Homer's gods

Athena to Achilles (Il 1.207-):

It is not the Father of gods and men who is giving this message to Achilles, it is his daughter Athena, sent by his wife Hera. She is persuading the angry Achilles not to draw his sword to kill Agamemnon. He obeys her, not from any moral or civic consideration but because it is the clever thing to do: she promises he will be better off that way. The fact that it is Hera who sent Athena ius also significant: it says that obeying her will not only increase his prize (= honour), it will also increase his status. But, typical for the double role that gods may have sometimes in Homer, she also 'loves and worries about' Agamemnon. This tells us that the Achilles - Agamemnon fight is about status on both sides. Aftyer all, it was she who inspired Achilles to attack Agamemnon first (Il 1.52) (see below and here).
Both goddesses have the power to move us, to speak to us and tell us to do or not do certain things. We do not have to obey them, and they may deceive us. But more about that later.

Basically we, Ancient Greek warriors, decide to do something because of its expected result:

1. It makes us better or stronger in the competition with others.
2. We profit from it, it makes us richer.
3. We want the pleasure that we think it will give us

This is an incomplete picture, but it introduces three top-level forces that drive us:

1. the drive to increase our status/power, to be number one.
2. our striving for success and profit by cleverness(2) and boldness.
3. our desire to have (or to be) someone attractive, admirable.

In other words: we are competitive, greedy and we love Love. Note that doing something 'because it is the right thing to do' which we are so fond of in modern-day TV and movies, is not part of the list. The Greeks had a somewhat more cynical (or realistic) view of mankind.
In the Iliad a) and b) often go together: to be more successful or rich also gives us a higher status. Just so, Athene and Hera often work together. There is a difference: high birth, for instance, gives us guaranteed status but certainly not guaranteed 'success in war'.

Modern people talk about "drives" or "forces" and see them as internal to us, part of our character. The Greeks (or at least some of them) call this "gods", they see those rather as powers that originate outside us and may or may not drive us and help us at crucial moments. Homer makes it clear that they can act on both individuals and on groups such as communities or armies. They distinguished a number of distinct "specialized" powers which tell us what to do if they so choose. They are beyond our control - we can only pray to them, put our faith in them, but they remain unpredictable. But if they do speak to us, we had better obey.
This is not an absurd view of things. After all, if, for instance, "cleverness" comes from inside us, why is it not always there? We cannot reliably decide beforehand to be clever in a given situation: successful cleverness comes and goes, no matter how high our score in the IQ test. We can only put our faith in it (confidently boast of it), rely on it and hope for the best. That corresponds to what Homer calls "praying" (εὔχομαι)(3) If we do put our faith in them, they may reward us. If we don't, they don't. But without them, we are "mere bellies" (Hesiod Th 26).

The pictures (icons) of the gods that Homer shows and the way all of the Greeks talk about them, gives us the impression that they see the gods as individual beings, "larger people", who look and act upon the human world. It is only in their actions as shown by Homer, most clearly in the so-called "double motivation" scenes where an actor is shown making a decision for himself while at the same time a god is convincing him/her to do so, that the "driving force" nature of the gods becomes clear. Homer is surely not the first or the only one with such a view, but only after Homer, with the Ionian philosophers and Plato do we see attempts to go beyond the metaphor. This view of the gods is not quite suitable for public speech and probably limited to private discussion among "initiated" people, i.e. prominent members of the aristocracy. For most people, the simpler "people in the sky" view is sufficient and the leaders of society can use this as a tool for herding their flock.

The gods of Plato

In the Republic, where Plato develops his soul - city analogy, he never mentions that the three parts of the soul correspond to the three Homeric goddesses(4). They do have the same roots and functionality. In the Laws he expands the theory of how he sees the gods. They are manifestations of Soul (Psychē), but purely good and immortal.

Plato Laws X, 891C-: a summary

Plato telling us that 'soul' comes first. The gods are a species of soul and they move people as well as nature.

This is some philosophical distance beyond Homer but there is a kinship. Much about Plato's "proof" of the existence of the gods is unclear, but here I would like to emphasize the mental aspects: what moves us. These are things "of the soul", the immaterial active principles, the ideas, that underlie everything: these are first in his world view. We are talking here about forces or rather powers. Above we saw the domains of some of these powers. Plato tried to cleanse them of the worldly muddiness and very human partiality that they show in Homer. Hìs gods cannot be swayed by prayer or gifts and they are absolutely good; see above: the bad has been split off. Thus he paved the way for the monotheism that was to come, though he himself does not completely go there.
Plato develops this into his theories of the three parts of the human soul, and the three classes of people: the aristocracy or guardians, the reasonable part or the rulers (if they happen to be philosopher-kings) and the desiring class, i.e. the common people or "money-earners".

These three become the Good, the True and the Beautiful(5).
Plato has objectified the goddesses as follows: "the good" is the idea behind status and quality (they are the same thing, to an aristocrat), "the true" is the idea behind cleverness and "the beautiful" is the idea behind pleasure. He himself uses the terms we translate as Spirit, Reason and Desire. See also here.
All of these three are desires, making us want something: they have a telos, a target or purpose. The philosopher wants to instill in us purified forms of these values, purified by education, compulsion and by perfect leadership: a leader who absolutely knows what is Beautiful, Good, and True (σωφροσύνης(6) καὶ ἀνδρείας καὶ φρονήσεως: see Pl. Rep 433B). This way he will replace the subjective, relative values by objective, universal ones. Or so he argues.

The Good, True and Beautiful in ancient Greece each have a semantic range which is partly unlike the modern usage of these words. Here follows a short explanation:

1. The Good:
   This is not a moral statement, it is a statement of quality. In our Christian culture, the Good has swallowed Justice and a person cannot be good if he or she is not also just and kind. Not so in ancient Greece where these concepts remain separate. What is good in a.Gr. is basically what is strong and impervious to change (note the conservative aristocratic bias in this). A good apple is one that does not rot. A good man is a man who does what he says and does not turn this way or that dependent on how the wind blows. Our fathers got to rule this land because they were the best people and therefore we, the sons, are the elite, the kaloskagathos. Goodness is thus linked to power.
   It is also linked to status. Status is a ranking according to goodness (aretē) so the striving for the good is also a striving to increase one's status and honour. The human character trait to want to do this is called andreia, translated as manliness or spiritedness. It is the aristocratic virtue par excellence.
2. The True:
   What we have here is a competitive force whose connection with "the True" is our grasp of reality. For instance, we may ambush an enemy, a clever trick if nothing else. If successful, we proved that we had a better knowledge of reality than he: we knew that he was there but he did not know that we were. Our view was "more true". A better word to call it is "the successful". It is the human drive that is always active when we are awake. It is continually looking for gain, success, loot, victory and for solutions to the problem of "how to get things done". The meaning ranges from "knowing the truth" to reason to cleverness to cunning to deceit. All of these have to do with a clearer view of the world, of reality. It is the art of survival, of know-how and know-when: it includes boldness and seizing your chance of victory. Courage is indispensable for it but, for the warrior, the victory it strives for is one that includes surviving. Giving your life for the cause is not its way.
   It is not wisdom or absolute truth until you subtract the self-centered desire from it. Athena is a very partial, selfish, acquiring goddess but, from necessity, one who does not lose sight of reality.
3. The Beautiful
   This is certainly not just the esthetically beautiful. In a.Gr., it is rather what is worthy of admiration and therefore deeply desirable to have or to be. A very beautiful woman is of course the easiest example (for any man but Plato).
   Some say the most beautiful thing is an army or a fleet of ships; according to Sappho it is the one you love. All these you can have. There exists also a kind of beauty that you can be: e.g. the kind of beauty or behaviour that makes a person sexually attractive. Its Greek name is makhlosunē. For women this has (as expected) negative connotations (it is translated lewdness or wantonness in dictionaries), for men it is even denied that such a thing exists, but it is what Paris received from Aphrodite to make Helen fall in love with him (Il 24.30). That is, according to Homer who clearly describes Paris in those terms as a women-magnet. The Beautiful can be simple sexual desire, or other desires for pleasure (see Plato on Eros) but it does not have to be. A true hero, one who voluntarily gives his life for the salvation of our city, is seen as shining with still greater beauty. The drive toward beauty is perhaps the greatest pulling force working on us, sometimes greater than the will to power or even the will to survive.

Gods and goddesses

There are two kinds of things that we may obey: rules and desires. I would submit that female gods are "desire" gods, while male gods "rule". Neither Homer nor Hesiod ever hints at a difference like this but the picture fits the usage. Gods like Zeus, Ares and Apollo in Homer impose a rule or duty on us. Goddesses like the three beauties Hera, Athena and Aphrodite represent desires. Athena in a unique way seems to be both: a woman in a man's armour, an armed maiden. She presents us with a really quite complicated picture, see e.g. the story of her birth (not in Homer). In the Iliad, Homer paints her as the most dangerous, but also the most hopeful of the three main goddesses. More on Athena here.

These are the goddesses' bribes for Paris in the story of the Paris Judgement (Paris is to decide which of them is the most beautiful - a job for Zeus if ever I saw one, but apparently the chief god chickened out) and in the Iliad: Status is offered by Hera, Victory by Athena and Beauty by Aphrodite. Always when these goddesses appear in the Iliad, they stand for the desires as described above. These are what we must obey to have a good life, they are our nature. We see the world - if and when we are seeing it at all - through their eyes and they fill it with purpose. Therefore they are quintessentially human but partially so(7) - in this sense they are less than we are. This is why Homer can describe them comically the way he does. They are also more than human because these powers are always there, immortal, and they rule all of us. So the person may be clever if they be led by "cleverness itself". See here the link to Platonian Ideas.
Let me emphasize again the incompleteness: no god (except Zeus) knows about the domain of another one. E.g. the desire for beauty or the striving for status understand nothing of cleverness and vice versa. This is also why they lack moral qualities (see below). And they are partial in the sense that they look at the world from our very personal point of view.

If you are lucky, they may be partial to you, as Athena loves Odysseus. That means you will be clever and possibly that your cleverness will make you a winner - but there are other gods and they may not love you as much. If you are a Heracles, a servant with no status in spite of his power, this is Hera hating you - you will be unable to improve your status no matter how highborn, strong or clever you are. If Hera would love you, you would be king.

In terms of Plato or Aristotle these are the "movers" although in Homer, they are not themselves "unmoved", i.e. they may respond to prayer. Homer speaks of us obeying them instead of them moving us. We obey them (or not) when we are making important decisions, we are not talking about trivial ones here. There are other gods that may move us, but these are the main three goddesses under discussion in the Iliad, the ones that we have to obey if we want to live a meaningful life.

But, and this is important: we do not have to obey them (though there may be a price for that, see Il 3.395-, Helen and Aphrodite). When we are obeying someone, be they god or human, that is still an act of free will on our part and we are completely responsible. E.g. Agamemnon tells us that it was Atē who posessed him when he quarrelled with Achilles, but he never uses that to shirk responsibility (Il 19.314-). Quite often it is better for us that we rule our emotions and desires like Zeus should rule the other gods. This can be done if we know ourselves, know what gods are moving us.

Justice

In Homer, every one of the gods is always right, in his/her own way. None should be ignored, they all must be honoured. But they are limited to their own domain and only Zeus has a "god's eye view".

However right they may be, the world is not ruled by our desires. There are other rules even if these are not immediately obvious. One thing we may be sure of: our actions determine our fate. True, the heroic mindset often denies this ("I will not die before my time has come") but the examples given in the Iliad (Patrocles, Hector, Achilles and really every hero) confirm it: we are killed because of our own choices. Why do these three die? The short answer is: they go too far, they do not stop in time: they wanted more, a better fate, a bigger portion than they could have. Which leads to one of the imperative mottos of Delphi: "Mēden Agav", "nothing in excess". The iconic image of this is Zeus with his scales, representing the balance there has to be between one party and the other. Or more precisely: between one fate and the other.

In Il 12.433- there is a simile:
"[...] as straight as the scales of an honest working woman spinning wool, who sees to it that they be true, for she would earn some meagre wages for her children". We may guess why: too much she does not dare. She will be accused of cheating by her patron; too little and she will earn nothing. That is δίκαιος, just, in Homeric terms. Exactly as for the warrior, it is the dividing line between need and fear.
So, here enters a male god. Not a desire, a rule. Zeus says: "you and I must share". One does not typically desire to do that(8), many of us would keep it all if we could. But we do know about the rule. The word for "fate" in Greek means share or portion, archetypically the size of the portion that we get (according to status) when we attend the communal feast-meal, or the share of the loot that a man receives from his king once they have, for instance, sacked Troy. The exact proportions of the division are negotiable but the ever valid top rule is "not too much".
next page: Kronos.

1. The word "god" can be used in many ways in Ancient Greece. To name but a few:
   - the administrator of Fate (Zeus)
   - the instrument of Fate (the other gods)
   - the causes of all things (Plato)
   - "what we obey" - the source of any remarkable human action
   - as an adjective (dios): noble, excellent etc.
   - do ut des (I give in order that you give) - sacrifices and promises
   - ironically, any unpredictable higher power "the gods have ordained..."
   - a metaphor or ironical title for the leaders of society.
   - indication of status (divine/noble father, mother) e.g. Il 12.312
   - (young) humans, ironically ("Oὖτίς με κτείνει") - they fancy themselves gods
   - gods as spectators
   - model of humanity (as above, so below)
   - mirror of humanity (as below, so above) also: comic relief
   - opposite of humanity (forever young, perfect, immortal)
   - personifications
   - an excuse for behaviour (a god made me do it)
   - façon de parler (Kirk)
   When reading we must always keep these potential meanings in mind.
2. I use "cleverness" rather than "intelligence" because the latter word is too detached, too theoretical. It cannot be emphasized enough that these powers are drives, not abilities or qualities. You see something, you want it and you find a way to get it: that is the drive, even power, we are talking about. It is not limited to Homo Sapiens. One can see in animal behaviour how seeing a desired object, like food, brings out unexpected cleverness in them.
3. εὔχομαι is a complicated subject and " pray" is a very limited translation. LSJ gives (among others): pray that, pray for, vow, promise, boast, declare. There is a strong connection with " do ut des" : "I will give this if you do that for me" (or " I have done this, therefore do that for me" ). Obviously a sacrifice to these powers is a meaningful thing.
4. Plato seems always reluctant to mention the gods by name except in innocuous context. They are very much a topic of his discussions though.
5. The Holy Trinity (the Father: the Good, the Son: the Beautiful, the Holy Ghost: the True) must be a distant descendant of Plato's theory.
6. 'σωφροσύνης' (sophrosyne): moderation in sensual desires, selfcontrol. To cleanse Aphrodite, Plato turned 'desire' into 'abstinence' and Eros into 'love of philosophy'. Beauty becomes 'beauty of the soul'.
7. This is why I think Homer sees the complete family of the gods living on Olympus as a picture, a metaphor of the human psyche, each of the gods being one of our powers.
8. Except perhaps 'Διώνη', Dione, Aphrodite's mother in Il 5.371-. 'Dione' is a feminized form of 'Zeus'. Within the framework of the theories proposed here, that would mean she represents a desire to share. Which is a nice picture for the mother of the goddess of Love.
9. Except sacrifices to the dead, to heroes or to Hades. There the whole animal is burnt, not eaten. These count as "payment", to restore the balance.
10. For a further development of this statement, see the page about Achilles.