Zeus is of course, the supreme god in the Greek pantheon.
Here he is depicted as a man about 30 years old with a very bushy head of hair and beard. The work is life-sized or slightly larger.
A placard informs us that it was found in Otricoli in 1781-1782. It was restored in 1783. It was probably originally part of a cultic statue showing him seated. It is probably a Roman copy of an earlier Greek original.
Wikipedia (
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"Zeus ...is the "Father of Gods and men" ... who rules the Olympians of Mount Olympus as a father rules the family according to the ancient Greek religion. He is the god of sky and thunder in Greek mythology. Zeus is etymologically cognate with and, under Hellenic influence, became particularly closely identified with Roman Jupiter.
Zeus is the child of Cronus and Rhea, and the youngest of his siblings. In most traditions he is married to Hera, although, at the oracle of Dodona, his consort is Dione: according to the Iliad, he is the father of Aphrodite by Dione. He is known for his erotic escapades. These resulted in many godly and heroic offspring, including Athena, Apollo and Artemis, Hermes, Persephone (by Demeter), Dionysus, Perseus, Heracles, Helen of Troy, Minos, and the Muses (by Mnemosyne); by Hera, he is usually said to have fathered Ares, Hebe and Hephaestus.
As Walter Burkert points out in his book, Greek Religion, "Even the gods who are not his natural children address him as Father, and all the gods rise in his presence." For the Greeks, he was the King of the Gods, who oversaw the universe. As Pausanias observed, "That Zeus is king in heaven is a saying common to all men". In Hesiod's Theogony Zeus assigns the various gods their roles. In the Homeric Hymns he is referred to as the chieftain of the gods.
His symbols are the thunderbolt, eagle, bull, and oak. In addition to his Indo-European inheritance, the classical "cloud-gatherer" (Greek: ?efe???e??ta, Nephelegereta) also derives certain iconographic traits from the cultures of the Ancient Near East, such as the scepter. Zeus is frequently depicted by Greek artists in one of two poses: standing, striding forward, with a thunderbolt leveled in his raised right hand, or seated in majesty."
As for the asteroid, Wikipedia (
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"5731 Zeus (1988 VP4) is an Apollo asteroid and Near-Earth object discovered on November 4, 1988 by C. S. Shoemaker at Palomar Observatory. Based on its observed brightness and assumed albedo it is estimated to have a diameter between 2.1 and 4.7 km."