Homer’s Characters that I Struggled with Most

The Olympian Gods, Part Two: Divine Intervention—or Divine Metaphor?

In Part One, I confessed that a deceptively simple question—did the Greeks actually believe in their gods?—had tied me in knots. Then I sat down to write The Full Disclosure Iliad, and a second question arrived to finish the job:

What on earth was I supposed to do with the Olympians?

Take a famous moment in Book One of the Iliad. Achilles, furious with Agamemnon, is reaching for his sword. Then Athena appears—visible only to Achilles—grabs him by the hair and tells him to stand down. And he does.

So what’s a twenty-first-century storyteller to make of that? Is an actual goddess descending from Olympus? Is “Athena” Homer’s way of saying Achilles’ better judgment finally showed up for work? Or do I drop the goddess and let Achilles calm down all by himself—something, frankly, he is not known for?

There’s no dodging it. In Homer, the gods are everywhere. They’re worse than seagulls at a picnic.

Three Ways to Handle the Gods

Modern retellers have three basic options.

Option One: Take them literally.

The gods are real supernatural beings who meddle in human affairs. Aphrodite really does rescue Paris. Apollo really does send the plague. You get all of Homer’s spectacle—plus one awkward question: If the gods can intervene whenever they like, why doesn’t somebody just end the war?

Option Two: Treat them as psychology.

Athena restraining Achilles? That’s his common sense winning a close vote. Helen blaming Aphrodite for her attraction to Paris? A tidy bit of rationalization. The humans stay in charge of their choices—but Homer’s gloriously strange gods shrink into labels for feelings.

Option Three: Show them the door.

The 2004 film Troy largely took this route, and it can make for a fun few hours. But take the gods out of the Iliad, and you soon discover there’s less left than you’d think. (With all due respect to Brad Pitt’s magnificent abs.)

Each approach can work. None was quite what I wanted. (Story of my writing life.)

Something I Noticed About Homer’s Gods

The Olympians are fantastically powerful. But they are not all-powerful. They are not all-knowing. And heaven knows they are not all-good.

In Homer, the gods didn’t create the cosmos; they just live in it, like rather grand tenants. Even Zeus must contend with forces he can’t simply sweep aside. Homer never hands us a tidy theology. Instead, he gives us gods who squabble over whether a beloved mortal can be saved, fret about what fate will allow and bicker over which interventions go too far.

And there was my answer: Keep the gods as real characters—but don’t make them conveniently omnipotent. Give them power, personality, vanity, appetites and limits.

If you were feeling scholarly, you might call this “theologically honest literalism.” I prefer to think of it as letting the gods be gods—just not letting them do absolutely anything they please.

Zeus Meets a Goddess He Cannot Control

The scene that crystallized all this comes early in The Full Disclosure Iliad, at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis—the party that sets the entire Trojan War in motion.

Everything is going swimmingly. Zeus is carousing, Apollo is on the lyre and the nectar is flowing. Then something dreadful gathers outside the great hall, demanding to be let in.

Zeus is frightened. And Peleus, the mortal groom, is understandably alarmed.

“What is that thing?” Peleus asks.

“The Goddess of Discord,” Zeus tells him. “We call her Eris.”

“Well, don’t let her in!”

But Zeus can’t keep her out. In my telling, Discord is a force even the Olympians cannot command. She enters, presents Zeus with her golden apple and compels him to accept it.

The King of the Gods, thunderbolts and all, stuck with a gift he desperately doesn’t want. We’ve all been there. Usually it’s a sweater.

Zeus and the Golden Scales

Homer himself revels in this uncertainty. Late in the Iliad, Zeus weighs the fates of two warriors in his golden scales. One pan sinks, and a hero’s death is sealed.

But what exactly has Zeus done? Has he decided who dies? Or has he merely discovered—or announced—a fate already fixed? Elsewhere, Zeus considers saving a mortal he loves, only to be firmly talked out of it by another god. So can the gods overrule fate, or must they respect it?

Homer, characteristically, declines to say. I found that delightful. It let me write a Zeus who is immensely powerful without pretending that even he has full control of the plot. (Every author knows the feeling.)

My Full Disclosure Olympians

In the end, I wanted gods who could shape human destinies but not dictate every outcome—gods who could inspire awe one moment and behave like spoiled children the next.

Cutting them out entirely felt a bit like staging Macbeth without the witches. You could do it, I suppose. But why would you want to?

So I kept the gods: literal, quarrelsome, dangerous, sometimes ridiculous—and never entirely in control. Eris arrives with an apple, Zeus can’t say no, and the trouble begins.

Was that the right choice? I’ll leave that to you. Gods know I’ve had enough trouble making up my own mind.