On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 3.23)

These remarks should be sufficient, once and for all, concerning the origin of the “holy God.”—The fact that conceiving gods does not necessarily, in itself, have to lead to this degraded imagination, that’s something we could not excuse ourselves from recalling for a moment, the point that there are more uplifting ways to use the invention of the gods than for this human self-crucifixion and self-laceration, in which Europe in the last millennia has become an expert—fortunately that’s something we can still infer with every glance we cast at the Greek gods, these reflections of nobler men, more rulers of themselves, in whom the animal in man felt himself deified and did not tear himself apart, did not rage against himself! These Greeks for the longest time used their gods for the very purpose of keeping that “bad conscience” at a distance, in order to be permitted to continue enjoying their psychic freedom. Hence, their understanding was the opposite of how Christianity used its God. In this matter the Greeks went a very long way, these splendid and lion-hearted Greeks, with their child-like minds. And no lesser authority than that of Homer’s Zeus himself now and then lets them understand that they are making things too easy for themselves. “It’s strange,” he says at one point in relation to the case of Aegisthus, a very bad case—

It’s strange how these mortal creatures complain about the gods!
Evil comes only from us, they claim, but they themselves
Stupidly make themselves miserable, even contrary to fate.*

But at the same time we hear and see that even this Olympian spectator and judge is far from being irritated and from thinking them evil because of this: “How foolish they are,” he thinks in relation to the bad deeds of mortal men—and even the Greeks of the strongest and bravest times conceded that much about themselves—the “foolishness,” “stupidity,” a little “disturbance in the head” were the basis for many bad and fateful things—foolishness, not sin! Do you understand that? . . . But even this disturbance in the head was a problem, “Indeed, how is this even possible? Where could this have really come from in heads like the ones we have, we men of noble descent, happy, successful, from the best society, noble, and virtuous?”—for hundreds of years the aristocratic Greek posed this question to himself in relation to every horror or outrage incomprehensible to him which had defiled one of his peers. “Some god must have deluded him,” he finally said, shaking his head . . . This solution is typical of the Greeks . . . In this way, the gods then served to justify men to a certain extent, even in bad things. They served as the origins of evil—at that time the gods took upon themselves, not punishment, but, what is nobler, the guilt. . .

Zeus makes these remarks to the other Olympian gods at the start of Homer’s Odyssey. Aegisthus seduced Clytaemnestra, and the two of them murdered Agamemnon, her husband, as soon as he returned home from the Trojan War. The gods, according to Homer, had warned him against these actions.