This is, in respect to time, like having foreshortening 
without a fixed point of view or vanishing point. And that, 
indeed, was the Greek stage of visual abstraction. Somewhat in 
the same way, van Groningen argues, Herodotus having “freed 
himself from myth and mythical speculations,” made a gesture 
“to use the past as an explanation of the present, or at any 
rate, of a later phase in the development.” (p. 26) This 
visualizing of chronological sequences is unknown to oral 
societies, as it is now irrelevant in the electric age of 
information movement. The “narrative line” in a literature is 
immediately revealing in the same way as the painterly or 
sculptural line. It tells exactly how far the dissociation of the 
visual from the other senses has proceeded. Erich Auerbach (14)
confirms in literature all aspects of the Greek development as it 
has appeared thus far in the other arts. Thus Homer’s Achilles 
and Odysseus are presented in flat vertical planes by “fully