The Iliad's gods

The Iliad's gods take sides in a human war, deceive, accept sacrifice as payment for favour, wound mortals from behind, and are themselves bound by a fate they cannot overrule. Nobody inside the poem treats any of this as a scandal.

In plain words

In the Iliad the gods take sides in a human war, deceive, trade favour for sacrifice and strike from behind, and no one in the poem finds it a scandal. The two traditions agree that powers fight over people and split on one point: the Bible calls it a crime and names a defendant, while Troy's poem calls it weather.

The mechanism

REFERENCE — the control says the same startling thing ours does: the powers are personal agents at war over human beings. The corpora diverge on exactly one point, and it is the load-bearing one — ours calls that behaviour a crime and names a defendant, while Troy's calls it weather.

How it was checked

• EvidenceT5 INDEPENDENT SECULAR; Status: COMMITTED
• Letter eraTHE ENCLOSURE AT THE BIRTH OF WRITING c. 3500 to c. 1150 BC
• SourcesSECULAR RECORD — Homer, Iliad