Miralles’ analysis of the Hesiodic myth of races, emphasizing the different temporalities present in the story, is applied in this paper to the representation of the past underlying the Homeric narratives external to the Trojan story. Through the analysis of some study cases, such as Nestor or Peirithoos, four ways of inserting the stories in the main narrative are singled out. Notwithstanding the specificity of each narrative digression to its immediate context in the poem, an overall conception of time linking all of them is shown to be fundamentally coherent with Hesiod’s image of a continuum of time between the heroic past and the present of the audience. The main function of those narratives is to challenge the fundamental pattern of decay underlying that conception through the re-presentation of a paradigmatic past that can be emulated in the present.