It is kept and stressed in return of Briseis to Achilles. The story pattern of the god who dies, wanders for a period of time in the other world, and then returns, requires the element of length of time because this element has seasonal significance. The reason for this is that the death of the substitute for Achilles, Patroclus, is stressed in the Iliad, whereas it is only vestigial in the Odyssey Anticleia’s role in the narrative is unimportant, yet her counterparts in the Yugoslav tradition are kept even to this day (see Appendix III). In the Iliad the length of the war is not conceived of as coincident with the absence of Achilles from battle. In the former the length of time causes no difficulty (even though it is doubled by the addition of another form of the story, a form involving wanderings), because the lapse of time coincides with the absence from home. The story of Odysseus is one form of these tales that of Achilles is another. Once thus sanctified, the war became the setting for tales of absence and return, the mythic death and resurrection, associated with fertility myth and ritual. I believe that it was the element of the length of the Trojan War, itself apparently an historical fact, which drew unto its story the bride-stealing theme.
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