“Intraformularity” in epos
By Adrian Kelly
The semantic potential of the ‘formula’ in early Greek epic poetry has been a principal and problematic area of research since the seminal work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Most Homerists do not accept without qualification their claim that the formula had limited semantic potential, but structure and semantics – i.e. metrical utility and meaning – were not fully reunited in Homeric oralist scholarship until Foley’s ‘traditional referentiality’ (e.g. 1999), the idea that a formula invoked or ‘resonated’ with previous contexts and their associations.
The Lives of Formulas: Linguistic Productivity and the Development of Epic Greek
By Chiara Bozzone
This paper introduces a new method for assessing the relative antiquity of Homeric formulas and formulaic expressions, based on the notion of linguistic productivity (borrowed from morphological theory).
Folkloristic Perspectives on Why Poets and Audiences Like Shared Formulas
By Jonathan Ready
“Even the Epithets are Necessary”: Ancient Approaches to ‘Illogical’ Homeric Epithets
By William Beck
Modern readers of Homer tend to interpret epithets on a sliding scale of significance.
Even the most rigid Parryists are willing to assign semantic significance to certain contextually-appropriate epithets, and even the most subjective reader would be hard-pressed to maintain the
unique significance of each of the 407 uses of δῖος in the Homeric poems. For all we have
learned about Homeric epithets since Parry’s discoveries nearly a century ago, our confidence in
our ability to interpret individual epithets has only diminished.