Human Passions & Weaknesses: The gods have human flaws such as jealousy, anger, vanity, and favoritism. They intervene to punish arrogance (arrogance), to protect their loved ones or to humiliate their enemies (e.g., Athena and Hera against the Trojans because of Trojan War).
Fate & Divine Plan: The gods know destiny and see to it that it is fulfilled. Even if they like a mortal (like Zeus Hector), they often retreat before inevitable Fate.
Entertainment & Prestige: Life on Olympus is often boring, so the Trojan War serves as a spectacle. At the same time, they compete with each other for who has the most power and influence.
Literary Function: In the epics (Iliad and Odyssey), the interventions of the gods are a literary device. Poets use the gods to explain the psychological ups and downs of heroes, the sudden changes of fortune, and the greatness of human nature struggling against supernatural forces.
In Homer, divine intervention and "written" (Fate) do not negate human freedom, but coexist with it.
This phenomenon in Homeric analysis is called "double determination" and it works as follows:
The Double Determination
Every action has two causes at the same time.
A human (the hero's logic, passion or decision).
A divine (the impulse or inspiration from a god).
Example: When Achilles wants to kill Agamemnon, Athena grabs him by the hair to stop him. Achilles is convinced because he wants to, not because he is a blind robot.
Fate is above the Gods
Fate or Destiny is a higher cosmic force.
Even the gods they must obey her.
Zeus he wants to save his son, Sarpedon, but Hera reminds him that his fate is to die. Zeus retreats.
The gods do not change destiny, they simply carry it out or delay it.
The Responsibility of People
People are not irresponsible for their actions.
At the beginning of the Odyssey, Zeus complains that mortals blame the gods for their suffering.
It says specifically that people get sick "pro moron" (beyond their writing) because of their own errors (like Aegisthus).
Therefore, Fate determines the great events (e.g. the fall of Troy or the death of Achilles), but the daily behavior and bravery of the heroes belong to them.
Fate vs. Fortune in Homer
In the Homeric epics, the concept of Luck (in the sense of chance or coincidence) almost does not exist. Everything has a purpose, a cause, and a direction.
Fate is a share: The word "fate" comes from the verb I share (share). It means the "share" that is due to each person in life (share of joy, pain and, most importantly, death).
Bounded life: Destiny does not define every little detail, but it sets the unshakable boundaries. It defines the never and its how you will die or if you will return to your homeland.
Not random events: If a stone falls and injures a hero, it is not bad luck that is to blame. It is the guiding line of a god carrying out the plan of Fate.
The evolution of perception in Ancient Tragedy
In the 5th century BC, the relationship between man, gods and fate changes radically. The tragedy is born within democratic Athens, where man acquires greater political and individual responsibility.
Conflict and Non-Cooperation: In Homer, god and man work together (double determination). In tragedy, man often collides by divine will or is trapped by it (e.g. Oedipus tries to escape the oracle, but each of his actions brings him closer to it).
Internal Dilemma: The heroes of tragedy (such as Medea or Orestes) are tormented by deep inner and moral dilemmas. They do not simply await divine enlightenment; the decision is theirs alone and the responsibility is terrifying.
Hubris and Nemesis: In tragedy, divine intervention becomes more moral and imperative. If man exceeds his limits (Hubris), punishment (Nemesis) from the gods is absolute and inevitable, serving as a lesson in human weakness.
Luck gains strength: In later tragedians, especially Euripides, "Fate" begins to be recognized as a fickle, blind force that rules the world, showing the growing uncertainty of the people of his time.
How the concept of the justice of the gods (Theodicy) is attributed to Homer in relation to tragedy.
Theodicy: Homer vs. Ancient Tragedy
The meaning of Theodicy (the justification of the actions of the gods and the existence of divine justice) differs radically between the Homeric epics and ancient drama.
Theodicy in Homer: Selfish Gods
In Homer, divine justice is neither absolute nor universal. It is often subjective and depends on the personal sympathies of the gods.
Absence of moral perfection: The Homeric gods are not models of morality. They steal, lie, cheat, and divide.
Ethics of Reward: The gods protect anyone who offers them rich sacrifices and respects the laws of hospitality. They do not punish "evil" in general, but personal insults to themselves or their protégés.
The turning point of the Odyssey: At Iliad the gods are almost immoral warriors. In Odyssey However, a first form of moral justice appears: the suitors are punished for violating the laws of the gods and showing arrogance.
Theodicy in Tragedy: Universal Lawfulness
In the 5th century BC, tragic poets attempted to purge the gods of human flaws and present them as guarantors of a universal and moral order.
Aeschylus (The Divine Judgment): For Aeschylus, Zeus is the ultimate exponent of justice. Evil begets evil and punishment is law. Man learns through pain ("he/she/it gets learned"). Divine justice restores balance to the world.
Sophocles (The Unwritten Laws): Sophocles' gods are just but distant and mysterious. Their laws are eternal and superior to the laws of men (e.g. Antigone). People often suffer through no fault of their own, but the divine plan always has a deeper, if incomprehensible, justice.
Euripides (Criticism of the Theos): Euripides overturns everything. He openly questions the morality of the gods. He shows gods as vengeful and cruel (e.g. Aphrodite in Hippolytus or Dionysus in Bacchae). For Euripides, if the gods do something shameful, then they are not real gods.
The philosophers' criticism of Homer constitutes one of the most famous intellectual conflicts of antiquity, known as "the old controversy between philosophy and poetry."
As Greek thought evolved towards rationalism, the image of the Homeric gods began to be considered unacceptable and dangerous.
Xenophanes of Colophon (6th century BC): The first harsh criticism
The pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes was the first to openly attack Homer and Hesiod for anthropomorphism of the gods.
Charge for immorality: He wrote that Homer attributed to the gods everything that is considered shameful and blameworthy among humans: theft, adultery, and fraud.
Construction according to image: He ironically noted that people create gods based on themselves. If oxen and lions had hands to draw with, they would draw ox-gods and lion-gods.
Plato (5th-4th century BC): Censorship in the "Republic"
Plato exerted the most systematic and severe criticism on Homer, going so far as to call him exile from his ideal state.
Bad example for young people: Plato believed that young people who listen to Homer's stories will justify their own evil deeds, thinking, "Since the gods do it, I can do it too."
God is only good: For Plato, God is the personification of the Good and perfection. Therefore, it is impossible for him to cause harm, change forms, lie, or mourn, as happens in the epics.
Distortion of the truth: The poets were accused of presenting a false image of the divine, based on passions rather than reason.
The Supporters' Response: The Allegorical Method
To save Homer's prestige, later thinkers (such as the Stoic philosophers) developed the allegorical interpretation.
They claimed that Homer was not being literal.
The battles of the gods were allegories for the conflict of elements of nature (e.g. fire versus water) or for the battle between of virtues and vices in the human soul.
The transition from Myth to Reason
It marks the birth of scientific and philosophical thought in Western Europe. Criticism of Homer served as the main catalyst for this world-historical change, which took place in three specific stages:
From Divine Dispositions to Natural Laws
In Myth (Homer): If a storm or an epidemic broke out, the cause was the anger of Poseidon or the arrows of Apollo. Nature had no rules of its own, but depended on the whims of the gods.
In Reason (Prosocratics): The first philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) excluded the gods from the interpretation of nature. They sought a raw material (water, infinity, air) and stable physical laws to explain the world. Rain was no longer the will of Zeus, but the result of the evaporation of water.
The Demystification of Human Behavior
In the Myth: A person's bravery, wisdom, or madness was the result of divine inspiration (e.g. Athena gives courage to Diomedes).
In the Word: With the emergence of the Sophists and Socrates, human behavior became the subject of Ethics and PsychologyVirtue and knowledge are no longer gifts from the gods, but the result of education, logical thinking, and personal effort.
The New Meaning of Truth
In the Myth: The truth was based on the authority of the Muse who guided the poet. The listener was required to believe the story without proof.
In the Word: The truth now demands logical reasoning (arguments) and observationAnything that cannot be proven or explained by logic is dismissed as a fairy tale.
This conversion did not eliminate religion, but it changed its function: the gods ceased to be protagonists of everyday life and became abstract concepts (like Aristotle's "First Mover Unmoved"), leaving man free to explore the world with his own mind.
Did Herodotus and Thucydides stop using the gods to explain wars?
The transition from Myth to Logos radically transformed the way people recorded their past. Before this development, "history" was the epic (like the Iliad), where the causes of a war were located on Olympus.
With Herodotus and Thucydides, the recording of events is freed from the divine and the science of History is born.
Herodotus: The transitional stage (5th century BC)
Herodotus is considered the "Father of History" because for the first time research (history) is based on personal observation, critical examination of sources, and the collection of testimonies. However, it is still in a transitional stage between myth and rationality:
Human causes: He seeks the real, earthly causes of the Persian Wars (political confrontations, cultural differences, expansionism)
The divine as "Cosmic Balance"»: Herodotus' gods do not descend onto the battlefield as in Homer. They intervene indirectly through (envy of the gods). If a man becomes excessively powerful and arrogant (Hybrid), the divine intervenes to restore balance (e.g. the fall of Croesus or Xerxes)
Signs and symbols: He still places great importance on dreams, oracles, and divine signs, although he often treats them with a dose of skepticism. .
Thucydides: Absolute Rationality and the Birth of Science (5th century BC)
Thucydides, writing about the Peloponnesian War, takes the big, revolutionary step. He completely excludes divine intervention from his historical narrative. .
Human Nature (the human): For Thucydides, the driving forces of history are human motivations: fear, self-interest, ambition, and the thirst for power. Wars are not fought because a god is angry, but because of political and economic rivalries.
Distinction between Cause and Cause: It introduces scientific methodology by separating the formal occasion (cause) from the real, deeper cause (most truthful pretext) of a war (e.g. the Spartans' fear of the rise of Athenian power)
"Luck" as the unpredictable: When Thucydides uses the word luck, does not mean a deity, but the unpredictable factor, the unpredictability of human life (e.g. the sudden plague that struck Athens)
Contempt of oracles: Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides treats oracles and superstitions with irony. In fact, he criticizes the Athenian general Nicias, who lost a crucial battle in Sicily because he refused to retreat due to a lunar eclipse.
The birth of History completed the path begun by the philosophers. The responsibility for the destruction or greatness of cities was transferred entirely to the shoulders of men. Politicians and generals were no longer pawns of the gods, but responsible for their decisions.
Epilogue
The Homeric era had given man an important, but not autonomous, position. The hero of the Iliad is great, but a god always stands beside him, whispering to him, pushing him, or holding him back. Fate defines life, the gods carry out or delay the inevitable, and man is responsible for his actions, but never alone.
The transition from myth to speech was not an abrupt rupture, but a slow, painful and creative maturation. Herodotus still hesitates between punishment for arrogance by the gods and political analysis. Thucydides, however, takes the big leap: he excludes the gods from history and places human nature—fear, self-interest, ambition—in— at the center of events. A little earlier, the Pre-Socratic philosophers had already explained lightning without Zeus and movement without Mercury.
Plato's philosophical criticism of Homer was not censorship out of intolerance, but the matrix of Western rational thought: if god is truly good, then he cannot lie, mourn, or sow destruction out of selfishness. The gods are either moralized, or become allegories, or they retreat before law, nature, and human responsibility.
The beginning of science did not mean the end of religion, but the end of the need for gods to inhabit every rain, every battle, and every decision.. Man was left alone before the universe — not abandoned, but free. Free to investigate, to err, to correct himself, to write history without the permission of the Muse, to set laws not as a divine command but as a human convention.
The path from Homer to Thucydides and Thales is, ultimately, the path of the West itself: a slow, difficult, but unstoppable move away from the heteronomy of myth to the autonomy of Reason. Not because the gods died, but because man decided—for the first time—to look at the world without intermediaries, with only his eyes and mind.
And this decision was the greatest revolution of antiquity.
Bibliography
Hostage : Iliad- Odyssey
Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days.
Herodotus, Histories.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.
Plato: State
Pre-Socratics – The Pre-Socratic Philosophers (translated by N. M. Skouteropoulos, Kritiki Publications).
Veikos, Th. (1993). Xenophanes of Colophon: His Critique of Homeric Theology. Athens: Stigmi Publications.
Karagiorgas, M. (2012). Historical Thought in Ancient Greece: From Homer to Thucydides. Athens: Papazisis Publications.
Romanos, V. (1997). Gods and Heroes in Ancient Tragedy. Athens: Kardamitsa Publications.
Kessidis, T. C. (2009). From Myth to Reason: The Formation of Greek Philosophical ThoughtThessaloniki: University Studio Press.
photo Atlantis, https://pixabay.com
