Human energy and courage should, accordingly, be spent not in exceeding the proper limits of the human condition but in bearing it with style, pride, and dignity, gaining as much fame possible within the boundaries of individual moira. It has been demonstrated that the Greek view is derived from an Indo-European notion of justice-that each being has a fate ( moira) assigned to him and marked clearly by boundaries that should never be crossed. A decisively different idea, however, is fundamental to the Greek heroic view of life. The Mesopotamian mind never tires of expressing deep human regret at mortality through stories about ancient heroes who, despite their superhuman strength and wisdom, and their intimacy with gods, failed to escape from death. The loss of a beloved friend does not make Achilles seek desperately to escape from death instead he rushes into combat to revenge Patroclus, although he knows that he is condemning himself to an early death, and that the existence of a king in Hades will be incomparably less enviable than that of a slave on earth.

Gilgamesh persists in his quest of immortality even when Siduri shows him the vanity of such an ambition, but Odysseus shuns a goddess’s offer of everlasting life, preferring to bear his human condition to the end. If these are indeed borrowings, it is all the more remarkable that they are used in Homer to express a view of life and a heroic temper radically different from those of the Sumerian epic of Mesopotamia.

In the Iliad, Patroclus, who dies as a substitute for his king and dearest friend, Achilles, and then gives Achilles a description of the miserable condition of man after his death, bears striking similarities to the friend of Gilgamesh, Enkidu. Like the two Greek goddesses, Siduri tries to dissuade Gilgamesh from the pursuit of his journey by representing the pleasures of life, but the firm resolution of the hero obliges her finally to help him cross the waters of death. The Odyssey has many parallels with the Epic of Gilgamesh the encounters of Odysseus with Circe and Calypso on their mythical isles, for instance, closely resemble the visit by Gilgamesh to a divine woman named Siduri, who keeps an inn in a marvellous garden of the sun god near the shores of ocean. The Epic of Gilgamesh was then well-known in the Levant, as is indicated by discoveries of copies of it throughout this wide area. The Greeks, therefore, had ample opportunity to become familiar with Hittite myths. The Hittites had continuous diplomatic relations with the Achaeans of Greece, whose princes went to the royal court at Hattusa to perfect their skill with the chariot. In it, Anu, Kumarbi, and the storm god respectively, parallel Uranus, Cronos, and Zeus in the Theogony. Thus, it is no surprise that, for example, the Greek myth about the succession of the divine kingship told in the Theogony of Hesiod and elsewhere is paralleled in a Hittite version of a Hurrian myth. At Ugarit a large quarter of the city was occupied by Greek merchants, whose presence is also attested, among other places, at the gate of Mesopotamia, at Alalakh, in what is now Turkey. The Greek world in the late Bronze Age was related to the Middle East by so many close ties that it formed an integral part of the Levant. Especially in its originative stage, the Greek epic may have been strongly influenced by these Asian traditions.

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