Zielinski's Law Reconsidered

"Zielinski's Law," which claims that the Homeric narrator does not represent simultaneous actions, continues to be debated. The narrator clearly depicts as sequential some actions that would "realistically" be simultaneous. Sometimes, this narrative convention has probably generated story-material to motivate the temporal sequence. In other passages, however, the audience's understanding of the action depends on the order in which events are presented, while the "real" temporal sequence is blurred. There is no single correct approach to Homer's handling of time.