Iliad, Homer - Mabel L. Lang (essay date 1983)

Mabel L. Lang (essay date 1983)

SOURCE: Lang, Mabel L. “Reverberation and Mythology in the Iliad.” In Approaches to Homer, edited by Carl A. Rubino and Cynthia W. Shelmerdine, pp. 140-64. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.

[In the following essay, Lang probes the interaction between the Iliad and external mythological stories of Greek gods and heroes, concluding that this relationship implies a process of “ongoing, non-static composition” in regard to both the epic and mythological exempla.]

The relationship between non-Trojan-War exempla and the Iliad episodes or situations which they illuminate has been defined in two opposite and apparently mutually exclusive ways. One view sees the exemplum as a model from which the Iliad episode was adapted; the other holds that the Iliad situation has priority, and that the exemplum was invented to fit it. In both these cases the...

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