Evocations of the succession myth through allusions to Thetis’s role in it ground the Iliadic theme of mortality in a complex set of divine-human relations. The Iliad presupposes an established hierarchy on Olympos, but behind the static resolution that hierarchy represents lies a history of contention and struggle, as the gods themselves obliquely but forcefully remind each other. Zeus’s authority is firmly in place. Claiming a preeminence that cannot be subverted, Zeus asserts that not all the other gods combined can dislodge him from his position of superiority. References to their past efforts to do so—or suggestions of possible attempts in the future—are reminiscent of such combats as are described in the Hesiodic version of divine competition for supremacy. Specific elements recognizable from the Hesiodic account are present in the Iliad, as in the passing mention of the monstrous Typhoeus at 2.782. But competition among the gods for power—and indeed reconciliation among them—is now, as it were, managed symbolically, through the partisan efforts of the gods on behalf of the mortal adversaries they favor. The gods’ very participation in the war on behalf of competing human interests becomes an allusion to their own history: when they take sides against each other in the war, that is, in aid of Greeks or Trojans, their actions rehearse the older, larger conflict that digressions about divine strife have recalled.

As our understanding of the distinctive properties of oral traditional poetry has grown over the past several decades, however, we have come increasingly to see that—as the present study aims to demonstrate—fundamental to the poetics of compositions like the Iliad and Odyssey is a process of selection, combination, and adaptation that draws out the full resonance and evocative power of the mythological material the poems incorporate. To an audience familiar with the mythological corpus available to the poet, the digressions create a topography the recesses of which reveal a rich and dense foundation beneath the evenly illuminated surface Auerbach describes. The more we are able to perceive the range and coherence of the references themselves, the more we can see how they serve to provide a context and a perspective in which to account for—to make sense of—character, action, and theme.

For all that he may underestimate the background they constitute and the shadows cast by the very obliqueness of their allusive representation, {90|91} Auerbach himself clearly perceives that the continuous integration of mythological passages supplementing (although they appear to delay) the poem’s narrative progress must be appreciated as the reflection, on the level of style, of a distinctive way of seeing and comprehending epic personages and events in their totality. This mode, which Auerbach takes to be characteristically Homeric, we may recognize, in all its cognitive dimensions, as intrinsic to traditional literature of the archaic period, including the poetry of Hesiod, the Homeric hymns, and Pindar.

Yet the Homeric poems, as this study began by observing, are interpreters of their mythological resources at every step; and “destruction” as understood by the traditions represented by Hesiod, the Cycle, and {94|95} Mesopotamian literature has been reinterpreted by the Iliad and translated into its own terms. The Iliad evokes these traditions, through passages that retrieve the theme of destruction, to place them ultimately in a perspective that, much as it rejects immortality, rejects utter annihilation as well.