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Zeus is the king of the Olympian deities. He is the god of thunder and the sky, and a key figure in the majority of Greek epics and myths. His role in The Odyssey is fairly straightforward: he acts as a sort of divine mediator who oversees all, and intervenes when he thinks it necessary, as various gods fight over whether to help or punish Odysseus on his laborious journey back to Ithaca. As a result, he is sometimes depicted as weighing men’s fates in his scales.
As the epic progresses, it becomes apparent that Zeus is deeply fickle and prone to rash outbursts, just like any other god or mortal. Sometimes Zeus favors Odysseus and either helps him directly or allows other deities to do the same. For example, he sends the messenger god Hermes to Calypso’s island to demand that she set Odysseus free, and he allows Athena to repeatedly guide Odysseus and Telemachus in spite of Poseidon’s fierce opposition to the idea; his decree that Odysseus, after ten years at war and ten years at sea, has suffered enough appears just and fair.
On the other hand, Zeus is also quick to anger and susceptible to other gods’ tempers. For example, he conjures a storm that destroys Odysseus’s ship and kills his entire crew after Odysseus’s sailors eat the cattle of the Sun, and he allows Poseidon to punish the Phaeacians for going against his wishes by helping Odysseus. This last example is particularly galling, given that he punishes the Phaeacians for simply abiding by the sacred Hellenistic code of hospitality known as xenia, of which Zeus is often characterized as the primary enforcer. These contradictory examples characterize Zeus as temperamental and impulsive, a god whose decisions are governed not by a fixed set of rules but by his own ego and the egos of others.
