Considerations on Fate in the Iliad and the Remarkable Interventions of the Divine

By borrowing the metaphor of the ‘tapestry of existence’ to discuss the matter of fate in Homer’s Iliad, we selected four threads that are interwoven in the warp of each hero’s destiny—that of necessity/fatality, the relations between Zeus and the Moîra, the plots and tricks of the gods, and fate and human actions—with the aim of inviting the reader to appreciate the texture of the work with the passages that most caught our attention, without the intention of exhausting the subject. To do so, we draw upon the origin of the word Moîra in anthropology, as well as some of Heidegger’s ideas and those of other commentators to enrich the discussion.