TFBT: Quotes for September

 Theogony, Hesiod, "There by the counsel of Zeus who drives the clouds the Titan gods [730] are hidden under misty gloom, in a dank place where are the ends of the huge earth. And they may not go out; for Poseidon fixed gates of bronze upon it, and a wall runs all round it on every side. There Gyes and Cottus and great-souled Obriareus [735] live, trusty warders ". Poseidon built the walls of Troy too (7.451-4)  Hmm

“the time will come when the great enemy of the gods will be let loose and Asgard shall be desolate. This enemy is Loki, the fire-god, whose release just before the coming on of the twilight of the gods is in close agreement with the release of the chained Prometheus, by whom the sway of Zeus is to be brought to an end.” (Cox, George W, 1827-1902. “The mythology of the Aryan nations.”)  I don't know that Zeus' sway comes to an end, but the release of Prometheus does coincide with the pulling of the Cyprian Veil.

"real gods tend to see the divine perspective as characterized by a fundamental lack of seriousness which Reinhardt memorably called sublime frivolity.” Tobias Myers

Zeus does not give any hint to Thetis (or Achilles) that “the gods” do not now represent a perfectly unified front. And after all, what would it have served to give her the whole picture? By giving Thetis a blanket statement that the gods’ response as a group to her son’s behavior is outrage, he emphasizes his own faithfulness to his promise even in the face of what he misleading construes as unanimous opposition; then, by telling her to say to Achilles that “the  gods” as a group are angry,  zeus avoids mentioning the dissenting views, thereby presents the discussion as closed, ruling out, for example, any possibility of appeal by Achilles to some sympathetic deity. Tobias Myers 

"It is notable that, like the Phaeacians and suitors of the Odyssey, the gods are a part of the epic events which absorb their attention. Yet the Phaeacians do not at first realize that the character Odysseus from Demodocus’ songs is among them, any more than the suitors listening to Phemius’ song of Achaean nostos realize that they themselves will soon be slaughtered to a man as part of the most famous instance of the genre."  Tobias Myers

 Like sports fans convinced that if they miss a second of play their team will lose, the poet’s audience is prodded to stay alert by the negative example of Zeus whose team indeed starts losing when he turns his eyes away from Troy (13.1ff), or when he makes love and sleeps afterward (14.153ff), and of Ares whose own son dies when he is not watching (13.521-25). Tobias Myers

 Cf. Clay 2011: 8: “But the pleasure of the internal observer also invites the audience to be entranced by the sheer beauty of the scene and to share momentarily a divine perspective, viewing the Trojan watch fires from afar, where a transient human moment is mirrored in the eternal cosmic phenomena of the heavens. Like the gods, we the audience can witness this interplay of the ephemeral and the timeless, this conversion of the fleeting into the everlasting, that constitutes the transformative power

 Richardson; “Fate is Homer;” 

Mark Edwards remarks that “fate, of course, is the will of the poet, limited by the major features of the traditional legends.” 

"The gods normally descend from Olympus in order to take a hand in the action (at Troy)  all except for Zeus. In mythology Zeus also descends to the mortal world in various guises, but never does so in the Iliad." (  Tobias Myers) Just like he never appears on stage in the tragedy.

“the principle which they appear to hold in common that a god’s wrath against mortals takes precedence over a god’s protection of those same mortals. “  Tobias Myers

 "The one who thinks he loves his misstress because of herself, makes a mistake."  François de La Rochefoucauld  

"if you utter worthy (not worthless)  words, you will be my spokesman.Let this people turn to you  but you must not turn to them."  Jeremiah 15:19