Gods Who Cannot Die, and What That Costs Them

The Homeric gods are powerful, interested and permanently unserious, and the poems know it. They are deathless and ageless, so nothing they do risks anything: Ares is wounded, howls like ten thousand men, and is healed a few lines later, while a mortal wounded in the same book is dead forever. The weight of the poems sits with the mortals for exactly that reason. Yet the gods are not free either. Zeus lifts his golden scales before Hector dies and reads the result rather than choosing it, and when he thinks of saving his own son Sarpedon, Hera asks whether he wants every other god to start rescuing theirs, and he lets him fall.

Cult practice is everywhere in the text and it is exact. Prayer names the god, recalls a service the worshipper has already performed, and asks for a return on it. Sacrifice is described down to the thigh bones wrapped in fat, the wine poured, the tasting. A plague arrives because a priest of Apollo was insulted and lifts when the god is appeased, which is a working model of what an offended deity is and how the offence gets repaired. The Odyssey then opens with Zeus complaining that mortals blame the gods for miseries they bring on themselves beyond their allotted share, which is the earliest surviving Greek statement of a problem the philosophers never put down.