The Cyclops' Cave. A unique scene, on an Athenian vase of about 480 B.C. showing the giant Cyclops
(Polyphemus) blinded by Odysseus, blocking the exit from his cave while his flock pass by him with
Odysseus and his companions clinging on beneath their bellies-the story of Odyssey 9. About 480 B.C. by
an artist who also left us a good study of Odysseus with the Sirens.
Parry worked from the ubiquitous verbal repetitions. The fixed epithets are the most obvious, with both
proper names and ordinary nouns-'much-enduring Odysseus', 'wine-dark sea' -but there are also whole
lines and even blocks of lines which come again and again. Virgil's 'pius Aeneas', like Tennyson's 'And
answer made the bold Sir Bedivere', imitates this pervasive characteristic. Parry made the crucial
connection between this 'formulaic' diction and the possibility, long speculated on, that Homer was an oral
bard rather than a literate writer. He started from proper names and their epithets, and demonstrated how
these constitute a remarkable system within the technically demanding epic metre, the dactylic hexameter.
(Which like all Greek metres is based on certain combinations of long and short syllables.) By