Human and divine responsibility in archaic Greek poetry

The purpose of my thesis is to examine the relation between the human and the divine in the Homeric poems, and define thereupon the limits of human and divine responsibility. To this end I particularly focus on the Homeric concepts of fate and divine justice, as these are expressed mainly by the terms and . Nonetheless, since the Greek terms do not always coincide in their semantics with the respective terms of any modern language, it is regarded as necessary that the field of each term be defined prior to the examination of the concepts themselves. Similarly, issues such as morality and Homeric ethics have to be raised, since they form the basis upon which any discussion of Homeric thought can rely. The Iliad and the Odyssey employ the two basic ideas of fate and divine justice each in a discrete manner, and this requires that each poem be examined separately. A comparison between the two works, necessary for a more overall idea of the Homeric world and the Homeric compositions, is incorporated in the chapter on the Odyssey