Following up on the combat between Hephaistos and Scamander, other gods now also join in the fight, and, the next thing you know, the cosmic conflict between the elemental forces of fire and water is transformed into a personalized brawl between divine partisans of Trojans and Achaeans. The personalization intensifies to the point of becoming ludicrous, and, once such a point is reached, the whole scene becomes an exquisite exercise in divine burlesque. As Walter Burkert (1960:132) has observed, however, such a comic form is not innovative but archaizing, and there are numerous parallels to be found in the myths and rituals of ancient Near Eastern civilizations; this observation applies also to the divine burlesque that characterizes other narrative sequences Homeric poetry, most notably in Odyssey 8 and in Iliad 1 as well as here in Iliad 21—and in the Homeric Hymns.