The structural principle here called ‘reverse order’ is regularly referred to in ancient and modern scholarship on Homer, but there is no generally accepted term to designate it. ‘Reverse order’ describes the Homeric narrator's tendency to return first to the last of a series of two or more elements previously mentioned. Therefore, the structure of the principle can be represented as: A–B—B’–A’. To give an example:

The horses, which are mentioned last, are taken up first, which is especially striking as one might expect precedence to be given to the human fighters. This Homeric structural principle was well known to Aristarchus, who referred to it with the phrase πρὸς τὸ δεύτερον πρότερον ἀπαντᾶν, for example in the scholion on the quoted passage.

The extant corpus of scholia provides a remarkably high number of notes which comment on the principle. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that the scholia contain traces of a scholarly debate as to whether the principle is always adhered to or not.