Tasso’s Homeric Counterfactuals

The Homeric counterfactual—“and now x would have happened, had not y intervened”—is instantly recognizable as one of the most distinctive narrative techniques of the Iliad and Odyssey. Reading Tasso’s counterfactuals against those of the Iliad reveals that Tasso adapts this technique to argue for a greatly reduced divine presence in human affairs; even where the outlines of those affairs are divinely willed, human activity plays a decisive role in shaping history. In the space they make for human agency within a triumphant divine providence, they play a role in Tasso’s Counter-Reformation argument for the necessity of free will.