Zeus Trivia
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60 free Zeus trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Zeus is the sky and thunder god who rules the Greek pantheon from Mount Olympus, and almost every Greek myth eventually runs through him. This quiz starts with the story everyone half-knows (the father who swallowed his children, the stone in swaddling clothes, the cave in Crete, the ten-year war with the Titans) and then goes deeper: how the brothers divided the cosmos, the monster who tore out his sinews, the wives before Hera, the disguises he used on Europa, Leda and Danae, and why Athena came out of his head. It then moves from myth to religion and history: what his name shares with Jupiter and the Vedic Dyaus, the epithets that made him god of oaths, guests and marketplaces, the oak oracle at Dodona, the wolf rites of Mount Lykaion, the ivory-and-gold statue at Olympia that was one of the Seven Wonders, the Athens temple that took 638 years to finish, and his cameo appearances in the New Testament. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Zeus and his cults and monuments, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Greek mythology, Roman mythology and Odin quizzes next.
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Q 01Which daughter of Zeus and Demeter did he give to Hades as a bride behind her mother's back?
Persephone
Persephone. Demeter let the crops fail in protest until Zeus ordered her daughter's return, and the earth is said to lie barren each year for the months Persephone spends below.
Q 02In the best-known telling, Zeus carried off which Trojan prince to serve as cupbearer to the gods?
Ganymede
Ganymede. Homer says the boy was taken for his beauty, and that Zeus paid his father for the loss with horses that were the finest under the sun.
Q 03In ancient Rome, Zeus was identified with which god?
Jupiter
Jupiter. That link is why the astronomer Simon Marius named the planet's four big moons after lovers of Zeus, among them Io, Europa and Callisto.
Q 04Zeus is the child of Cronus and which Titaness?
Rhea
Rhea. After Cronus swallowed her first five children, she asked her own parents, Gaia and Uranus, to help her hide the sixth.
Q 05Why did Zeus's father swallow each of his children at birth?
A prophecy said one would overthrow him
A prophecy said one would overthrow him, and Cronus had reason to believe it: he had taken power by castrating his own father, Uranus, with a sickle.
Q 06What did Zeus's mother give Cronus to swallow in place of her newborn son?
A stone in swaddling clothes
A stone in swaddling clothes. Cronus later vomited it up, and Zeus set it at Delphi as a marvel, where travellers in Roman times were still shown a stone said to be the one.
Q 07Which son of Zeus and Europa became king of Crete and had Daedalus build the Labyrinth?
Minos
Minos. Death did not end his reign: Odysseus finds him in the underworld, golden sceptre in hand, still handing down judgments to the dead.
Q 08In most tellings, the infant Zeus was fed on the milk of which animal?
A she-goat
A she-goat. In Ovid's telling the goat broke a horn on a tree, and the horn was filled with fruit for the baby and became the horn of plenty.
Q 09How did the Kouretes keep Cronus from hearing the infant Zeus cry?
By beating spears on their shields
By beating spears on their shields. Callimachus has the armoured guardians dance a war-dance around the baby, so that Cronus would hear the din of their armour and not the crying.
Q 10In one version, the young Zeus's cradle hung from a tree so he was in none of which three places?
Heaven, earth or sea
Heaven, earth or sea. The Roman mythographer Hyginus tells it as a loophole: Cronus was hunting everywhere for the child, and a cradle swinging from a branch lay in none of the three realms.
Q 11Who gave Zeus his thunderbolt after he freed them from imprisonment?
The Cyclopes
The Cyclopes. In thanks for their release the one-eyed smiths armed his brothers too, giving Poseidon his trident and Hades a helmet that made its wearer invisible.
Q 12After his ten-year war with the Titans, whom did Zeus sentence to hold up the sky forever?
Atlas
Atlas. His burden was the heavens and never the Earth: Hesiod has him bracing the sky with his head and arms at the far edge of the world.
Q 13In Homer's account, how did Zeus and his brothers divide the world between them?
Drawing lots
Drawing lots. Poseidon throws it back at Zeus in the Iliad when ordered off the battlefield: Zeus holds only his own third, he says, and the earth is common to all three.
Q 21Which daughters were born after Zeus lay with the Titaness Mnemosyne on nine successive nights?
The Muses
The Muses. Their mother was Memory herself, yet Hesiod says the nine were born to bring a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow.
Q 22Leto, pregnant by Zeus, roamed far and wide before she could give birth to Apollo on which island?
Delos
Delos. Callimachus says land after land turned her away for fear of Hera, while the island drifted loose until it gave Apollo a birthplace and took root.
Q 23Zeus first won Hera by turning into which small bird, which she caught and kept as a pet?
A cuckoo
A cuckoo. Pausanias says the mountain where it happened was renamed Cuckoo Mountain, and that Hera's great statue near Argos held a sceptre with the bird perched on top.
Q 14Where did Zeus banish the defeated Titans?
Tartarus
Tartarus. Hesiod says a bronze anvil dropped from earth would fall nine days and nights to reach it, and Zeus posted the three Hundred-Handers there as guards.
Q 15Which monster with a hundred snaky fire-breathing heads challenged Zeus after the Titans fell?
Typhon
Typhon. When he stormed heaven, Apollodorus says, the other gods fled to Egypt and hid in the shapes of animals while Zeus fought on with his thunderbolts.
Q 16In Apollodorus's account, a hundred-headed monster disabled Zeus by cutting out what?
The sinews of his hands and feet
The sinews of his hands and feet. The monster hid them in a bearskin under a she-dragon's guard, until Hermes and Aegipan stole them back and refitted them to Zeus.
Q 17In Apollodorus's account, Zeus buried his hundred-headed challenger by hurling which mountain on top of him?
Etna
Etna. Apollodorus says its blasts of fire come from the thunderbolts Zeus threw, and Aeschylus warns that the pinned monster will one day send rivers of fire across Sicily.
Q 18In the Iliad, which three gods conspired to tie Zeus up in bonds?
Hera, Poseidon and Athena
Hera, Poseidon and Athena. The sea-nymph Thetis saved him by summoning the hundred-handed Briareus, and Achilles later tells her to remind Zeus of the debt.
Q 19According to the Theogony, who was Zeus's first wife, whom he swallowed while she was pregnant?
Metis
Metis. Hesiod says Zeus tricked her with cunning words and put her in his own belly, where she went on advising him on good and evil.
Q 20Which goddess was born from Zeus's head?
Athena
Athena. She leapt out fully armed after Zeus's skull was split with an axe, a blow that different tellers credit to Hephaestus or to Prometheus.
Q 24In the Iliad, Hera seduces Zeus away from the Trojan War using a charm borrowed from which goddess?
Aphrodite
Aphrodite. Hera borrowed her embroidered band of desire, then bribed the god Sleep with a bride to knock Zeus out afterwards, and the Greeks rallied while he dozed.
Q 25What did Gaia give as a wedding present when Zeus married Hera?
A tree bearing golden apples
A tree bearing golden apples. Hera had it planted in her own distant garden with a dragon on guard, and stealing its fruit later became one of the labours of Heracles.
Q 26Zeus carried Europa across the sea to Crete in the form of which animal?
A bull
A bull. He appeared as a tame white bull, so gentle that the princess climbed onto his back, and only then did he plunge into the sea.
Q 27In Euripides's Helen, Zeus comes to Leda as a swan fleeing from which pursuer?
An eagle
An eagle. Helen tells the tale herself as the play opens, right after naming Tyndareus as her father, and undercuts it with the words 'if this story is true'.
Q 28Zeus reached the imprisoned princess Danae in what form?
A shower of gold
A shower of gold. Her father had locked her in a bronze chamber because an oracle said her son would kill him, and her son Perseus later did, by accident, with a stray discus.
Q 29Zeus's lover Io, a priestess of Hera, was turned into which animal?
A cow
A cow. Hera set the all-seeing Argus to guard her, and when Hermes killed him she sent a gadfly that chased Io as far as Egypt.
Q 30In Ovid's telling, what happened to Semele when Zeus appeared to her as he did to Hera?
She was burned to ashes
She was burned to ashes. Zeus had sworn to grant whatever she asked and could not refuse, but he saved her unborn son Dionysus by sewing him into his own thigh.