The Idiod, a Greek Poem, Is a Romance of the Greeks

Greek philosophers took a considerably more critical approach to religion than anything we can find in mediaeval europe. Their understanding of the gods found full expression in the poems of homer and hesiod. For the greeks, these poems were something close to sacred texts. Homer shows us that hera needs to distract zeus by getting him to go sleep so that she can arrange for hector to be wounded without zeus's interference. The overall effect of this is that homer's gods are the explanations of last resort, or even of first resort.