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All of us who have a passion for Classics and have read the Homeric
poems are well aware that gods and heroes, and even other things
are accompanied by epithets that belong so much to them that they
have practically become part of the name. From hearing and reading
the poems these epithets imperceptibly work themselves into our
consciousness. We know, for instance, without needing to be reminded,
that the sea is wine-dark and Achilles swift-footed, that the cloud
gatherer is Zeus and that Apollo, the lord of mice, is famed for
his bow, that wily Odysseus is the man of many ways, and that Athena
watches over him with the eyes of an owl.
We have become used to these epithet-noun pairs just as the Greeks
themselves had been accustomed to them through the force of tradition.
if you want to see just how much this is true, try pronouncing the
following recombinations of some of the noun-epithet pairs: many
minded Achilles, swift-footed Odysseus, the ox-eyed lady........
Athena?
If this does not feel entirely wrong, if it was not difficult
for you to pronounce these words together without cringing, without
feeling that something would be broken and ruined, in short, if
doing so did not damage your aesthetic sensibilities, then you are
probably not yet acquainted with homer.
Among scholars there is an ongoing debate as to how much of the
Homeric
poems is made up of these and other formulaic word groups. Milman
parry
argues that the formulaic density of the Homeric poems is 100%.
Others
Estimate the amount of formulaic content in the Homeric poems to
be
closer to 70%, allowing 30% to the free expression and inventiveness
of
the bard. Wherever the actual numbers may lie, everyone agrees that
the
formulaic content of the poems is high, and this is really no surprise
in poetry that was performed orally and handed down from one generation
to the next through an oral tradition.
To show more clearly how these formulaic noun-epithet pairs assisted
the bard in recalling verses from memory or in improvising new ones,
it is necessary first to understand the structure of the epic hexametre.
So we shall take a detour here to do so, and go through some exercises
designed to help us understand Homeric verse and its oral composition,
before returning to the epithets and looking at how the rhapsode
made use of them to stitch together his lines and spin his tale
of words. The basic pattern then of the dactylic hexametre is as
follows.
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