The primordial Themis revealed the danger to a general assembly of Zeus and the other Olympians. Only then did Zeus really give up on Thetis, because he wanted to “preserve his own power forever.” Perhaps Thetis already knew the secret, perhaps that was why she had rejected the god of gods. Or at least one might conclude as much by analogy, since there was another occasion when Thetis was the only woman who protected Zeus’s sovereignty. This was when various other Olympians, including Athena, who was born from the god’s own temple, wanted to put him in chains. Upon which Thetis, a marine goddess who never went to Olympus, called Briareos, a hundred-headed Titan, to the rescue, and Zeus was saved. Zeus was thus indebted to Thetis for her support, “in both word and deed,” and she would exploit that indebtedness to defend her son, Achilles.
As for the motives behind the Olympian plot to bind Zeus in a thousand knots, Homer’s lips are sealed. But a god in chains is a god dethroned: that, and nothing less than that, was what the Olympians had been plotting. Thus the need for a woman’s help was not limited to the heroes but also applied to the greatest of the gods. Even Zeus, in his unscathed Olympian stability, knew that his reign must end one day. As early as Homer’s time, he already owed his continuing reign to expediency, since on one occasion he had repressed his desire for a woman to avoid the birth of a more powerful son and on another he had been saved only because that same woman had called on the help of Briareos, one of those rough-hewn, primordial creatures the Olympians would generally rather not have mentioned. Even Zeus, then, had opposed cunning to destiny; even the supreme god had put off his own end. The game was not over yet.
Before revealing her secret to the Olympians, Themis had told her son Prometheus. Chained to a rock, Prometheus thought of Zeus endlessly pursuing his “empty-headed” philandering, never knowing which of his conquests might prove fatal to him. Those frivolous adventures were becoming rather like a game of Russian roulette. And Prometheus kept his mouth shut.
Thus Zeus’s womanizing takes on a new light. Each affair might conceal the supreme danger. Every time he approached a woman, Zeus knew he might be about to provoke his own downfall. Thus far the stories take us: but for every myth told, there is another, unnameable, that is not told, another which beckons from the shadows, surfacing only through allusions, fragments, coincidences, with nobody ever daring to tell all in a single story. And here the “son stronger than his father” is not to be born yet, because he is already present: he is Apollo. Over the never-ending Olympian banquet, a father and son are watching each other, while between them, invisible to all but themselves, sparkles the serrated sickle Kronos used to slice off the testicles of his father, Uranus.
Whenever their lives were set aflame, through desire or suffering, or even reflection, the Homeric heroes knew that a god was at work. They endured the god, and observed him, but what actually happened as a result was a surprise most of all for themselves. Thus dispossessed of their emotion, their shame, and their glory too, they were more cautious than anybody when it came to attributing to themselves the origin of their actions. “To me, you are not the cause, only the gods can be causes,” says old Priam, looking at Helen on the Scaean Gate. He couldn’t bring himself to hate her, nor to see her as guilty for nine bloody years’ fighting, even though Helen’s body had become the very image of a war about to end in massacre.
No psychology since has ever gone beyond this; all we have done is invent, for those powers that act upon us, longer, more numerous, more awkward names, which are less effective, less closely aligned to the pattern of our experience, whether that be pleasure or terror. The moderns are proud above all of their responsibility, but in being so they presume to respond with a voice that they are not even sure is theirs. The Homeric heroes knew nothing of that cumbersome word responsibility, nor would they have believed in it if they had. For them, it was as if every crime were committed in a state of mental infirmity. But such infirmity meant that a god was present and at work. What we consider infirmity they saw as “divine infatuation” (átē). They knew that this invisible incursion often brought ruin: so much so that the word átē would gradually come to mean “ruin.” But they also knew, and it was Sophocles who said it, that “mortal life can never have anything great about it except through átē.”
Thus a people obsessed with the idea of hubris were also a people who dismissed with the utmost skepticism an agent’s claim actually to do anything. When we know for sure that a person is the agent of some action, then that action is mediocre; as soon as there is a hint of greatness, of whatever kind, be it shameful or virtuous, it is no longer that person acting. The agent sags and flops, like a medium when his voices desert him. For the Homeric heroes there was no guilty party, only guilt, immense guilt. That was the miasma that impregnated blood, dust, and tears. With an intuition the moderns jettisoned and have never recovered, the heroes did not distinguish between the evil of the mind and the evil of the deed, murder and death. Guilt for them is like a boulder blocking the road; it is palpable, it looms. Perhaps the guilty party is as much a sufferer as the victim. In confronting guilt, all we can do is make a ruthless computation of the forces involved. And, when considering the guilty party, there will always be an element of uncertainty. We can never establish just how far he really is guilty, because the guilty party is part and parcel of the guilt and obeys its mechanics. Until eventually he is crushed by it perhaps, perhaps abandoned, perhaps freed, while the guilt rolls on to threaten others, to create new stories, new victims.
Every sudden heightening of intensity brought you into a god’s sphere of influence. And, within that sphere, the god in question would fight against or ally himself with other gods on a second stage alive with presences. From that moment on, every event, every encounter occurred in parallel, in two places. To tell a story meant to weave those two series of parallel events together, to make both worlds visible.
Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel over the géras, that part of the spoils of war which is divided, though not in equal portions, among the prestigious members of the army. Zeus, talking to the other gods assembled on the golden paving of Olympus, reminds them that he is fond of the Trojans because they have never forgotten to give him his géras, that part of the sacrifice dedicated to him through sacrifices. And he makes the point while discussing the fate of Agamemnon, Achilles, and their enemies. Every word in human terminology takes on another meaning in a divine context, but the words themselves frequently remain the same, and every story unfolds simultaneously on earth and in heaven. With Olympian conjuring, it will sometimes even seem that everything is happening on the same stage. When Helen goes to Paris’s bedroom to visit the warrior, just returned from the battlefield “as though from a dance,” it is Aphrodite who gets a chair for her. But this closeness and familiarity doesn’t diminish the distance in the slightest. These beings blessed with the power of speech may be aware of sometimes possessing divine beauty or strength or grace, yet there will always be something they lack: the inextinguishable reserves of the Olympians, their “inextinguishable laughter” when they see Hephaestus limping through their banqueting hall, that capacity for “living easily” which is the hallmark of those few beings who know that they will live forever.