Most scholars think that Homer's post-Mycenaean audience did believe in the existence of the gods described in the Iliad, although they did not perhaps stand in very profound awe of them and were not terribly superstitious; on the one hand, the gods (especially Zeus) were believed to hold the power of determining an impersonal "fate" for humans, but, one the other, even Zeus himself was subject to, and struggled with, fate; S