Originally Posted by uno

Essay 1:
in The Daily Life of Greek Gods Guilia Sissa and Marcel Detienne note that in the Iliad "we come across gods who are prey to rancor (menis) or fury (menos), Olympians who are angry (choomenoi), blessed beings who are indignant (ochthein) and irritated (nemissao). Nor can these emotions be explained away as incidental manifestations of character. On the contrary, those emotions constitute dynamic factors in the narrative. If you reconstruct the day to day life of the Olympians, you cannot avoid the evidence that Zeus's strategic designs, which are supposed to determine and provoke events, are in truth simply secondary effects, themselves the results of a more immediate and less considered impulse: the god's immense irritation at Agamemnon. His divine rage is itself the culmination of a whole chain of passionate reaction, for Agamemnon has provoked the resentful fury of Achilles, who appealed to the pity of Thetis, who in her turn managed to arouse the anger of Zeus (40-41). Use your reading of the Theogony and Works and Days to discuss how the rage of the gods in Hesiod and Book 1 of the Iliad can be used to explain the Greek view of what organizes the cosmos.