The ancient Greeks had ways of explaining the ebbs and flows of fortune that are far more satisfying, even logical, than any widespread cosmology of the United States in 2018. The courses of mortals’ lives, to the Greeks, were tied up in the whims of the gods, who unlike our own more distant deities would often intervene directly in the affairs of humans.
In the Iliad, the tide of the Trojan War shifts in favor of the Trojans because Achilles is having an argument with Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek host; but far from being simply a matter of Achilles, the Greeks’ best fighter, withdrawing from the fray, the shift is courtesy of Zeus, who throws in his lot in with the Trojans because he happens to owe a favor to Thetis, Achilles’ sea-nymph mother.