Are we puppets of the gods, or real puppeteers of our own lives ?

As you may know, determinism and free will are two opposed philosophical positions. When mentioning "free will", we think of the power that we human beings have to guide our own lives, with every act opening a path never described before. Every single moment in our lives is a consequence of the micro-decisions we've been doing through all our existence. We govern our acts on Earth, and become responsible of them.

On the contrary, determinism suggests that every move we make (and even those we don't make) are not a consequence of our desire, but determined by other agents. We may think we chose, but the choice itself was previously made somewhere else by someone or something different from ourselves. In this world, self-defined actions do not exist cause everything is ruled by natural laws and fate.

In the Homeric world, fate, divine intervention and independent human action seem to work together in a strange and confusing coexistence.

The Fates
They are the three deities who preside over the destiny of mankind. Every time a man is born, Clotho prepares the thread of life (spans it from her distaff onto her spindle), Lachesis assigns it a length, and Atropos cuts it. The thread is woven on the loom, which means a new human being will start to exists and that his life will span to the point where the thread was cut, which will become his death.

The Divine Intervention
Gods are said to govern the actions of men; they favour humans according to their desire and can apparently intervene in their destiny.

It is said that only Zeus, the King of the Olympian gods, can weigh the lives of men and that it is he who informs the three sisters of his decisions. In that case, the Fates are viewed only as the instrument of Zeus. Still others claim that not even Zeus is beyond the power of the Fates and that he is subject to their whim. That would make the Fates the most powerful of all the deities.

- Was the decision to invade Troy due to the abduction of Helen (Sparta's queen) from Menelaus' hands, or the consequence of "The Judgement of Paris" and Hera's rage ? (The Iliad)

Note: The Judgement of Paris was a beauty contest that had Hera, Athena and Aphrodite as contestants. Paris was named judge, and chose Aphrodite as the most beautiful of the three. Hera and Athena swore vengeance.

- Athena guided the arrow of Pandarus to wound Menelaus, sabotaging a truce that could potentially lead to the peaceful return of Helen from Troy (The Iliad)

- In his sea-journey Aeneas went shipwrecked and met Dido, queen of Carthage. After losing her husband Sychaeus, Dido had promised him ever-lasting love, and that she was never to fell for any man on earth. Cupid (Eros / son of Aphrodite) threw one of his arrows to Dido and she could do nothing against the god's shot of love: she became infatuated with Aeneas. When he had to set sails to Italy and continue with his trip - for he had a transcendent mission to accomplish - Dido couldn't stand the pain and committed suicide. (The Aeneid)

- Oedipus tried to escape his fate by all means, but the more he tried, the less he achieved it. Against his will, he killed his father Laius and mistakenly married his mother Jocasta, bringing disaster on his city and family. (Oedipus King)

As I mentioned in the opening paragraphs, free will, fate and determinism coexist in Greek and Roman Mythology. The idea of destiny, of what is fixed, is flexible to every author, to every story, or even to every character. Everything is guided for the entertaining and allegorical purposes of the author; there's no engineering need or even desire to follow a single philosophical movement.