Homeric Gods and the Values of Homeric Society

Abstract

A recent article has observed, with particular reference to the Homeric poems, that ‘divine intervention <cannot> be simply removed from the poems to leave a kernel of sociological truths’. I agree; though I should interpret the words in a manner different from their author. I shall endeavour to show in this article that not merely divine intervention, but divine behaviour as a whole in the Homeric poems, is governed by the same values as human behaviour in the poems; so that the ‘sociological truths’—or whatever they should be termed—can encompass divine as well as human behaviour in Homer. Nor, it seems to me, is this even prima facie surprising. True, the conversations on Olympus recorded in Homer are in one sense entirely free composition, since no bard in the tradition had ever met an Olympian or attended an assembly of the gods. But the bards lived in a society which—like later Greek societies that we are better able to observe—believed itself able to discern the hand of gods in the events which befell it or its several members; which, not surprisingly, attributed pleasant events to the favour of its gods, unpleasant events to the anger of its gods; enquired why the god or gods concerned was pleased or angry; and ascribed reasons for divine pleasure or anger analogous to those for which a powerful human being in the society might have been expected to become pleased or angry.