When Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004) retold Homer’s Iliad, he made a deliberate choice: remove the gods. No Zeus weighing fates, no Athena whispering in ears, no Apollo turning the tide of battle. What remained was a purely human drama—armies, kings, and rivalries.
But my daughter saw through it immediately. Within five minutes, she noticed what was missing: the gods themselves. The story felt hollow without them, as if the stage were set but half the actors never arrived.
The truth is, Homer’s story is not only about warriors and cities; it is about the forces behind them.
The gods are not mere decoration. They are symbols of the impulses that rule human life—love, pride, jealousy, vengeance, chance. To the Greeks, war without gods would have made no sense. It would be like telling the story of a storm without the wind.
And here is the deeper lesson: without myth, we are left with only the secular version of events. A bare-bones chronicle of who fought, who killed, who conquered. Useful, perhaps, but incomplete. Myths remind us that history is not just what happened—it is also what it meant. Myths let us see the invisible: the longings, the fears, the irrational drives that move people as surely as armies move across the plains.
That is why we need more than secular stories. A world explained only by economics, politics, and psychology leaves us starving for meaning. Myth nourishes the part of us that recognizes forces larger than ourselves, that refuses to reduce love to chemistry or war to strategy.
The gods of Homer may no longer walk among us, but the forces they personified still do. And perhaps my daughter’s instinct is right: when the gods disappear from the story, we notice. Something essential has been lost.