All this is going completely the wrong direction. I didn’t intend to cause this confusion with my posting and now that it comes to apologies I think it is better to let this thread die. I was hoping that my way of reasoning against Homer’s Iliad would have indicated that my accusations against him should not be taken literally (though I was honestly curious, if there are, however queer or motivated by pure envy, some things with the Iliad that would even bother a user of this forum).
Apparently I failed in doing so.
That is probably the best reason there is, Bert! And a writer I admire very much, Nabokov, said pretty much the same thing without being nearly so concise as you. 
I’m happy to do that, but I’d like to make two more comments in good faith.
I read your original post with a tone of ridicule, and I didn’t understand what help you were asking for; but it is now clear that this was not your intention, and perhaps it is simply a matter of miscommunication. But I am sincerely sorry if I’ve discouraged you from posting here and expressing your opinions, because there are many people here nicer and more helpful than myself.
And I’d like to comment on the instance of Glaucus and Diomedes, to clarify my position for you and everybody else. I have to admit that I don’t recall all the details of the instance, but it doesn’t really matter for my point. I thought you were objecting to the notion of justice in Homer’s gods, which I would consider an objection to the epic tradition (while still admitting the possibility that some of that attitude might be original with Homer). But if instead you are saying that this is an instance where Homer puts something in motion, and then seems to forget and fail to resolve it, then I think that is a valid objection to the individual poet. Although, I would still say that all of those instances combined don’t prove for the whole poem that Homer can’t develop a plot; but how distracting they are is a matter of stylistic opinion, I suppose.
But don’t stop questioning established positions: it is an important practice.
Nick
What godly justice? While we should respect Hciebel’s wish and let this thread drop to the end of the page or something I’d like to point out that I don’t think that the Greek Gods are depicted as especially just. They are too involved and moody and so on and so forth to be considered just (so maybe we should discuss it, if you want to that is, in another thread?)
Hi Irene I’m not sure that we need to start another post; we would probably need an endless discussion to debate the nature of “justice”, and I’m not sure that I have anything valuable to contribute to that huge topic. But I think in this case I just simply failed to express myself clearly.
I think it was this sentence that was confusing, and understandably so:
By this I didn’t mean to say that the gods are just, or even that they were considered just by Homer. Let me try to rephrase it. What I meant was that a criticism of the behavior of the gods in Homer’s poems should probably be directed in large part to the tradition which he inherited, and not necessarily at him, as if he had created them singlehandedly. And by the part in parentheses I only meant that if we could somehow look at a larger sample of Greek heroic poetry, that we might be able to determine how much of Homer’s attitude toward the gods was of his own creation, and how much of it was part of the tradition in which he was working.
Does that make sense?
~N
Ah! I should have read your post more carefully it seems.
No, it wasn’t your fault Irene, that sentence was not only unclear, but it really did give the impression that you got from it. Thanks for pointing it out so that I could explain it better. And now, finally, we fade fade into the dying of the light…