ignorance and grant us understanding. Everything before it describes how the world is built — the only thing that makes such a request worth making.
The design is this: Zeus governs everything through law, and his instrument is the thunderbolt. The bolt is not the mythological weapon of the sky-god but physics: the stroke by which "all the works of nature are accomplished". By it he also "steers the common Logos", the reason that runs through all things. The Homeric vocabulary is still in place — "dark with cloud", "bright with lightning" — but something else now lives inside the words.
Hence the hardest line in the hymn: nothing comes to be apart from Zeus, "save what the wicked do in their own folly." The single breach in the fabric of the world is human stupidity. And even that is not final: a few lines later the god is said to know how "to order the disordered" and to fit good together with bad into one arrangement.
And so the request is the one it is. Asking for a harvest makes no sense where everything is already ordered by law; the one thing a person lacks, and can ask for, is an understanding of that law. As for refusing to understand — that is the subject of the same author's quatrain, cleanthes-zeus-002.
