Seeing the unseen in the Iliad 1

This chapter begins from the commonplace observation that Homer is cinematic, in the sense that he makes it easy for the audience to visualize the action. It points out that Homer's visualization project is more ambitious than that of the Athenian tragic poets in that he includes the gods in his action. In tragedy gods as a rule appear either in the prolog, which is to say before the dramatic illusion of the plot has fully taken hold, or at the end when they conclude the plot in an epiphany from the machine. The typology of passages in which a god rescues a favored mortal from imminent threat has been elucidated by Karl Reinhardt and Bernard C. Fenik. The chapter draws attention to points relevant to understanding certain problems raised by a final passage that is not strictly a member of Reinhardt’s and Fenik’s group, but is clearly and interestingly related to it

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