Homer

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.

Almost as soon as the poems were fixed, Greeks who took religion seriously found them difficult. Xenophanes objected that Homer and Hesiod had attributed to the gods everything that is shameful among men, theft and adultery and deceiving one another. Plato proposed in the Republic to censor them out of the education of the young for the same reason, while quoting them throughout his own work. The move that rescued the text was allegory: read the gods as elements, or as physical forces, or as faculties of the soul, and the scandal dissolves into physics. Antiquity credited the technique to Theagenes of Rhegium, the Stoics developed it at length, and Neoplatonists were still using it a thousand years later.

Two other habits show what the poems had become. Homer was the schoolbook, so a literate Greek carried long stretches of him in memory and could be argued with in his own words, which is a kind of authority scripture usually has and literature usually does not. And the text was consulted for divination, opened at a random place and read for an answer, a practice that treats the poems as an oracle rather than as a story. Whether one poet composed them, or whether the name covers a tradition of oral singers whose work was written down later, was already an old question in antiquity and is not settled now.