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 relationship is viewed as it would be in a literary work which was composed once...