Note 45 — Chapter V · FREETHOUGHT IN GREECE

Still, it cannot be said that in the Iliad there is any clear hint of religious skepticism, though the Gods are so wholly in the likeness of men that the lower deities fight with heroes and are worsted, while Zeus and Hêrê quarrel like any earthly couple. In the Odyssey there is a bare hint of possible speculation in the use of the word atheos; but it is applied only in the phrase οὐκ ἀθεεὶ, “not without a God,”45 in the sense of similar expressions in other passages and in the Iliad.46 The idea was that sometimes the Gods directly meddled. When Odysseus accuses the suitors of not dreading the Gods,47 he has no thought of accusing them of unbelief.48 Homer has indeed been supposed to have exercised a measure of relative freethought in excluding from his song the more offensive myths about the Gods,49 but such exclusion may be sufficiently explained on the score that the epopees were chanted in aristocratic dwellings, in the presence of womenkind, without surmising any process of doubt on the poet’s part.