“Against the will of fate....” These lines so upset some ancient editors, men schooled in philosophy and especially the Stoic and Epicurean quarrels about fate and freedom that, in the interests of logical consistency, they tried to suppress the offending lines and substitute the following passage: “But it is not fated that the well-built city of Troy should be sacked in Achilles’ lifetime. It will be taken by the wooden horse....”
It is thought possible, then, in Homer’s vision, that Achilles can somehow break the pattern; in fact he must be prevented. And Zeus can break it too. He laments the fate of Sarpedon—and is tempted to save him. But his consort Hera recalls him to a sense of duty.
“Do as you please, Zeus ...
but none of the deathless gods will ever praise you.
And I tell you this—take it to heart, I urge you—
if you send Sarpedon home, living still, beware!
Then surely some other god will want to sweep
his own son clear of the heavy fighting too.
Look down. Many who battle round King Priam’s
mighty walls are sons of the deathless gods—
you will inspire lethal anger in them all. ” (16.526-34)
And her argument prevails. Destiny could, theoretically, be defied, but only at the risk of chaos. Zeus lets Sarpedon go down to death.
The Olympian gods are a family like many a family on earth. It has an all-powerful, philandering father, who cannot be defied but may be deceived, a watchful, jealous and intriguing wife, and sons and daughters who vie for their parents’ favor as they pursue their individual aims. These gods play their part in the poem, in close contact with the human beings. And gods and men, for Homer, are very much alike—in shape, in speech, even in motive, in passion, in forms of action. The most passionate of the gods involved in the struggle are Hera, the wife of Zeus, and Athena, his daughter; they hate Troy and the Trojans with a bitter, merciless hatred. We are not told why they nurse this savage hatred for the Trojans until Book 24, where the famous Judgment of Paris is mentioned (24.31-36 and note ad loc). It is typical of a certain school of thought about Homer that these lines, the only explicit mention of the Judgment of Paris in the Iliad, have been suspected as a later addition; the beauty contest of the goddesses is too frivolous a motif for the high tragedy of the poem. But this leaves the unsuccessful goddesses’ raw hatred for Troy unexplained. It seems clear from the casual, almost cryptic, way Homer refers to the story that it was perfectly familiar to his audience, and Hera’s motive for hating Troy, the insult to her beauty, is perfectly consonant with the picture of Hera as the jealous divine wife Homer presents elsewhere in the Iliad—in her plot against Heracles, Zeus’s child by a mortal woman ( 14.300-8), and her brutal assault on Artemis, Zeus’s child by another goddess (21.557-66). Hell hath no fury like a goddess scorned. And this personal motive has its opposite side: the unfailing support given to the Trojans by the winner of the beauty contest, Aphrodite, and her intervention to save Paris from his fate at the hands of Menelaus (3.439-41).
The reasons for divine intervention are trivial, human, all too human. Yet these gods, imagined in the likeness of man in all his strength and weakness, but magnified in scale, are figures symbolic of those aspects of our lives that seem incomprehensible and uncontrollable. Athena prompts the archer Pandarus to shoot Menelaus (not that he did not want to) and so destroys what for a moment seemed a chance to end the war (4.99-159). Both sides, now Achilles is absent, want peace, but the war goes on. We too have seen and may see again similar situations, and when the catastrophe comes on us in spite of the universal desire to avoid it, we fall back on explanations that are perhaps more sophisticated but no more satisfactory: the irrationality of human nature, the will of history (Croce’s phrase), the will of God or even pure accident—and in the last analysis these explanations are just as metaphysical as Homer’s gods.
The gods intervene also in a more direct fashion: they sometimes take part in the fighting. They do so to protect human favorites or, on a grander scale, to instill courage and combat-fury into individual heroes and even whole armies, as Poseidon does (14.422—610) in defiance of Zeus’s nonintervention order. This is not a modem way of looking at battle, but it is a striking way of expressing one of the mysteries of combat—the unpredictable currents of aggressive courage or faltering panic which sweep through armies, the mysterious factor known as morale. It is not a factor that can be fed into the computer (though that expert on the subject, Napoleon, said it was three times as important as materiel), and everyone who has been in battle knows how intangible and unpredictable it is, how hard-pressed, outgunned men can suddenly take the offensive and turn the tables, how victorious advancing units can develop an uneasiness about their flanks that can turn into panic. And in fact battle is always unpredictable. In the early years of the fifteenth century, as the English armies, masters of southern and central France in a hundred years’ war, found themselves besieged and threatened by French troops they had beaten scores of times, who were now led by a peasant girl from Domrémy, men fell back on explanations no less unworldly than Homer’s gods. Joan herself claimed that the Archangel Michael had appeared and told her to kick the English out of France, “bouter les Anglais hors de la France,” and the English firmly believed that she was sent not by an angel but by the Devil, and burned her as a witch at Rouen. And historians still find it impossible to explain, in purely rational terms, how she could have accomplished what she did.
Sometimes, however, the Homeric gods do more than protect and encourage; they actually join in the fighting, usually against one another, though in Book 5 Ares kills a Greek warrior and is in his turn wounded by Diomedes, who has already wounded Aphrodite. When Zeus encourages them to join in the fighting, as Achilles comes out to attack the Trojans, gods fight against gods: Athena against Ares and Aphrodite, Hephaestus against the river-god Xanthus, Hera against Artemis. The only one of these contests that is treated with epic dignity is that between Hephaestus and Xanthus, fire against water, against the immense strength of the river that came close to drowning Achilles. But when Athena downs Ares with a stone and then punches Aphrodite in, of all places, the breasts, when Hera smiles as she boxes the ears of Artemis with her bow, no reaction other than laughter seems possible. These wounds heal quickly, and even if they did not, the gods are exempt from the ultimate consequence of action: they cannot lose their lives—no matter what they do; they will survive. And given this crucial difference between gods and men, only men can have true dignity on the battlefield; the presence of gods there is an impertinence. The immunity of the gods, who fight their mock battles while men stand and die, casts into higher relief the tragic situation of the men who risk and suffer not only pain and mutilation but the prospect, inevitable if the war goes on long enough, of death, of the total extinction of the individual personality.
The gods are immortal; they are not subject to time. They have all the time in the world. And so they are not subject to change, to the change brought by age, to the change brought by learning from suffering and a realization of limitations. They will always be what they are now and have always been; they are all the same at the end of the Iliad as at the beginning. They do not change, do not learn. How could they? They are the personification of those mysterious forces which through their often violent interaction produce the harsh patterns of human life—the rise and fall of nations, the destructiveness of the earthquake, the terror of the flood, the horrors of the plague, but also the sweetness of passionate love, the intoxication of wine, the extra strength that surges through a warrior’s limbs at the moment of danger.