flinging into it all the rivers’ fury.
All that flow from the crests of Ida down to breaking surf...
The channels of all those rivers—Apollo swung them round
into one mouth and nine days hurled their flood against the wall
and Zeus came raining down, cloudburst powering cloudburst,
the faster to wash that rampart out to open sea.
The Earth-shaker himself, trident locked in his grip,
led the way, rocking loose, sweeping up in his breakers
all the bastions’ strong supports of logs and stones ...
He made all smooth along the rip of the Hellespont
and piled the endless beaches deep in sand again
and once he had leveled the Argives’ mighty wall
he turned the rivers flowing back in their beds again
where their fresh clear tides had run since time began.
So in the years to come Poseidon and god Apollo
would set all things to rights once more. (12.21-42)
Man’s highest efforts, his struggles on the face of the earth are, from the heavenly point of view, insignificant, his huge military constructions merely a surface disturbance to be readjusted. As even now, on the beaches of the 1944 Normandy landing—Sword. Juno, Gold, and Utah and Omaha, where once the great artificial harbors, the Mulberries, floated, loaded with vehicles and munitions—now the waves and the sand show hardly a trace of the gigantic enterprise ... at most an occasional rusted grenade pin or the worn rubber heel of a GI boot. As at Troy, things have been set to rights.
THE GODS
The subject of the poem is the rage of Achilles against Agamemnon, a human passion, but the prologue speaks also of gods. “What god drove them to fight with such a fury? / Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto” (1.9-10). A few lines earlier we have been told that as heroes fell in battle, “the will of Zeus was moving toward its end” (1.6). Are the events of the poem the creation of the will of Zeus and Apollo, or of the will of Achilles? To what extent is Achilles a free and responsible agent? It is a question raised by many other passages in the poem, as gods inspire, restrain, terrify or rescue individual heroes. How far can men whose actions so often seem to be the product of direct divine intervention be held responsible? Is there, in fact, in Homer any fully formed concept of free and responsible human action? It would seem at first as if the answer were No. In the quarrel in Book I Achilles refrains from killing Agamemnon on the spot because Athena grasps him by the hair and forbids it. But a closer look at this and similar passages where human action is prompted by divine suggestion reveals that the Homeric conception of divine interference is an extremely subtle one. Athena seizes Achilles by the hair just as he draws his sword, but we have been told that before he drew it, he had considered the alternative.
Should he draw the long sharp sword slung at his hip,
thrust through the ranks and kill Agamemnon now?—
or check his rage and beat his fury down?
As his racing spirit veered back and forth,
just as he drew his huge blade from its sheath,
down from the vaulting heavens swept Athena ... (1.224-29)
She comes, as it were, as the representation of that more cautious course he had considered, to urge its claims. And it is remarkable that she uses language not of command but of persuasion. “Down from the skies I come to check your rage / if only you will yield” (1.242-43). The Greek word here translated “yield”—pithêai—is actually a form of the verb peithô, “to persuade.” There is a correlation here between divine intervention and independent human action; they seem to work together, or rather they seem to be the same thing viewed from two different angles. And there are of course passages in the Iliad where a man comes to a decision, choosing between alternatives, with no divine suggestion or intervention at all. We see Odysseus in the thick of battle, his flanks threatened, debate with himself whether to run for it or fight on; he comes to the conclusion that he must stay and fight. His impulse to run is countered by his fear of being thought a coward; the warrior code asserts its authority even in the face of almost certain death (11.477- 86). But this is still a free decision, as Homer makes clear when later he puts Menelaus in the same situation, gives him many of the same formulas of debate, for and against retreat, and has him come to the opposite conclusion—he withdraws from the battle ( 17.101-21 ). Usually, however, important human decisions involve the participation of a god; divine intervention and human responsibility coexist.
This is not the only pair of philosophical irreconcilables that Homer rides in tandem: he presents us also with Destiny and its voice Prophecy on the one hand, together with the will of Achilles and Zeus on the other. Events are determined, we are expressly told at the beginning of the poem and elsewhere, by the will of Zeus, who is presented to us in the poem as a figure more stable, more majestic, than the other gods. And yet on more than one occasion the will of Zeus is thwarted by fate, as in the case of Sarpedon, his beloved son. As he sees him closing in combat with Patroclus, Zeus laments: “Sarpedon, the man I love the most, my own son—/ doomed to die at the hands of Menoetius’ son Patroclus” (16.515-16).
Many attempts have been made to reconcile these two ideas, to assert the overriding power of Zeus’s will on the one hand, or that of a nameless destiny on the other, but in fact the coexistence of these irreconcilables is not a phenomenon confined to Homer’s imagined world. In any civilization which makes a place in its thought for free will (and therefore individual responsibility) and pattern (and therefore overall meaning), the two concepts—fixed and free—exist uneasily cheek by jowl. The only escape from this logical contradiction is the prison of rigid deter minism, a pattern fixed from the beginning and not subject to change, or on the other hand, the complete freedom and meaningless anarchy of an unpredictable universe. And Greek thought, like ours (or those of us at least who still live in the humane traditions of the West), tries to embrace the logical contradiction of freedom and order combined.
In Homer the combination is a subtle one; the idea of destiny, of what is fixed, is flexible. Zeus can predict the future—the deaths of Patroclus, of Achilles, the fall of Troy—and in all these cases it is impossible to say whether the result is destiny or his will or both. But sometimes the possibility is raised that what is fated will actually be annulled by divine will—or even by human. So when Achilles in his rage storms against the routed Trojans and comes right up to the walls, Zeus stirs the gods to go into battle to delay the swift advance of Achilles. “Now,” he says, “with his rage inflamed for his friend’s death, / I fear he’ll raze the walls against the will of fate” (20.35-36).