Dear Classical Wisdom Reader,

There are some elements of the ancient world that don’t seem very comparable to our modern lives. You know, things like public toilets where you clean yourself with a stick, using lead to dye your hair or indeed ritual sacrifices with piglets… or people (I hope)!

There are also a lot of concepts that exactly relate either… we don’t spend all day worrying if poor hospitality (Xenia) will result in revenge by the gods (just remember THAT this holiday season!) or strive to achieve glory (Kleos) in our normal lives… likewise the idea of fate (Moirai) does not completely color our perspective.

But what if… it was a little more understandable, a bit more relatable than we are prone to imagine? What if ‘fate’ to the ancients was like budgets and American presidents?

Read on for a fresh analysis of the most ancient of texts: Homer’s Iliad. Homeric scholar A.P. David delves into the role FATE plays in the epic and how we can make sense of what it meant back then… and now.

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Now… onto Homer, fate… and Bill Clinton?

Enjoy!

All the best,Anya Leonard

Founder and DirectorClassical Wisdom

How Does FATE Fit in the Iliad?

by A. P. David

What is the role of ‘fate’ in Homer’s Iliad?

My late teacher David Grene used to say that fate in ancient Greek usage was only ever about 95% certain. That is to say, there was always that little bit of wiggle room, and hence a feeling of possibility and choice. Without this 5%, it would not be humanly possible to conceive of a worthy life or a meaningful, interesting narrative.

Hence it is absurd to say that we cannot discuss a character’s choices simply because everything was fated for ‘the Greeks’. What then, considering the above, is the role of fate in Homer the poet’s plotting and in the lives of his protagonists?

The Father of Gods Follows Fate

It is quite clear that Zeus is the most powerful figure in the world, but not even the father of gods and men is free to alter fate.

Let us consider the nature of the pressures on him. When he realizes that his dear son, Sarpedon, is about to be killed by Patroclus, he mourns out loud in the most personal way, and wonders whether he should spirit him away alive.

Hera’s response is worth mulling over. It is not, ‘hey Zeusy, that’s nice, but you know it’s IMPOSSIBLE.’ It is, rather, ‘well well well … all this fuss for a mortal … okay, go ahead. But the rest of us gods aren’t going to be too happy about it.’

She goes on to point out what chaos would result if each of the gods decided to help out their particular favourites, protecting their lives from some kind of prearranged fate. ‘There are so many sons of immortals fighting around Priam’s town!’ She suggests, instead, that Sarpedon be allowed to die, but also that arrangements be made for the body to be returned to Lycia, where his family could prepare it and mourn properly.

Zeus is eager to acquiesce. It is the thought of what a bureaucratic mess would be created that prevents the supreme power in the universe from saving his son. We all know this feeling of the bureaucratic nightmare. (It is quite a puzzle to me how Homer the poet knew this feeling, without the direct experience of modern politics and infrastructures.)

Is it really this mundane, bureaucratic inertia that preserves the machinery of fate? Yes, apparently.

Agamemnon and Beyond Fate

Let’s look at Book II in the Iliad. After hearing the false dream, Agamemnon declares to the troops that the army’s cause is hopeless. It is said that the Achaeans would have returned home in their ships ὑπέρμορα, ‘beyond fate,’… unless a chain of command from Hera through Athena to Odysseus had not reined them in.

This notion that something would have happened ‘beyond fate’ but for some intervention, recurs through the poem. I would connect it to the affect of the ‘brink of destruction’, a feeling of the tension that something that is not supposed to happen is almost coming to pass. One feels, almost bodily, the force that keeps what is fated on its proper track. Nothing ever happens in the Iliad beyond what is fated, despite the reality of the threat. It is as though there is a contract established between poet and audience, which allows him to draw on this effect in a state of peculiar epic pleasure.

Next question then is: How can we have a free will if there is such a thing as fate?

The modern question is about the coexistence of will and fate (or determinism), but to Homer, it is the relation between, say, Zeus’ plan and the anger of Achilles. On the one hand, these actions are directly juxtaposed, but on the other hand, this looming notion of fate emerges with a steady persistence.

At first it seems that the Homeric question is as intractable as the modern one, but I believe there is important information in the Greek. It is found in the word most often translated as ‘fate’. This word is μόρος and properly it means ‘part’ or ‘portion’. Sometimes the notion is figured as a piece of string that is cut by the three mythological spinners.

But I think it is best served by an image that expresses the finitude of the available string—and really a cake or a pie works better. It is as if there is one big pie baked of the stuff of life, and each of us is allotted one share. This notion of the share, it seems to me, is a key to understanding Homer’s conception, in the way that it adds content to the notion of a predestined terminus to a string-like line of life.

Fate and Free Will: A Budget

What I would like to suggest is the notion of a ‘budget᾽, in its political and modern sense, which gives context to the notion of a share or portion that is the Homeric ‘fate’. Just as in the case of a modern congress, everything that ultimately becomes a part of the fateful budget begins life as an object of desire on the part of an agent, however broad-minded or craven the politician.

I think it is fair to say that everything that comes to be fated in the Iliad began life as an object of desire, in the person of some god. 

To be sure, there is a Freudian over-determination in Homeric events; it is not that there is no explanation for why something happens, but rather, that there are too many of them. The anger of Achilles did all those terrible things, and also the will of Zeus was being accomplished, and oh, by the way, the whole thing was fated anyway.

The problem with a budget is that it cannot be changed mid-stream. In the period prior to its passage, a budget is a field of endless conflict and negotiation. Anything is possible at that point. But once it is passed, nothing can be changed. Once the government offices or UN bureaus have received their annual allotment, they cannot ask for more. They can only petition for next year. I think that this is the key to the power of fate. It is like this year’s budget.

Consider how deeply the anxiety about this problem goes in the Iliad; it is in fact expressed in the opening conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, which is essentially a problem of re-allotment once the division has already been made. The case is doubly poignant and humanly challenging because the commodity in question is a woman. Apart from the question about the value of a woman (how many hecatombs is she worth?) it is not possible to return a woman. It is essential, in regard to the possibility of reconciliation with Achilles, that Agamemnon claims he has not, in fact, slept with Briseis… although this stretches credibility.

A Favor to Thetis

The whole narrative problem of the Iliad, which is also Zeus’s problem, is how to stitch in a certain sequence of events, within a framework that has already been determined. He already knows that Troy is going to fall and when it is going to fall. But Thetis has called in a favour; and he must deliver in such a way as to work within the confines of a fate that has already been budgeted. To some extent, I believe he makes things up as he goes along. He is shown doing this when he wonders whether Patroclus should die right there at Hector’s hands, over Sarpedon’s body, or whether he should get to rage on some more. (He decides on a little more action for Patroclus.)

The flexibility here is striking. In Book VIII we find out from Zeus’s own mouth, for the first time, that Patroclus has to die as part of this favour for Thetis. Just because Zeus expresses it as a fated thing, does not mean that he had ever seen this before: he speaks in the modus of a prophet.

But Zeus himself, the supremo, does not know precisely when the necessary death must occur. 

Similarly, in Book XV, when he wakes up from Hera’s embrace, he announces for the first time, to us and presumably to himself, that Hector also must die. His son Sarpedon will fall at Patroclus’ hands, and Patroclus at Hector’s, so that Achilles will finally be roused from the ships to seek revenge. This is the way that Thetis’ favour will be completed. There will be a reversal, a παλίωξις, driving back from the ships to Ilium, to neutralize the retrogression in fate that was initiated by Thetis’ request.

It is false to the letter and to the spirit of the story to say that Patroclus’ and Hector’s deaths were fated from the beginning. No such things were on the horizon until the quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon, and Thetis’ visit to the knee of Zeus. Fate unfolds before us, at the very moments that Zeus sees the pieces fall into place, and Homer himself glimpses at the horizons of his story. Perhaps we even feel a sense of achievement here. Zeus’ successful negotiation within the confines of fate is at the same time a narrative achievement. As we are also swept onward into the real-time mortality of Patroclus and Hector, the pathos of Achilles’ surrogates.

At certain moments Zeus holds up the scales, and a man’s fate tips in the balance. I am open to suggestions about the meaning of this, but it strikes me as a ratification rather than a decision. Judges do not like to feel like perpetrators of any kind, but as agents of justice. Zeus is no exception. Holding up the scales is a way of turning the messy motives that produce what is fated, into a matter of masses and weights. There is a distance in the gesture that perhaps is a comfort to judge and jury. It seems to be a way of objectifying a decision, rather than an event in itself.

Is Zeus Bill Clinton?

So, is the most powerful figure in the universe a kind of hen-pecked American president, with Hillary in the wings, and Monica asking favours, who has to pass a budget through an unruly congress and then live with the consequences?

Yes. I think this is Homer’s idea. What I don’t understand is what experience Homer could possibly have had of this post-Enlightenment kind of government: for that is what Homer depicts in his Olympians, a government, of a kind very familiar to us.

The question to ask is about the truth and the reality. Which of the competing stories that purport to take us ‘behind the scenes’ actually works, so as to answer to our experience of reality?

Is what is behind the appearance of our will and agency a reality of impersonal forces, masses, energies and elements, whose implacable laws are the true determinants of what is real? Or behind the scenes is there a purpose or intelligence of some kind? Or is there a loving god with a personal stake in our welfare? Or rather, does the world actually work as though its strongest power were a compromised president, where things happen as though they had been decided by a corruptible parliament, and the divinity of sex can overthrow the most stable fantasies of well-meaning people?

It would be good to separate these answers, between the ones that are wishes, the ones that comfort, and the ones that are true. As always, open eyes and an open mind are what move us forward.