HKB
His opinion on fate he shows clearly in his poems (I. vi. 488):--
Dearest, wring not thus my heart, For till my day of destiny is come No man may take my life, and when it comes Nor brave, nor coward can escape that day.
But among the other things in which he confirms the power of fate, he thinks as the most-approved philosophers have thought after him,--Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus,--that not all things happen by fate, but some things are in the power of men, the choice of whom is free. The same man in a way acts as he desires and falls into what he does not desire. And this point of view he has clearly expounded in many places, as in the beginning of each of his poems: in the "Iliad" saying the wrath of Achilles was the cause of the destruction of the Greeks and that the will of Zeus was fulfilled; in the "Odyssey" that the comrades of Odysseus went to their destruction by their own folly. For they had offended by touching the sacred oxen of the Sun, although they could have abstained from doing so. Yet it was foreordained (O. xi. 110):--
But if thou hurtest them, I signify ruin for thy ships, and for thy men, and even though thou shalt thyself escape. If thou doest them no hurt and art careful to return, so may ye yet reach Ithaca, albeit in evil case.
So not to violate them depended on themselves, but that those who had done the evil should perish follows from fate.
It is possible to avoid what happens accidentally by foresight as he shows in the following (O. v. 436):--
Then of a truth would luckless Odysseus have perished beyond what was ordained had not gray-eyed Athene given him some counsel. He rushed in and with both his hands clutched the rock whereto he clung till the great wave went by.
Then on the other hand running a great danger as he was, he had perished by fortune; yet by prudence he was saved.
Just as about divine things there are many divine reasonings in the philosophers taking their origin from Homer, so also with human affairs it is the same. First we will take up the subject of the soul. The most noble of the doctrines of Pythagoras and Plato is that the soul is immortal. To it in his argument Plato affixed wings. Who first determined this? Homer says this among other things (I. xvi. 856):--
But the soul flying on its members came to Hades,--i.e. into a formless and invisible place, whether you think it in the air or under the earth. But in the "Iliad" he makes the soul of Patroclus stand by the side of Achilles (I. xxiii. 65):--
The soul of wretched Patroclus came.
He makes a small speech for him in which he says this (I. xxiii. 72):--
The spirits and spectres of departed men Drove me from them, nor allow to Cross the abhorred river.
In the "Odyssey" through the whole account of the descent to Hades what else does he show but that souls survive after death, and when they drink blood can speak. For he knows that blood is the food and drink of the spirit, but spirit is the same thing as soul or the vehicle of the soul.
There came up the soul of the Theban Tiresias having a golden sceptre.
Purposely he changes the word for soul to the masculine, to show that it was Tiresias. And afterward (O. xi. 601):--
And after him I described the mighty Heracles, his phantom I say; but as for himself he hath joy at the banquet among the deathless gods.
For here again he showed that the semblance thrown off from the body appeared, but no longer connected with its matter. The purest part of the soul had gone away; this was Heracles himself.