“So the decree of the Gods willed it, and doomed man to perish, that it might be a matter for song even to distant generations”?

In other words, we suffer and perish so that poets may not lack material, and this is the dispensation of those very Gods of Homer who seem much concerned about the joyousness of generations to come, but very little about us men of the present. To think that such ideas should ever have entered the head of a Greek!