θεοί νύ μοι αἴτιοί εἰσιν Helen’s Agency and the Gods in Homer and Euripides

Abstract

This article explores Homeric and tragic perspectives on the origins of the Trojan War, and specifically on the respective roles of Helen and the gods. Focusing on key passages from the Iliad and Euripides’ Trojan Women, it investigates how these works depict the relationship between Helen’s and the gods’ agency and responsibility in bringing about the war. In doing so, it offers new perspectives on the broader issue of the interaction of divine and human agency in early Greek thought, arguing that this question remained a topic of instability and uncertainty rather than being resolved (as modern scholars often assume) into a single, widely applicable principle. In a related sense, the article also foregrounds divine agency, taking it seriously as something which, for the ancient Greeks, was very real and mattered profoundly – in contrast to the (often implicit) tendency of modern scholarship to dismiss appeals to divine intervention in ancient Greek sources as a matter of rhetoric rather than belief. Using the example of Helen, I argue that they can be both at the same time.