The Zeus theology of Homer
Extracts from chapter eighteen of "Primitive Materialism".
The Trojans, in comparison, progressively come off worse and worse in the moral conflict. The Trojans are not blamed simply because they have abducted Helen. The moral argument is repeated afresh in the opening books. The Trojans themselves believe they should return her, but the matter can be settled by single combat between Paris and Menelaus. This is bound by a solemn oath.
And now Agamemnon lifted up his hands and prayed aloud in the hearing of all: ‘Father Zeus, you that rule from Mount Ida, most glorious and great; and you, the Sun, whose eye and ear miss nothing in the world; you Rivers and you Earth; you Powers of the world below that make the souls of dead men pay for perjury; I call on you all to witness our oaths and to see that they are kept.’[1]
Paris is in danger of his life in personal combat with Menelaus; Aphrodite transports him from the battlefield to the bedroom of Helen: Paris breaks the oath. The Trojans have not only abducted Helen, but in the context of trial by combat, they are oath-breakers. One of their party, Pandarus, takes advantage of Menelaus’s exposed position on the battlefield to shoot at him with an arrow: the Trojans violate the armistice. After that, nothing can save them; Pandarus meets his end in the first encounter with a rampaging Diomedes. Why does not Zeus destroy Troy immediately? “The Olympian may postpone the penalty,” exclaims Agamemnon, “but he exacts it in the end, and the transgressors pay a heavy price, they pay with their lives, and with their women and children too. The day will come – I know it in my heart of hearts – when holy Ilium will be destroyed, with Priam and the people of Priam of the good ashen spear.”[2] Another answer involves the interplay of the moral characters of the men on both sides of the divide, for the Greeks are not innocent. The gods, and their conflicts, play out the psychodrama both of individual men, and of the collectives they belong to, including the all-embracing collective psyche of the two sides, for they all worship the same gods, which means to participate in the same psychological situation.
[1] Iliad, III, 297.
[2] Iliad, IV, 164.
And now Agamemnon lifted up his hands and prayed aloud in the hearing of all: ‘Father Zeus, you that rule from Mount Ida, most glorious and great; and you, the Sun, whose eye and ear miss nothing in the world; you Rivers and you Earth; you Powers of the world below that make the souls of dead men pay for perjury; I call on you all to witness our oaths and to see that they are kept.’[1]
Paris is in danger of his life in personal combat with Menelaus; Aphrodite transports him from the battlefield to the bedroom of Helen: Paris breaks the oath. The Trojans have not only abducted Helen, but in the context of trial by combat, they are oath-breakers. One of their party, Pandarus, takes advantage of Menelaus’s exposed position on the battlefield to shoot at him with an arrow: the Trojans violate the armistice. After that, nothing can save them; Pandarus meets his end in the first encounter with a rampaging Diomedes. Why does not Zeus destroy Troy immediately? “The Olympian may postpone the penalty,” exclaims Agamemnon, “but he exacts it in the end, and the transgressors pay a heavy price, they pay with their lives, and with their women and children too. The day will come – I know it in my heart of hearts – when holy Ilium will be destroyed, with Priam and the people of Priam of the good ashen spear.”[2] Another answer involves the interplay of the moral characters of the men on both sides of the divide, for the Greeks are not innocent. The gods, and their conflicts, play out the psychodrama both of individual men, and of the collectives they belong to, including the all-embracing collective psyche of the two sides, for they all worship the same gods, which means to participate in the same psychological situation.
[1] Iliad, III, 297.
[2] Iliad, IV, 164.
Questions
1. Is it correct to interpret Homer as a highly self-aware author who sought to affirm Olympian religion?
2. Are the Trojans of the Iliad portrayed as doomed because they breach the moral law?
3. Is there an objective moral reality?
2. Are the Trojans of the Iliad portrayed as doomed because they breach the moral law?
3. Is there an objective moral reality?
Second extract
The belief that moral punishments and rewards attend all actions independently of empirical conditions, gives rise to the belief in a power that brings about these consequences, and where that power is called “God”, then this becomes the moral argument for the existence of God. The argument itself makes no substantial comment on the nature of God, save that God is interested in human affairs, a point that was observed by Kant, who is its chief advocate. Whatever God may be, because “he” takes an interest in human affairs, he has become a personal god. This is a legitimate ground for some form of anthropomorphism and partly accounts for the anthropomorphism of the Olympian religion of Homer. Whenever people refer to poetic justice or karmic consequences they are invoking this moral argument.
Questions
1. What is the moral argument for the existence of God?
2. To what extent was Homer and/or Greek society aware of the moral argument for the existence of God?
3. What changes in the theological conception of the godhead are implied by Homer?
4. To what extent does the Iliad and the Odyssey reflect incipient or developed monotheism? Is Homer the inventor of monotheism?
2. To what extent was Homer and/or Greek society aware of the moral argument for the existence of God?
3. What changes in the theological conception of the godhead are implied by Homer?
4. To what extent does the Iliad and the Odyssey reflect incipient or developed monotheism? Is Homer the inventor of monotheism?
Third extract
In addition to overt transgressions of oath-breaking, breaches of the law of Zeus governing strangers and travellers, and acts of cannibalism, we see the emergence of hubris, which embraces both a flaw of character, and the idea of placing oneself above the gods, encompassing the subtler transgressions of which Agamemnon, Achilles and Hector are guilty. Hubris implies the religious conception of sin as transgression of divine law. It is therefore significant that Homer and the Greeks have no term for sin in this or any other sense. The passage where the old teacher of Achilles, Phoenix, attempts to counsel Achilles to return to the fighting is important.
Phoenix: “Conquer your pride, Achilles. You have no right to be so stubborn. The very gods, for all their greater excellence and majesty and power are capable of being swayed. Even they are turned from their course by sacrifice and humble prayers, libations and burnt-offerings, when the miscreant and sinner bend the knee to them in supplication. Do you not know that prayers are the Daughters of almighty Zeus? They are wrinkled creatures, with a halting gait and downcast eyes, who make it their business to follow Sin about. But Sin is strong, and quick enough to leave them all behind. Stealing a march on them, she roams the world and brings mankind to grief. They come after and put the trouble right. The man who receives these Daughters of Zeus with humility when they approach him, is greatly blessed by them and has his own petitions granted. But when a man hardens his heart and rebuffs them, they go and pray to Zeus the Son of Cronos that he may himself be overtaken by Sin and punished through his fall. This applies to you, Achilles.”[1]
The term translated here as “Sin” is the Greek Ate, the goddess of mischief, delusion, ruin consequent on folly, the daughter of Zeus or Strife (Eris). Homeric thought here does not think in terms of the abstract notion “sin”, which is the refusal to do as God commands, but knows of this concept through its concrete manifestations. The doctrine expounded by Phoenix also concerns the action of prayers, Litae, the “Daughters of Zeus”. If this were a modern composition, we would understand Phoenix’s words to be a figure of speech. However, we are in the context of 700 BCE: thought itself is constrained by primitive materialism, thought in terms of vital substances. Prayers, like sacrifices, like sympathetic magic, are believed to produce effects much in the same way we envisage winding up a clock produces ticking motion. The right of Zeus to refuse to listen to a prayer confers on God the power of creation, and marks a transition from a magico-scientific, mechanistic understanding of ritual to a religious one – a transition from the idea of prayers producing effects, to the idea of prayers as supplications. Since Zeus in Homer can refuse, we are mid-way between these two conceptions. In the extract the prayers Phoenix describes are directed towards Achilles, a man not a god, who therefore does not have the right to rebut them. Homer, through Phoenix, is expressing the inevitable moral consequences of transgression, here specifically Achilles’s refusal to allow prayers to have their due effect – they revert to Zeus, who punishes the transgressor. As yet the Greeks do not have a term for sin as transgression of God’s laws; when, later, they introduce a term for sin, they use harmatia, deriving from the notion of “missing the mark” or “to err”, used in the sense of “to fail of one’s purpose”, “fault” and “failure”, and specifically in the context of hubris and Greek tragedy. It was Aristotle in his Poetics who first applied the concept to tragedy.
[1] Iliad, XIX. 495 – 515.
Phoenix: “Conquer your pride, Achilles. You have no right to be so stubborn. The very gods, for all their greater excellence and majesty and power are capable of being swayed. Even they are turned from their course by sacrifice and humble prayers, libations and burnt-offerings, when the miscreant and sinner bend the knee to them in supplication. Do you not know that prayers are the Daughters of almighty Zeus? They are wrinkled creatures, with a halting gait and downcast eyes, who make it their business to follow Sin about. But Sin is strong, and quick enough to leave them all behind. Stealing a march on them, she roams the world and brings mankind to grief. They come after and put the trouble right. The man who receives these Daughters of Zeus with humility when they approach him, is greatly blessed by them and has his own petitions granted. But when a man hardens his heart and rebuffs them, they go and pray to Zeus the Son of Cronos that he may himself be overtaken by Sin and punished through his fall. This applies to you, Achilles.”[1]
The term translated here as “Sin” is the Greek Ate, the goddess of mischief, delusion, ruin consequent on folly, the daughter of Zeus or Strife (Eris). Homeric thought here does not think in terms of the abstract notion “sin”, which is the refusal to do as God commands, but knows of this concept through its concrete manifestations. The doctrine expounded by Phoenix also concerns the action of prayers, Litae, the “Daughters of Zeus”. If this were a modern composition, we would understand Phoenix’s words to be a figure of speech. However, we are in the context of 700 BCE: thought itself is constrained by primitive materialism, thought in terms of vital substances. Prayers, like sacrifices, like sympathetic magic, are believed to produce effects much in the same way we envisage winding up a clock produces ticking motion. The right of Zeus to refuse to listen to a prayer confers on God the power of creation, and marks a transition from a magico-scientific, mechanistic understanding of ritual to a religious one – a transition from the idea of prayers producing effects, to the idea of prayers as supplications. Since Zeus in Homer can refuse, we are mid-way between these two conceptions. In the extract the prayers Phoenix describes are directed towards Achilles, a man not a god, who therefore does not have the right to rebut them. Homer, through Phoenix, is expressing the inevitable moral consequences of transgression, here specifically Achilles’s refusal to allow prayers to have their due effect – they revert to Zeus, who punishes the transgressor. As yet the Greeks do not have a term for sin as transgression of God’s laws; when, later, they introduce a term for sin, they use harmatia, deriving from the notion of “missing the mark” or “to err”, used in the sense of “to fail of one’s purpose”, “fault” and “failure”, and specifically in the context of hubris and Greek tragedy. It was Aristotle in his Poetics who first applied the concept to tragedy.
[1] Iliad, XIX. 495 – 515.
Question
1. What did the archaic Greeks understand by Ate, goddess of hate? Is it a backward projection to translate Ate by "sin"?