The Divine Audience and the Religion of the<i>Iliad</i>

Abstract

One of the most striking features of the Iliad is that the gods are constantly present as an audience. Not only are they shown intervening and responding to human action, but repeatedly they are explicitly said to be watching. It will here be argued that this is much more than a ‘divine apparatus’, that it stands in a peculiar and identifiable relation to real religion, and that it is of the greatest importance both for the Iliad and for later Greek poetry.