PUPPET MASTERS? GODS AND HUMAN EMOTIONS IN XENOPHON’S PHILOSOPHY

Abstract This article examines how divine interventions intersect with human emotional responses in Xenophon. While existing literature has explored Xenophon’s religious attitude, little work has been done on Xenophon’s portrayal of divine action and its contribution to a comprehensive Xenophontic theory of emotions. Xenophon’s works contain numerous instances of divine intervention in which the agent guiding the main action is the divinity, and its interventions even go beyond the influence on humans, extending to the realm of nature itself. Do these divine interventions imply a lack of human free will? My aim is to demonstrate that in scenarios involving divine intervention, human agency can be influenced in different ways: it can either be enhanced or undermined by divine action. To demonstrate this, the study focusses on four key emotions—gratitude ( charis ), fear ( phobos , deidô , sebô , phrikê ), hope ( elpis ) and confidence ( tharsos )—as they emerge in scenarios of divine intervention across Xenophon’s corpus.