ofty height
Of many ridg'd Olympus.
Why, Lord of lightning, hast thou summoned here
The gods of council, dost thou aught desire
Touching the Greeks and Trojans?

What does this mean except that the world is conducted by civilized laws
and the gods consult under the presidency of the father of gods and men?

His opinion on fate he shows clearly in his poems (I. vi. 488):--

Dearest, wring not thus my heart,
For till my day of destiny is come
No man may take my life, and when it comes
Nor brave, nor coward can escape that day.

But among the other things in which he confirms the power of fate, he
thinks as the most-approved philosophers have thought after him,--Plato,
Aristotle, and Theophrastus,--that not all things happen by fate, but
some things are in the power of men, the choice of whom is free. The
same man in a way acts as he desires and falls into what he does not
desire. And this point of view he has clearly expounded in many places,
as in the beginning of each of his poems: in the "Iliad" saying the
wrath of Achilles was the cause of the destruction of the Greeks and
that the will of Zeus was fulfilled; in the "Odyssey" that the comrades
of Odysseus went to their destruction by their own folly. For they had
offended by touching the sacred oxen of the Sun, although they could
have abstained from doing so. Yet it was foreordained (O. xi. 110):--

But if thou hurtest them, I signify ruin for thy ships, and
for thy men, and even though thou shalt thyself escape.
If thou doest them no hurt and art careful to return, so may
ye yet reach Ithaca, albeit in evil case.

So not to violate them depended on themselves, but that those who had
done the evil should perish follows from fate.

It is possible to avoid what happens accidentally by foresight as he
shows in the following (O. v. 436):--

Then of a truth would luckless Odysseus have perished beyond
what was ordained had not gray-eyed Athene given him some
counsel. He rushed in and with both his hands clutched the
rock whereto he clung till the great wave went by.

Then on the other hand running a great danger as he was, he had perished
by fortune; yet by prudence he was saved.

Just as about divine things there are many divine reasonings in the
philosophers taking their origin from Homer, so also with human affairs
it is the same. First we will take up the subject of the soul.