influence by one poet on the other is, of course, one possibility. For example, the phrases quoted above
from Hesiod, “Thebes of the seven portals” and “Helen of the lovely tresses,” both occur in Homer as
well, and one poet may have appropriated them from the other. Yet the similarity is so much more
extensive than the sharing of a few, or even a great many, specific expressions that it will be necessary to
understand the peculiar nature of poetic composition in Greece of the Geometric Period before we can
begin to understand the relationship between Hesiod and Homer.
Mention was made above of the artificial dialect that Hesiod’s poetry displays. The poems of Homer are
composed using essentially the same dialect. This purely literary, or “artistic,” dialect contains not only
elements that derive from different regions of the Greek world but also elements that belong to discrete
periods of the development of the Greek language. But what is the point of such an artificial language? A
satisfactory explanation was not forthcoming until the work in the 1920s and 1930s of a brilliant
American scholar named Milman Parry accounted for the eclectic character of Homeric language as
deriving from a tradition of orally composed poems. What Parry studied were those pervasive
expressions, such as “Thebes of the seven portals” and “Helen of the lovely tresses,” that consist of a
name and an EPITHET. He did not examine these specific expressions, which occur only a couple of
times each in the Homeric poems, but rather certain combinations of noun plus epithet that occur dozens of
times each in the Iliad and Odyssey, like “the steely-eyed goddess Athena” or “swift-footed Achilles.”
What Parry discovered was that Homer normally does not use more than one such combination having the
same metrical value for any one character in his poems. There are several different combinations that
Homer uses when he refers, for example, to the main character of the Iliad: He may call him “Peleus’ son
Achilles” or “swift Achilles” or “noble Achilles,” in addition to “swift-footed Achilles,” but none of
them is metrically equivalent to any of the others.
EPITHET An adjective or descriptive phrase indicating some quality or attribute which the speaker
or writer regards as characteristic of the person or thing described, for example, “swift-footed” in
the expression “swift-footed Achilles.”Parry referred to this system as an “economy of epithets,” and he concluded that so elaborate a system can
have arisen only by evolving over a lengthy period of time for the purpose of facilitating oral
composition; that is, composition in the course of oral performance. Homeric (and Hesiodic) poetry is
composed using a metrical form known as the DACTYLIC HEXAMETER, a verse form consisting of 12
to 17 syllables that follow a standard pattern of short and long syllables. If in the course of his
performance the poet reaches a particular point in the hexameter line and wishes to fill out the rest of that
line with an expression meaning “Achilles,” the poet normally has one and only one expression in his
repertoire that will fit into the remaining space in the line. Likewise, the words and expressions that
derive from different dialects or different periods of time generally serve to provide metrically distinct
ways of saying essentially the same thing. So, for example, Homer uses five different ways of saying “to
be,” each form belonging to a different dialect or a different stage in the development of the Greek
language. Ordinary language has no need of such a profusion of verb-forms, but the retention of these
forms in Homer’s artificial dialect makes sense only when one recognizes that no two of the forms have
the same metrical configuration. The advantage of this system is that it releases the poet from the need to
choose between competing and metrically equivalent expressions, so that he can concentrate more upon
what he is about to say than upon what specific words he is going to use to say it. It is not only individual
words that are the elements of the oral poet’s repertoire, but regularly recurring groups of words that
Parry referred to as “formulaic expressions” or “formulae.” In addition to these regularly recurring verbal
patterns, Parry and other scholars came to recognize the presence in the Homeric poems of repeated