[Milton-L] Zeus's self-exculpatory voice

[John Leonard]

John Rumrich suggests that Homer's Zeus, like Milton's God, employs "the 
free will defence," to which James Fleming replies:
.


> But in Greek religion -- as Nietzsche points outs somewhere -- is it not
> precisely the case that the gods made you do it (whatever it was)? "He 
> must
> have been deceived by a god," say the Greeks, at the downfall of a great
> man.

"Greek religion" may well express this view, some of the time, as did 
"seventeenth-century Protestantism" (some Protestants, sometimes).  But John 
Rumrich was not speaking off the top of his head.  He was recalling Milton's 
words on Odyssey 1.32, where Zeus does blame mortals for blaming the gods. 
Milton quotes these lines alongside Prov. 19.4 at the end of Christian 
Doctrine I.4 to make the point that God blinds those who blind themselves, 
so sinners have only themselves to blame.  Milton refers to the same Homeric 
passage in DDD:

"That mans own freewill self corrupted is the adquat and sufficicent cause 
of his disobedience besides Fate; as Homer also wanted not to expresse both 
in his Iliad and Odyssei" (YP. 2.294).

There's my one post for the day.

John Leonard