I think if you are going to discuss the Iliad's value system in terms of the relationship between leaders and masses, one scene you really need to take into account is the speech of Sarpedon in Book 12, placed almost exactly at the center of the epic. In that speech Sarpedon explicitly describes the honor given to the chiefs as a reciprocal system: a reward to them by the people for their willingness to lead - and potentially die - in battle.
I don't see how that is compatible with your reading: yes, it too can be read as a justification for elite rule, but it is not a justification for UNCONDITIONAL elite rule, no matter how the elites perform, which is what you were arguing for. Your mistake - I think - is to note (correctly) that the elites in the Iliad are not judged on their wisdom or success, but you fail to see what they ARE judged on, which is their risk-taking courage.
I would recommend Simone Weil’s essay, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”, as my preferred interpretation of the epic. Reading it as aristocracy-justifying propaganda does not really make sense to me largely for the reasons set out in Weil’s essay.
An interesting wrinkle here involves the nature of Bronze Age warfare. Bronze was scarce and expensive, so elites who could afford bronze armor and weapons essentially served as a super-soldiers. It may have been the most elite-dominated style of warfare ever. Therefore, the everyman soldiers simply mattered far less.
The Iron Age changed this dynamic. Iron is much more plentiful than tin, so it dramatically reduced the cost of arming lots of soldiers. This, in turn, dramatically reduced the importance of elite soldiers.
"Maybe some clever poet originally inserted the story of Thersites in order to subtly critique the values of the Greeks..."
This is actually the view of several scholars, that Homer is using Thersites as a vehicle for irony and to express a reasonable but subversive view of the poet himself, much like how many scholars view Shylock.
To elaborate a bit, there is quite a lot of irony in the Iliad, especially in its depiction of Agamemnon (strong and beautiful but a huge jackass), and the same inversion is at least suggested in the case of Thersites. Additionally, by making Thersites his scapegoat for his inability to beat Achilles, Odysseus is diminished. There is some scholarly commentary about the exact translation about the soldiers laughing and cheering is ambiguous.
>There is some scholarly commentary about the exact translation about the soldiers laughing and cheering is ambiguous.
Right, I noticed that the translation Richard uses says "The men were troubled but they smiled and laughed" which is carrying a lot more ambiguity than just "the men smiled and laughed"
Yes, or "upset". PW Rose in "Plural Voices in Homer" wonders, along with a few others he cites, whether the soldiers are upset "at the failed rush to the ships" or "the treatment of their spokesperson."
This is a cool take, and the scene with Thersites also resonated with me when I read it. I think where I differ, is I don't think there's anything particularly interesting or foreign about the value system presented by the Greeks/Trojans. Another commenter mentioned the Vikings. It's universal. It's just typical armed male "yay violence" stuff. You could take the Iliad and rewrite it as some gang beef and it'd be perfectly legible.
Yo third street ran a train on our ho, now we beefin'. One guy got dissed now he don't wanna fight. Some punk was like "I don't wanna get shot over some shorty. Why don't we just go to college or something?" so I smacked him for being a wuss.
I enjoyed this piece. The alien psychological (the toughest men are CONSTANTLY crying and bitching) and moral universe of the Iliad is a big part of its draw.
I think there is something to your view, but I also think a straightforward reading of the main heroes as "virtuous, but with interesting flaws" works pretty well, when you consider that the primary virtues with which the warrior elite were concerned are things like "personal courage, strength at arms, glorious leader of men to prosperity and victory, piety [right action and ritual to keep the gods happy]". These guys were basically Vikings, so Agamemnon reads more as "glorious leader brought low by his arrogance and his habit of not paying attention to, or honoring, his key supporters and the gods" and less as "giant dick-bag". Odysseus is more-or-less an ideal Greek, except for the huge (by Greek standards) flaw of getting into a pissing match with the gods (half of Greek mythology is examples of why you should Not Do This and the other half is how sometimes you are screwed regardless because you are in a situation where you offend one god or another, and Odysseus and Agamemnon are good examples of the first, and Paris of the second [pissing of Athena is at least as much his problem as pissing off Agamemnon]).
It's classic "good guy with some fatal flaws and bad luck, leading to fun drama" writing. Just an alien definition of "good guy" which is richer than "happens to be a noble".
Thersites is contemptable because he is a coward uninterested in glory and his points that Agamemnon is treating Achilles unfairly is intended to highlight a real flaw in Agamemnon to the audience, but (i) it is one that he doesn't have the standing to raise, as a cowardly weakling and (ii) is sullied because Thersites clearly just wants to go home, and is stirring up (more) shit in order to achieve that objective--you do not get the sense that he would be satisfied if Agamemnon only apologized so they get on with the glorious conquest. This device of a contemptable person saying a true thing, but still being contemptable is used a lot in classical literature.
I think a reason for the enduring value of the Iliad, whatever its message, is the beauty of its poetry, and that calling it propaganda misses its implicit critique of elite behavior. There is something clearly wrong about this culture of extreme violence driven by offended honor and petty grievance over prizes -- a culture Priam and Achilles momentarily escape, in Book 24, in their moment of shared loss. What they are fighting over isn't worth it, they realize, but they're unable to escape the cycle of violence.
Agree with the person who recommends "Poem of Force" (which, in a word, sees a kind of Christian message in the Iliad) as well as Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, which is a savage satire on the Iliad's heroic culture in which Thersites plays a prominent role.
The gods are the ultimate framework in the Illiad. Their criteria, seemingly arbitrary to us are skill, courage and beauty. In the human world it is simply formed hierarchy. Opposing those in power leads to endless war. Better unjust stability than constant instability. Democracy seem to be the best we can do so long as the results are accepted. Then we get an almost laughable parade of leaders. Fascism and Communism are the vices of failed Democracies.
Fascinating analysis, but I suspect it's wrong, and before I had to give it any credence, I would need to see comparisons with other civilizationally impactful literature from the same lens of "propaganda justifying aristocratic rule."
My guess is you would find that such literature generally praises rulers as exemplars of virtue, though clumsily because virtue wasn't well understood.
If so, what stands out about The Iliad would be that it is so lucid about the indefensible vices of the ruling class. That helped to pave the way for democracy. And yet the Greek heroes are very brave, plunging into the fight again and again with gusto. That, too, set a pattern that undergirded Greek greatness.
The Greeks had fine role models of courage, even if they were morally inept to an incredible degree, taken holistically.
Something I think you're missing here is that the Epic Cycle, of which the Iliad is a key part, is fundamentally a collapse story. The Cycle is set in the Mycenaean world, which had collapsed by the time these legends took place. In addition, the Greeks were well aware that this world had collapsed: see the legends of the Dorian invasion, such as the Athenian king Codrus. So a large part of the story is how this society could collapse, and a large reason is that the Greeks make the gods angry. This is why Odysseus spends ten years making it home, so many heroes die at Troy, and Agamemnon is eventually killed. Because it's a collapse story, it can't logically treat most of the rulers as infallible, even though it's sympathetic to almost all of them.
P.S. Odysseus tries to kill Diomedes in some sources and does kill Palamedes. So it wasn't really unheard of for leaders to kill people on the same side.
The anti-democratic pro-aristocratic aspect of the Illiad is so right there on the surface that I don't think many people have felt the need to write it up as an explicit theory. However, I have frequently seen Theristes used as an example of how archaic Greece was anti-democratic as compared to the democracy of Classical Greece.
On the question of whether Homeric values influenced the Greeks more widely: for sure they did. Status strivers going to strive. The Iliad and Odyssey were basic education for centuries. Athens, I would argue, adopted a democratized version of Homeric values, keeping the emphasis on strength, competition, glory, and acquisition through violence. These values seem to have only been fundamentally questioned from the time of Plato - the Peloponnesian War had certainly showcased major downsides of these values - and the shift to Stoicism and later Christianity, which advocated very different values indeed.
Stoicism was certainly treated by the Romans as compatible with striving for glory (at least in the late Republic); IIRC some historians think this is part of why Stoicism became generally popular in late republican Rome, unlike eg. Epicureanism. Certainly violence *against one's fellow citizens/aristocrats* toward that end was seen as less acceptable than in the Iliad, but that's more a matter of greater political stability; you could probably say the same about classical Sparta.
I'd say that insofar as Stoicism promoted *doing one's duty and accepting the overall order of the world* that was eminently compatible with the Roman Empire and may account for its popularity. Stoicism is not pacifist or anti-slavery per se, but it does not promote the personal glory, power grabs, and casual brutality one finds in the Iliad and Odyssey. The Homeric poems could be taken to promote adventurous rogues like Alcibiades, whereas Stoicism promotes an ethics of conciliation and restraint much more compatible for the soldiers/bureaucrats of a working world-empire.
Good reading IMO. The Iliad showcases an ethos of aristocratic competition rather than autocracy. The Greeks were competitive in everything I can think of: politics, sports, drama, philosophical argument, and, perhaps most basically, between city-states and explorers / settler armies as entrepreneurial political founders. No doubt there was also plenty of economic competition, although the Greeks under-theorized this (though Hesiod, a people's poet, does refer to benefits of competition among potters). Different city-states had different set ups with one, Athens, finding a formula for unprecedented concentration of world-historical achievement. Autocracy can mean order, but typically also stagnation. Minimally orderly competition between entities enables differentiated generation and selection of all the interesting things.
"Perhaps this optimization process can explain why Greek civilization flourished. The value system reflected in and propagandized by The Iliad seems conducive to social stability. At the same time, by defending elite prerogatives rather than preaching worship of an individual ruler, as the Persians and Egyptians did, the story contributed to the maintenance of a civilization that was more democratic than anything that had come before, allowing it to benefit from relatively open debate and more opportunities for a wider range of talented men to contribute to society."
There was a riot of diversity in governance styles among Greek city-states. Some were proto democracies (like Athens), some were ruled by a king, some had oligarchies, and some were extremely bizarre with pretty much no parallel in another known society (Sparta). A lot of precocious places had very fragmented, experimental backdrops like this. Italian city-states were much like this during the Renaissance, Western Europe itself was very fragmented and fractious after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
If you are on an ancient Greece kick you should read Thucydides. It's actually remarkable how modern he seems - he is writing as a contemporary about the Peloponnesian War and is very clearly a very different breed of cat from the guys in the Iliad and Homer.
>The Iliad isn’t similar to standard authoritarian propaganda today, in which leaders are treated as unusually wise and virtuous. Such material exists to legitimize the rule of particular individuals. The Iliad has a different purpose: to justify the rule of elites as representing the natural order of the world, which in effect means that defending the virtue of past leaders is unnecessary, if not downright counterproductive.
The role of religion is also interesting here, e.g. the concept of "divine right of kings" (Europe) or the "mandate of heaven" (China). Egyptian pharaohs would simply declare themselves gods.
One modern phenomenon which I think is underrated: Even though not all countries are democracies, the existence of *some* democracies still requires authoritarians to work harder to legitimize their rule so that the populace will regard the authoritarian government as a comparatively good option. See for example https://www.chinatalk.media/p/why-deepseek-appeasing-karens-is
In pre-industrial societies people had dramatically lower expectations of their government. See this book: https://www.amazon.com/Pre-Industrial-Societies-Anatomy-Pre-Modern-World/dp/1780747411 The attitude was "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must". In those days "government" kinda just meant paying taxes and not getting much of anything in return. As a citizen, your main interaction with government was trying to avoid paying taxes. You didn't strongly identify with your "country" (back in those days the word "kingdom" or "empire" was more likely to be used, which reflected a real difference in political structure). You might not even speak the same language as the ruler: Some sources claim that at the time of the French Revolution, less than 20% the population spoke the standard French language as their native tongue.
Nowadays there has been a revolution of rising expectations. Even in the US, which has one of the highest median incomes in the world adjusted for cost of living, a military-defense position which is well beyond impregnable, and legions of foreigners desperately trying to get in, voters are still perpetually convinced that something is deeply wrong, and keep electing leaders like Obama and Trump who promise hope and change. Please excuse me while I pulverize my forehead.
As also in the Iliad: it is often repeated that kings' power is granted by Zeus. However, at the time depicted in the Iliad it apparently wasn't thought that the gods cared whether kings ruled well or justly: this is stated only once in the Iliad, in a simile comparing something to the anger of Zeus at a king who judges corruptly, & the similes in Homer are generally thought to be late additions to the poems.
I think if you are going to discuss the Iliad's value system in terms of the relationship between leaders and masses, one scene you really need to take into account is the speech of Sarpedon in Book 12, placed almost exactly at the center of the epic. In that speech Sarpedon explicitly describes the honor given to the chiefs as a reciprocal system: a reward to them by the people for their willingness to lead - and potentially die - in battle.
I don't see how that is compatible with your reading: yes, it too can be read as a justification for elite rule, but it is not a justification for UNCONDITIONAL elite rule, no matter how the elites perform, which is what you were arguing for. Your mistake - I think - is to note (correctly) that the elites in the Iliad are not judged on their wisdom or success, but you fail to see what they ARE judged on, which is their risk-taking courage.
I would recommend Simone Weil’s essay, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”, as my preferred interpretation of the epic. Reading it as aristocracy-justifying propaganda does not really make sense to me largely for the reasons set out in Weil’s essay.
An interesting wrinkle here involves the nature of Bronze Age warfare. Bronze was scarce and expensive, so elites who could afford bronze armor and weapons essentially served as a super-soldiers. It may have been the most elite-dominated style of warfare ever. Therefore, the everyman soldiers simply mattered far less.
The Iron Age changed this dynamic. Iron is much more plentiful than tin, so it dramatically reduced the cost of arming lots of soldiers. This, in turn, dramatically reduced the importance of elite soldiers.
Even during the iron age warfare was still very elite with horses and plate armor
"Maybe some clever poet originally inserted the story of Thersites in order to subtly critique the values of the Greeks..."
This is actually the view of several scholars, that Homer is using Thersites as a vehicle for irony and to express a reasonable but subversive view of the poet himself, much like how many scholars view Shylock.
To elaborate a bit, there is quite a lot of irony in the Iliad, especially in its depiction of Agamemnon (strong and beautiful but a huge jackass), and the same inversion is at least suggested in the case of Thersites. Additionally, by making Thersites his scapegoat for his inability to beat Achilles, Odysseus is diminished. There is some scholarly commentary about the exact translation about the soldiers laughing and cheering is ambiguous.
>There is some scholarly commentary about the exact translation about the soldiers laughing and cheering is ambiguous.
Right, I noticed that the translation Richard uses says "The men were troubled but they smiled and laughed" which is carrying a lot more ambiguity than just "the men smiled and laughed"
Yes, or "upset". PW Rose in "Plural Voices in Homer" wonders, along with a few others he cites, whether the soldiers are upset "at the failed rush to the ships" or "the treatment of their spokesperson."
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26308593
Suddenly, I have an insight into the relationship between Epstein and our current ruling class oligarchs!
This is a cool take, and the scene with Thersites also resonated with me when I read it. I think where I differ, is I don't think there's anything particularly interesting or foreign about the value system presented by the Greeks/Trojans. Another commenter mentioned the Vikings. It's universal. It's just typical armed male "yay violence" stuff. You could take the Iliad and rewrite it as some gang beef and it'd be perfectly legible.
Yo third street ran a train on our ho, now we beefin'. One guy got dissed now he don't wanna fight. Some punk was like "I don't wanna get shot over some shorty. Why don't we just go to college or something?" so I smacked him for being a wuss.
I enjoyed this piece. The alien psychological (the toughest men are CONSTANTLY crying and bitching) and moral universe of the Iliad is a big part of its draw.
I think there is something to your view, but I also think a straightforward reading of the main heroes as "virtuous, but with interesting flaws" works pretty well, when you consider that the primary virtues with which the warrior elite were concerned are things like "personal courage, strength at arms, glorious leader of men to prosperity and victory, piety [right action and ritual to keep the gods happy]". These guys were basically Vikings, so Agamemnon reads more as "glorious leader brought low by his arrogance and his habit of not paying attention to, or honoring, his key supporters and the gods" and less as "giant dick-bag". Odysseus is more-or-less an ideal Greek, except for the huge (by Greek standards) flaw of getting into a pissing match with the gods (half of Greek mythology is examples of why you should Not Do This and the other half is how sometimes you are screwed regardless because you are in a situation where you offend one god or another, and Odysseus and Agamemnon are good examples of the first, and Paris of the second [pissing of Athena is at least as much his problem as pissing off Agamemnon]).
It's classic "good guy with some fatal flaws and bad luck, leading to fun drama" writing. Just an alien definition of "good guy" which is richer than "happens to be a noble".
Thersites is contemptable because he is a coward uninterested in glory and his points that Agamemnon is treating Achilles unfairly is intended to highlight a real flaw in Agamemnon to the audience, but (i) it is one that he doesn't have the standing to raise, as a cowardly weakling and (ii) is sullied because Thersites clearly just wants to go home, and is stirring up (more) shit in order to achieve that objective--you do not get the sense that he would be satisfied if Agamemnon only apologized so they get on with the glorious conquest. This device of a contemptable person saying a true thing, but still being contemptable is used a lot in classical literature.
I think a reason for the enduring value of the Iliad, whatever its message, is the beauty of its poetry, and that calling it propaganda misses its implicit critique of elite behavior. There is something clearly wrong about this culture of extreme violence driven by offended honor and petty grievance over prizes -- a culture Priam and Achilles momentarily escape, in Book 24, in their moment of shared loss. What they are fighting over isn't worth it, they realize, but they're unable to escape the cycle of violence.
Agree with the person who recommends "Poem of Force" (which, in a word, sees a kind of Christian message in the Iliad) as well as Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, which is a savage satire on the Iliad's heroic culture in which Thersites plays a prominent role.
The gods are the ultimate framework in the Illiad. Their criteria, seemingly arbitrary to us are skill, courage and beauty. In the human world it is simply formed hierarchy. Opposing those in power leads to endless war. Better unjust stability than constant instability. Democracy seem to be the best we can do so long as the results are accepted. Then we get an almost laughable parade of leaders. Fascism and Communism are the vices of failed Democracies.
Yes I agree, I think the basically had an extremely different concept of virtue/morality, not something we'd ever recognise as such.
Fascinating analysis, but I suspect it's wrong, and before I had to give it any credence, I would need to see comparisons with other civilizationally impactful literature from the same lens of "propaganda justifying aristocratic rule."
My guess is you would find that such literature generally praises rulers as exemplars of virtue, though clumsily because virtue wasn't well understood.
If so, what stands out about The Iliad would be that it is so lucid about the indefensible vices of the ruling class. That helped to pave the way for democracy. And yet the Greek heroes are very brave, plunging into the fight again and again with gusto. That, too, set a pattern that undergirded Greek greatness.
The Greeks had fine role models of courage, even if they were morally inept to an incredible degree, taken holistically.
Something I think you're missing here is that the Epic Cycle, of which the Iliad is a key part, is fundamentally a collapse story. The Cycle is set in the Mycenaean world, which had collapsed by the time these legends took place. In addition, the Greeks were well aware that this world had collapsed: see the legends of the Dorian invasion, such as the Athenian king Codrus. So a large part of the story is how this society could collapse, and a large reason is that the Greeks make the gods angry. This is why Odysseus spends ten years making it home, so many heroes die at Troy, and Agamemnon is eventually killed. Because it's a collapse story, it can't logically treat most of the rulers as infallible, even though it's sympathetic to almost all of them.
P.S. Odysseus tries to kill Diomedes in some sources and does kill Palamedes. So it wasn't really unheard of for leaders to kill people on the same side.
The anti-democratic pro-aristocratic aspect of the Illiad is so right there on the surface that I don't think many people have felt the need to write it up as an explicit theory. However, I have frequently seen Theristes used as an example of how archaic Greece was anti-democratic as compared to the democracy of Classical Greece.
On the question of whether Homeric values influenced the Greeks more widely: for sure they did. Status strivers going to strive. The Iliad and Odyssey were basic education for centuries. Athens, I would argue, adopted a democratized version of Homeric values, keeping the emphasis on strength, competition, glory, and acquisition through violence. These values seem to have only been fundamentally questioned from the time of Plato - the Peloponnesian War had certainly showcased major downsides of these values - and the shift to Stoicism and later Christianity, which advocated very different values indeed.
Stoicism was certainly treated by the Romans as compatible with striving for glory (at least in the late Republic); IIRC some historians think this is part of why Stoicism became generally popular in late republican Rome, unlike eg. Epicureanism. Certainly violence *against one's fellow citizens/aristocrats* toward that end was seen as less acceptable than in the Iliad, but that's more a matter of greater political stability; you could probably say the same about classical Sparta.
I'd say that insofar as Stoicism promoted *doing one's duty and accepting the overall order of the world* that was eminently compatible with the Roman Empire and may account for its popularity. Stoicism is not pacifist or anti-slavery per se, but it does not promote the personal glory, power grabs, and casual brutality one finds in the Iliad and Odyssey. The Homeric poems could be taken to promote adventurous rogues like Alcibiades, whereas Stoicism promotes an ethics of conciliation and restraint much more compatible for the soldiers/bureaucrats of a working world-empire.
Good reading IMO. The Iliad showcases an ethos of aristocratic competition rather than autocracy. The Greeks were competitive in everything I can think of: politics, sports, drama, philosophical argument, and, perhaps most basically, between city-states and explorers / settler armies as entrepreneurial political founders. No doubt there was also plenty of economic competition, although the Greeks under-theorized this (though Hesiod, a people's poet, does refer to benefits of competition among potters). Different city-states had different set ups with one, Athens, finding a formula for unprecedented concentration of world-historical achievement. Autocracy can mean order, but typically also stagnation. Minimally orderly competition between entities enables differentiated generation and selection of all the interesting things.
"Perhaps this optimization process can explain why Greek civilization flourished. The value system reflected in and propagandized by The Iliad seems conducive to social stability. At the same time, by defending elite prerogatives rather than preaching worship of an individual ruler, as the Persians and Egyptians did, the story contributed to the maintenance of a civilization that was more democratic than anything that had come before, allowing it to benefit from relatively open debate and more opportunities for a wider range of talented men to contribute to society."
There was a riot of diversity in governance styles among Greek city-states. Some were proto democracies (like Athens), some were ruled by a king, some had oligarchies, and some were extremely bizarre with pretty much no parallel in another known society (Sparta). A lot of precocious places had very fragmented, experimental backdrops like this. Italian city-states were much like this during the Renaissance, Western Europe itself was very fragmented and fractious after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
If you are on an ancient Greece kick you should read Thucydides. It's actually remarkable how modern he seems - he is writing as a contemporary about the Peloponnesian War and is very clearly a very different breed of cat from the guys in the Iliad and Homer.
>The Iliad isn’t similar to standard authoritarian propaganda today, in which leaders are treated as unusually wise and virtuous. Such material exists to legitimize the rule of particular individuals. The Iliad has a different purpose: to justify the rule of elites as representing the natural order of the world, which in effect means that defending the virtue of past leaders is unnecessary, if not downright counterproductive.
The role of religion is also interesting here, e.g. the concept of "divine right of kings" (Europe) or the "mandate of heaven" (China). Egyptian pharaohs would simply declare themselves gods.
One modern phenomenon which I think is underrated: Even though not all countries are democracies, the existence of *some* democracies still requires authoritarians to work harder to legitimize their rule so that the populace will regard the authoritarian government as a comparatively good option. See for example https://www.chinatalk.media/p/why-deepseek-appeasing-karens-is
In pre-industrial societies people had dramatically lower expectations of their government. See this book: https://www.amazon.com/Pre-Industrial-Societies-Anatomy-Pre-Modern-World/dp/1780747411 The attitude was "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must". In those days "government" kinda just meant paying taxes and not getting much of anything in return. As a citizen, your main interaction with government was trying to avoid paying taxes. You didn't strongly identify with your "country" (back in those days the word "kingdom" or "empire" was more likely to be used, which reflected a real difference in political structure). You might not even speak the same language as the ruler: Some sources claim that at the time of the French Revolution, less than 20% the population spoke the standard French language as their native tongue.
Nowadays there has been a revolution of rising expectations. Even in the US, which has one of the highest median incomes in the world adjusted for cost of living, a military-defense position which is well beyond impregnable, and legions of foreigners desperately trying to get in, voters are still perpetually convinced that something is deeply wrong, and keep electing leaders like Obama and Trump who promise hope and change. Please excuse me while I pulverize my forehead.
People who think they're getting something from taxes today are just sillier than people back in the bronze age.
You get roads, police, fire departments, public education, criminal justice, public transit, clean water, libraries, parks, social safety nets, etc.
You can’t list things made possible by money taken from me by force as me getting something.
> The role of religion is also interesting here
As also in the Iliad: it is often repeated that kings' power is granted by Zeus. However, at the time depicted in the Iliad it apparently wasn't thought that the gods cared whether kings ruled well or justly: this is stated only once in the Iliad, in a simile comparing something to the anger of Zeus at a king who judges corruptly, & the similes in Homer are generally thought to be late additions to the poems.