[2] Homeric epic, in its pan-Hellenic ambition, tends, for example, to exclude overt reference to distinctly local religious phenomena. As G. Nagy has shown in The Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore, 1979), elements in myth that refer to hero-cult are abridged or suppressed in the epic narrative. See D. Sinos, Achilles, Patroklos, and the Meaning of Philos (Innsbruck, 1980), esp. 13-36, 47-52, for further elucidation of the consequences of this restriction in the Iliad and for the manner in which Homeric poetry "offers us clear proof by way of dictional analysis that its epic tradition does indeed contain elemental vestiges of cult and references to the heroes of cult in a manner necessarily modified to fit the strict generic ordering of the language of epic" (15).