The Homeric and Hesiodic Mythic Worldview

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, composed and codified around the 8th century BCE out of an oral tradition reaching back to the Mycenaean Bronze Age, supply the earliest systematic cosmological imagery in Greek literature. The Homeric cosmos is a flat disk of earth, Gaia, encircled by the river Okeanos, with the sky, Ouranos, resting above it as a solid dome, and a murky abyss, Tartarus, lying beneath Hades — a vertical structure of sky, earth, and underworld that would long outlast the poems themselves. Within this world, thunder, lightning, storms, and plague are not impersonal events but the direct, willed acts of anthropomorphic gods: Zeus hurls the thunderbolt, Poseidon shakes the earth, and Apollo sends the plague that opens Book 1 of the Iliad. Even Zeus, the supreme Olympian, is not omnipotent; he is bound by oaths, by fate (moira) and the Fates (Moirai), and by the council of the gods, so that no single rational ordering principle governs Homer's cosmos the way arche or logos would govern the Milesians'. Homeric explanation is narrative and personal — things happen "because a god willed it" — and the epics possess no vocabulary of physis, "nature," as an object of inquiry distinct from divine agency or personal will.