THE IMMORTAL NATURE OF THE GODS
The most important limitation on the power of the gods in Homer’s poems is that presented by their own nature. The defining characteristic of the gods, according to Homer’s theology, is their deathlessness.[123] This quality, this immunity from death and all the sorrows and experiences connected with death, shapes their character, their understanding, and their feelings.
And this they cannot change. They cannot empty themselves of their immortal nature.[124] They are necessarily and essentially immortal and they are therefore necessarily and essentially different from humans by virtue of their immortal nature. The gods can alter their seeming - they can make themselves appear as old or young,[125] male or female,[126] human or animal[127] - but they cannot alter their immortal being.Homer’s gods have been famously described as displaying a “sublime frivolity.”[128] The character of the gods in Homer’s poems is strikingly comical. In the Odyssey the gods are at times amusing and playful - as when Athena, in human guise, prays to her uncle and sometime adversary
Poseidon, and then grants her own prayer (3.51-62). But it is above all in the Iliad where Homer presents the gods as remarkably comical figures, perhaps most memorably when Zeus is overcome with erotic passion for his wife Hera and woos her by maladroitly mentioning his love affairs with seven goddesses and mortal women, but most characteristically in their conflicts, which provoke smiles and laughter even from the gods themselves.[129] When Hephaestus recounts the story of his father Zeus hurling him down from Mount Olympus so that he fell “all day” and came crashing down upon the island of Lemnos, his mother Hera “smiled” and then all the gods erupt in “unquenchable laughter” (1.584-600). When Athena urges - and enables - Diomedes to stab her sister Aphrodite, and a shrieking Aphrodite rushes to Mount Olympus to be healed by her mother Dione, her father Zeus “smiled” at the quarreling sisters (5.122-132, 5.311-430). When Hera plots to help the Achaians by beguiling Zeus, arousing his erotic passion, and inducing him to sleep, and then, when her plot is exposed, she casts blame on Poseidon, Zeus, the very victim of her plotting, “smiled” (15.4-48; see 14.153-360).
Similarly, when Athena knocks down Ares with a huge stone, she “laughed” (21.402-409); when Athena knocks Aphrodite down, Hera “smiled” (21.415-434); and when the “smiling” Hera strikes Artemis, Zeus “laughed” (21.489-508). The gods’ conflicts provoke smiles and laughter for the simple reason that those conflicts are without serious consequence for the immortals. When Diomedes stabs Aphrodite, her divine mother immediately heals the goddess so that “her arm was made whole and her heavy pains were completely soothed” (5.416-417); when, before stabbing her, Diomedes stabs nine Trojan warriors in quick succession, including two sons of Priam, he kills them all (5.144-296). As Homer says of his slaying of the two sons of Phainops, Xanthos and Thoon: “There he despoiled them, and took away the spirit dear to them from them both, and left to their father lamentation and miserable sorrows, since he was not to welcome the two of them returning home from battle alive” (5.155-158). But the immortal gods cannot lose their lives and hence cannot cause themselves or their parents such sorrows. The conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon in Book I is tragic because it causes “countless woes to the Achaians” and many deaths of beloved friends and comrades; the conflict between Zeus and Hera in Book I is comic because it ends in laughter and good cheer (1.1-7, 1.408-412,129
Homer, Plato, and the Homeric Education on the Gods 47 536-611).[130] Everything is at stake for the human beings in their conflicts - their loved ones, their happiness, their very existence. But for the eternal gods, who bicker and make up, and will do so for the rest of time, nothing of significant or lasting consequence is at stake.[131]