Quote:
Originally Posted by Hamlet53
As an observation on the comment by 6charlong about repeated use of certain phrases it also seems to depend on the translation one has in hand. In the Lattimore translation that I finally settled on goddesses, or at least noble women, are regularly referred to as “of the white arms.” Juno is often described in this way as is Aphrodite and Hektor's wife. Yet when I searched for the phrase “white arms” in the ebook version of the Butler translation it was not to be found.
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Ah ha! Excellent! I was wondering if anyone would notice that. Yes, those adjectives or adjectival phrases are a very characteristic feature of Homer, and are called "epithets". Lattimore preserves them all from the Greek; many of the other translations do not. Thus, as you say, women are often "white-armed", Achilles is "swift-footed", Hector is "Hector of the shining helm", Agamemnon is "lord of men", wide-ruling", "powerful", or "shepherd of the people". All Greek heroes, seemingly at random, can be "godlike", "bronze-armoured", or "strong-greaved", while Trojan heroes are "breakers of horses"; the sea can be "wine-dark", or "loud thundering"; ships can be "black" or "hollow" or "swift". Zeus, in particular, has a huge array of epithets: "mighty", "son of Kronos", "cloud-gathering", "loud thundering", "father of gods and men", and many more, while his wife (and sister) Hera, is, perhaps less flatteringly, "cow-eyed".
So, why are they there? We need to understand a little bit about the structure of Greek poetry. Epic poetry is written in what's called "dactylic hexameter". That means that each line is divided into six parts, called "feet", and each foot is a "dactyl". Greek poetry doesn't rhyme, but it has a fixed pattern of long and short syllables. A dactyl can have one of two patterns of syllables: either "long long", or "long short short".
That means that the poet can't put words just anywhere; he needs to choose words that fit into the pattern of long and short syllables that the metre requires. Remember that the Iliad was originally an "oral" poem - each performance of it was unique, with the poet pretty much making up his own unique version as he performed it. Composing dactylic hexameter verse "on the fly" is a pretty spectacular feat, and the epithets are there to help the poet do it.
The way we think it worked is this:
The performer would have a huge array of epithets memorised; some generic, others unique to a particular thing or person. He would say someone's name, and know that he then needed to fill in a certain number of syllables to reach the end of the line, or the place where he wanted to start a new phrase. He would choose an epithet with the syllable pattern that he needed, and slot it in to the verse at that point. This probably took years of training, and the trained rhapsode could do it completely automatically, without having to break his rhythm to think about what fitted the verse.
A secondary reason for the epithets was probably as a way for the audience to recognise their favourite characters in the story. Thus, if you heard the phrase "swift-footed", you'd think "ah - that's Achilles that's being talked about!".
Epithets are a unique feature of oral poetry. When writing was invented, and poets could spend time finding words to fit the metre, rather than having to make it up on the fly, they pretty much disappeared. Thus, you don't find epithets in Virgil's Aeneid, which was composed in writing.
Fun stuff!