Outraged by all the carnage caused by Achilles as that hero relentlessly keeps slaughtering droves of Trojans and clogs the river with their bloody corpses, Scamander as the divine embodiment of the river rises up with all his watery might and proceeds to fight Achilles one-on-one. What follows is an epitome from HQ 145–146. We know that ancient Greek narratives about hostile encounters between heroes and river gods can traditionally picture the river as taking the shape of a ferocious beast: a prime example is Archilochus F 286-287 (ed. West), where the hero Hēraklēs fights with the river god Akhelōios, who has taken on the shape of a raging bull. We may contrast the treatment of the fight between the hero Achilles and the river god Scamander here in Iliad 21, where the river Scamander does not take the shape of a bull and is not even theriomorphic: rather, the narrative opts for a variant tradition highlighting the elemental aspect of the river, as water personified, struggling with a hero whose ally, as we are about to see, will be the god Hephaistos in his role as fire personified. It has been argued, partly on the authority of the scholia for I.21.237, that the Archilochean representation is pre-Homeric. But it is enough for now to say that the Archilochean representation stems from a tradition that is independent of Homer. And the Homeric narrative goes out of its way to make an indirect reference to the other tradition. The river god Scamander, in the heat of battle with the hero Achilles, is described at I.21.237 as ‘bellowing like a bull’ (μεμυκὼς ἠύτε ταῦρος). The simile amounts to a conscious acknowledgment of a variant tradition. Finally the river god, after a lengthy struggle, is starting to overwhelm Achilles, and now this main hero of the Iliad finds himself in danger of getting swept away, cut off from all epic memory, in the flooding streams of the enraged Scamander.