Classical tradition, as recorded
in Herodotus,  describes the
"Return of the Heracleidae"
Ἐπιστροφὴ τῶν Ἡρακλειδῶν,
the descendants of Heracles,
who were exiled at his death
& returned in later generations
to reclaim the dominion that
Heracles had held in the Peloponnesus;
The Greece to which the tradition
refers is the mythic one,         now
considered to be    Mycenaean Greece;
The details differ from one ancient
author to another, the commonality
being that a traditional ruling clan
traced its legitimacy to the hero Heracles;
One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis,
understood as a form of realism in literature,
is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis:  The Representation
of Reality in Western Literature, which opens
w/ a famous comparison between the way
the world is represented in Homer's Odyssey
& the way it appears in the Bible;
                                  From these two seminal
Western texts, Auerbach builds the foundation
        for a unified theory of representation that
spans the entire history of Western literature,
including the Modernist novels being written
at the time Auerbach began his study.
                                       In art history,
"mimesis", "realism" & "naturalism" are used,
often interchangeably,    as terms for accurate,
even "illusionistic",     representations of the world