(a) Heroic narrative

Stories of legendary heroic deeds are the theme most typically associated with ‘epic’. This sub-genre includes the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Shield, and many fragmentary exemplars: the Epic Cycle; the Theban epics; various Heracles epics, including the Capture of Oichalia, and epics by Panyassis, Pisander, and perhaps Cinaethon; perhaps multiple Theseids;Footnote ⁷ and probably the Minyas, Wedding of Ceyx, Descent of Peirithous, and Aegimius. Ancient writers describe the Naupactia as a genealogical poem ‘about women’, but most surviving fragments relate to an Argonautica narrative.Footnote ⁸ Choerilus’ historical epic the Persica should also be shelved in this sub-genre.

Aristotle considered the character of heroic narrative to be basically akin to that of tragedy. Some modern literary criticism has followed him in this, seeing in Homer an underlying seriousness, or sense of inexorability, or tragic irony.Footnote ⁹ But many other modern critics have argued that heroic narrative is a descendant of a much older tradition of ‘praise poetry’, a form of poetry found in diverse cultures, which typically celebrates a living individual or a god.Footnote ¹⁰ In this view, the true central theme and purpose of heroic narrative is kleos, ‘fame’ or ‘renown’;Footnote ¹¹ and poetry is not just a celebration of a hero's reputation but also a vehicle for reports of the hero, creating the hero's reputation. This is most famously illustrated by two Homeric scenes where Achilles (a non-professional singer) and Demodocus (a professional) sing of the klea andrōn, the ‘glories of men’; the phrase also gets used of one story that is spoken, not sung;Footnote ¹² and several studies have attached great importance to the use of kleos in poetic phrases that may be traceable back to Indo-European roots.Footnote ¹³ However, this interpretation does not always transfer easily to heroic narratives outside Homer. A poem such as the Shield is, of course, a vehicle for its hero's reputation in a trivial sense, and the Theogony and the Hymns are sung in praise of gods and so serve as kleos, bringing reports about the divine realm to mortal audiences.Footnote ¹⁴ But, in Homer, kleos is closely intertwined with tragic themes such as mortality, personal identity, and tension between the hero and a surrounding community. That kind of intertwining is not often apparent elsewhere.

Epic poets of the Hellenistic and later ages imitated many Homeric formal elements (invocations to a Muse, similes, combat scenes, and sacrifice scenes), but in the Archaic period there is no reason to assume that any of these was actually obligatory. The most consistent formal feature is the use of third-person narrative, interspersed with direct quotation when characters speak.Footnote ¹⁵ Only rarely does a narrator make his presence felt in the story, speaking with his own voice, or blurring the distinction between his own voice and that of a character.Footnote ¹⁶ In the case of Homer, this creates an effect of distance which has often led readers to perceive the narrative as naïf, impersonal, and unmediated, even if that naïveté is self-conscious and studied.Footnote ¹⁷ Numerous studies in the last few decades have qualified this interpretation, showing that Archaic poets selected and adopted identifiable personas.Footnote ¹⁸ Homer, in particular, actively exercises a finely nuanced control over the way in which scenes develop;Footnote ¹⁹ but it is reasonable to question whether all heroic poets demonstrated the same degree of finesse, or in the same way.

(b) Wisdom poetry

In wisdom poetry a speaker directly imparts insights, instructions, or knowledge, usually to an addressee who is clearly identified. When discussed with a perspective looking to later Greco-Roman poetry such as Aratus or Virgil's Georgics, it is more often known as ‘didactic poetry’; ‘wisdom poetry’ looks backwards, to a cross-cultural backdrop of many Near Eastern parallels.Footnote ²⁰ Our main exemplar is the Hesiodic Works and Days. Several lost Hesiodic poems also fall into this category: the Precepts of Chiron, the Great Works, the Bird Omens (or Ornithomancy), and, focusing more on the natural world, the Astronomy. When elements of wisdom poetry pop up in other genres, they tend to be in the form of parables and aphorisms (on which see below).

It seems that, in the sixth century, in the hands of poet-philosophers such as Solon and Theognis, moral and political teaching gradually shifted into elegiac metre. But hexameter remained the metre of choice for discussing the nature of the physical world, most notably for the pre-Socratic poets Parmenides and Empedocles. Xenophanes straddled both genres.Footnote ²¹ Both the elegiac and hexameter offshoots retained the poetic conceit of addressing the poem to a recipient or student. This recipient (in narratological terms, an ‘implied narratee’) acts as a proxy for the poem's actual (or ‘external’) audience, allowing them to receive the teachings at the same time as the character in the poem.Footnote ²² Thus the Works and Days is addressed to Perses, and the Precepts of Chiron to Achilles; Theognis instructs his boy beloved Cyrnus; Empedocles addresses On Nature to Pausanias (fr. B 1), and another fragment addresses the people of Acragas (fr. B 112). The Derveni Theogony, though primarily a cosmogonic poem, has Night instructing Zeus, declaring oracles in her cave (fr. 6 Bernabé). Parmenides adapts this motif from the Hesiodic Theogony but reverses the relationship: Hesiod was visited by the Muses and instructed in poetry (Theog. 22–34), but Parmenides travels beyond the gate of Day and Night to receive teachings from an unnamed goddess (fr. B 1).

Few historians of ancient philosophy make the mistake of treating Hesiod as something wholly separate from the pre-Socratics. But students of Hesiod sometimes do. Certainly the later philosopher-poets focus more consistently on applying reason to the world around them; but, from a purely poetic perspective, philosophical and literary verse draw on the same tradition. Ancient critics felt the same way. Heracleitus (fr. B 40) categorizes Hesiod as a philosopher along with Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Hecataeus; and Plato interprets earlier poets as using mythology to represent natural forces, even to the extent of describing Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides as proto-sophists.Footnote ²³

(c) Cosmogony

Cosmogonic poetry tells of the origins of the universe, of the establishment of the present cosmic order, and of how the gods use the threat of violence to maintain that order. In this sub-genre, parallels from the Near East are especially close: the Babylonian Enuma Elish, the Ugaritic Baal cycle, and the Hurro-Hittite poems about Kumarbi.Footnote ²⁴

In the Greek tradition, regularly recurring themes include the birth and genealogy of the gods (that is, ‘theogony’ proper);Footnote ²⁵ the apportioning of divine prerogatives; and various battles between gods or against demonic powers so as to establish a stable divine order. Especially prominent are the battles against the monster Typhoeus (or Typhaon) and the Titans (the Titanomachy).

Our main exemplar is the Hesiodic Theogony. We have fragments of various other theogonies, usually grouped as ‘Orphic’ poems: the theogonies of Musaeus and Epimenides, and the Derveni and Eudemian theogonies. These are framed around the Near Eastern succession myth as strongly as Hesiod's, though they are very different in both style and tenets. We also know of various Titanomachies, especially the one attributed to Eumelus. Cosmogonic elements also appear in narrative digressions in the Works and Days;Footnote ²⁶ the major Hymns;Footnote ²⁷ and many allusions and echoes throughout Homer. In the Hymn to Hermes 417–33, the second ever performance of kitharoidic poetry is a theogony sung by Hermes. And Empedocles’ poetry is at least as closely attached to this category as to wisdom literature: he is deeply concerned with the origin and generation of natural forces, often personified, especially Love and Strife; one fragment (B 123) rattles off a list of ‘Titans’ (Birth, Death, Sleep, etc.) that could easily sit in a theogony.

It has been alleged that Homeric epic has no interest in cosmogony.Footnote ²⁸ In fact, the Iliad is pervasively flavoured with cosmogonic elements, especially in those parts of the story set on Olympus. A few passages refer to the birth of the gods or apportionment of divine prerogatives;Footnote ²⁹ others refer to divine battles and rebellions, including the battle with Typhoeus;Footnote ³⁰ and the scenes on Olympus contain frequent reminders of Zeus's maintenance of the divine order by threat of violence, as in the Hesiodic Theogony.Footnote ³¹

(a) Hymn or hymnic prelude

Poets would regularly begin performances of hexameter poetry – of any kind – with a hymn to one or more gods. This is shown by the testimony of the Hymn to Hermes, Pindar, Thucydides, and pseudo-Plutarch,Footnote ³⁴ as well as by the closing formulae in many of the Hymns, which refer to poems to be performed after the hymn. Pindar and Thucydides call this prelude a prooimion. In English it is best to avoid that term, because it creates confusion with the English word ‘proem’, which has deep roots and is conventionally used for opening paragraphs even of modern epics.Footnote ³⁵

We find exemplars not only in the Hymns but also in the Theogony (a hymn, or rather a pair of hymns, to the Muses, 1–34 and 35–105); Works and Days 1–10 (to Zeus); and, in a modified form modelled on the Theogony, Parmenides fr. B 1. Hymnic preludes are depicted indirectly in Odyssey 8.499–500 (Demodocus’ third song) and Hymn to Hermes 427–33 (Hermes’ hymn-within-a-hymn to Mnemosyne, followed by a theogony). There are only three surviving examples of a hymn that is still attached to its subsequent poem: the two Hesiodic exemplars, and in elegiac verse Simonides’ Plataea ode, frs. eleg. 10 and 11.1–20 (a hymn to Achilles).

As we saw in Chapter I, in the Homeric Hymns it is traditional to distinguish a group of longer hymns (numbers 1–5), of which the shortest is 293 lines, from the shorter hymns (numbers 6–33), of which the longest is 59 lines. A formal analysis by Janko suggests instead a fourfold grouping: hymns that are based solely on mythical narrative (‘purely mythic’ hymns); hymns that enumerate the god's attributes without narrative (‘attributive’); an intermediate group called ‘composite mythic’, which contains both attributive and mythic sections; and ‘composite prolonged’, where there are attributive sections both before and after the mythic section, and where the standard ‘farewell’ to the god is extended to become in effect a third attributive section. Each group displays a distinct sequence of motifs, in a manner similar to type scenes. The purely mythic, composite, and prolonged groups account for the major hymns. The minor hymns are evenly distributed between the purely mythic and purely attributive groups, though a couple are defective in terms of formal structure.Footnote ³⁶

It is plausible, though uncertain, that at least the shorter hymns served as a corpus of set pieces that any poet could draw on to preface an epic performance. There is some indication that the hymns in the Theogony and Works and Days were also used this way.Footnote ³⁷ The major Homeric Hymns are so big that it is doubtful whether they could have been used as preludes, in spite of Thucydides’ reference to the Hymn to Apollo as a prooimion.Footnote ³⁸ But that is not to say that the preludic function of hymns had died out: Pindar and Simonides show that this function persisted until at least the 470s.Footnote ³⁹

(b) Type scenes

Type scenes – set-piece episodes with a regular sequence of motifs – are very prominent in Homer, and have been extensively studied.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is generally thought that they have their origins as components in the cognitive toolkit of pre-Homeric oral bards, aiding them in improvisation by providing a continuous flow of cues.Footnote ⁴¹ In non-Homeric hexameter, type scenes are thinner on the ground and they seem to be motivated more by an awareness of codified forms than by an improvisational function. Some clear exemplars are Heracles’ arming scene (Shield 122–43);Footnote ⁴² the hospitality scene when Demeter arrives at Keleos’ house (Hymn to Demeter 105–211);Footnote ⁴³ the adornment scenes in Theogony 573–84, Cypria frs. 5–6, Hymn to Aphrodite 60–74, and Hymn 6.5–13;Footnote ⁴⁴ and the sacrifice scene in Hymn to Hermes 115–37. Divine epiphanies in the Hymns also follow patterns that are familiar from Homer.

Although we identify type scenes by their formal structure, they are far from formulaic. Ancient poets routinely adapted them in many ways. For example: in Homeric arming scenes a hero normally dons his gear in the sequence greaves–breastplate–sword–shield–helmet–spear; but, in the Shield, Heracles leaves his shield until last, so as to create a clean transition to the extended description of it that dominates the poem. In the Hymn to Demeter, where the host would normally provide the guest with a meal, Demeter instead instructs her host on how to prepare a ritual potion, the kykeōn, in her honour. And the sacrifice scene in the Hymn to Hermes is distorted for humorous effect: Hermes effectively offers a sacrifice to himself (!), and runs into trouble when (in his capacity as sacrificer) he wants to eat the roasted meat but (in his capacity as dedicatee) refuses to swallow it.

(c) Genealogy

Characters in Homer are frequently identified with reference to their parents; but there are also several thorough genealogies, which typically serve to bolster a character's status.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the Theogony and Catalogue of Women they are more important still. Pausanias informs us that genealogy was also prominent in the Naupactia.Footnote ⁴⁶

The branching nature of genealogy poses a challenge to a poet's narrative strategy. Homer and the Catalogue normally begin by reporting all the children of one individual; these children are followed by their descendants, one child at a time, dealing with each genealogical branch fully to the third or fourth generation. West has shown that the Catalogue organizes genealogy in manageable chunks, steering a middle course between ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ approaches.Footnote ⁴⁷ Homeric genealogies show the same tendency, dealing with genealogical chunks of about the same size. The Theogony's genealogies come in smaller chunks and are less systematic, but still have various organizing principles.Footnote ⁴⁸

In all of these cases it is normal to find narrative vignettes, containing heroic or divine/cosmogonic material, peppered among the genealogies. The Iliad seasons Glaucus’ genealogy with the story of Bellerophon, for example; and among the genealogies in the Catalogue are sprinkled various deeds of Heracles and the stories of Atalanta, Mestra, and so on.Footnote ⁴⁹ Of the relationship between narrative and genealogy, West writes: ‘If the Succession Myth is the backbone of the Theogony, the genealogies are its flesh and blood’. Muellner, drawing on Vernant, writes of genealogy as itself a form of narrative, while the vignettes are ‘nongenealogical [narrative] on the way to becoming genealogical again’.Footnote ⁵⁰

(d) Catalogue

Catalogues have been extensively studied, largely because of the historical importance of the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships.Footnote ⁵¹ We can distinguish at least three varieties: ‘formal’ catalogues, with detailed catalogue entries that follow fairly regular formulae;Footnote ⁵² ‘casual’ catalogues, simple lists with little ornamentation;Footnote ⁵³ and a type that has been called the ‘Ehoie tradition’ (after the e¯’ hoiē formula used in the Catalogue of Women), which consists of catalogues of legendary women and the genealogical relationships between them.Footnote ⁵⁴

Entries in ‘formal’ catalogues are linked to specific geographic locations and follow well-defined routes through the landscape of Greece (see below on route descriptions). Our exemplars are, in the Iliad, the great Catalogue of Ships, the Trojan Catalogue, and a renewal of the Catalogue of Ships when the Myrmidons enter battle for the first time;Footnote ⁵⁵ and the Catalogue of Helen's Suitors in the Catalogue of Women Book 5 (frs. 154, 155.1–75, 156). The catalogue of Trojan allies that appeared in the Cyclic Cypria (arg. 12) probably fitted this type. It is also likely that the Naupactia had a formal catalogue of Argonauts, which would have served as a model for the one in Apollonius’ Argonautica (Apollonius’ catalogue imitates the ‘formal’ style).Footnote ⁵⁶ These are major virtuosic set pieces and come with a great deal of dramatic build-up.Footnote ⁵⁷ They also play a preludic role: the catalogues of Iliad 2 act as a kind of ceremonial opening of war, the Myrmidon entry in Iliad 16 introduces Patroclus’ display of heroism, and the list of Helen's suitors announces the contest for her hand in marriage and a subsequent slide into the Trojan War.

Among ‘casual’ catalogues we have Zeus's list of his former lovers (Il. 14.315–28); lists of Nereids (Il. 18.39–49; Theog. 240–64); the ghosts of dead heroes seen in the underworld (Od. 11.566–635; Returns frs. 3–9; Minyas frs. 2–6); and a few other, briefer, roll calls. Empedocles’ list of ‘Titans’ (fr. B 123) also fits this model well.

The ‘Ehoie’ type is really a cross between catalogue and genealogy. Like genealogy, it is preoccupied with procreation and the movement from one generation to the next;Footnote ⁵⁸ and it routinely contains vignettes of heroic narrative. The ‘Ehoie’ type is represented by the bulk of the Catalogue of Women; Odysseus’ catalogue of dead heroines (Od. 11.225–330); and the Great Ehoiae. Much of the Naupactia also seems to have been occupied with a catalogue of the ‘Ehoie’ type.Footnote ⁵⁹

(a) Proem and invocation of Muse(s)

‘Proem’ is used here with its conventional English sense: a brief preface, especially the introductory paragraph to a heroic narrative epic. Following the practice of The Homer Encyclopedia, I keep it distinct from the device of the hymnic prelude (see above).Footnote ⁶⁰ Regular formal features of a proem are: (1) introduction of one or more major themes in the first line (e.g. ‘anger’ in the Iliad; ‘a man’ in the Odyssey); (2) an address to the divine Muse(s), praying for inspiration; (3) a relative clause that expands on (1) and leads into a discursive (but not thorough) exploration of the poem's contents. Often a second invocation (4) renews the focus on the highlighted theme, with a further dependent relative clause (5) that leads into the main body of the poem. Most extant poems feature some or all of these elements.Footnote ⁶¹ But formal proems were not obligatory: the Works and Days and Shield possess no proems.

Proems of this form are naturally intimately connected to the trope of invoking a Muse. Muse invocations appear in other contexts too, but where they do appear they are still typically introductory, and they often touch on the problem of the relationship between the performer and his poetic persona – the poet's voice as opposed to the Muse's voice.Footnote ⁶² The trope of the Muse invocation is a uniquely Greek invention. It is in turn closely tied to the trope of ‘two types of knowledge’ (see below).

For most post-Archaic epics the Iliad and Odyssey proems served as models. But in Archaic poetry, the fullest examples of the pattern are the Catalogue of Women fr. 1.1–15:

Theogony 104–15:

and Odyssey 1.1–10:

The Iliad has only a shadow of (4) and (5), with a rhetorical question at line 8 and expansion in the relative clause in the following line. Another doubled invocation has been convincingly identified in the fragments of the Little Iliad proem.Footnote ⁶³ Alongside the fragment given as fr. 1 in West's and Davies’ editions (‘Of Ilios I sing, and Dardania land of fine colts…’), another line, fr. 1 Bernabé, also contains a Muse invocation (‘Muse, tell me of those things that never happened before / and never will again’). Bernabé concluded that the two come from separate poems; Scafoglio rejects this, and draws attention to an imitation in Virgil's Aeneid, 1.1–11. But the double invocations in the Odyssey, Theogony, and Catalogue of Women provide even closer parallels.

A proem is closely linked to a hymnic prelude, but the two must not be conflated. Their functional and formal distinctness is especially clear in the way they are joined in Simonides’ elegiac Plataea ode. At the end of his hymn to Achilles, Simonides switches to his main narrative as follows (fr. eleg. 11.19–24):

The ‘farewell’ in 19–20 is a standard closing for hymns; the summoning in 20–1 signals the transition into a proem; the last phrase, with its reference to the coming song, has the air of a doubled invocation.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Theogony's transition is even more compressed, where Hesiod's farewell to the Muses (Theog. 104) also serves as his invocation for the proem. The one other case where a hymnic prelude survives attached to a poem, Works and Days 1–10, moves directly from the hymn to the main content without a formal proem. Simonides’ poem, though it is elegiac, provides our clearest evidence that proems like those in the Iliad and Odyssey could be preceded by formal hymnic closes. Hymns can themselves open with brief invocations to the Muse: the major Hymns to Hermes and Aphrodite do so, and so do about a third of the minor hymns.Footnote ⁶⁵

(b) Two types of knowledge: ‘truth’ vs. ‘report’

In the Theogony's opening hymn the Muses famously declare (Theog. 27–8):Footnote ⁶⁶

This sentiment is not isolated. It belongs to a tradition of poetic utterances cast in terms of two types of knowledge: one true, the other false; one divine, the other mortal; one authentic, the other mere opinion.Footnote ⁶⁷

Thus in Iliad 2.484–6 the Muses possess divine knowledge which is accurate, while mortal knowledge is mere kleos (‘report’ or ‘rumour’), prone to inaccuracy and untruth. A performer or narrator who is divinely favoured may have access to the first type of knowledge: so Odysseus tells the story of his wanderings ‘expertly, as a singer would do’ and not ‘making up lying stories, from which no-one could learn anything’ (Od. 11.363–9). Penelope's account of the two gates through which dreams come plays on the same trope at a more symbolic level: dreams that come through the gate of ivory are false, while the gate of horn produces dreams that are fulfilled (Od. 19.560–9). And this dichotomy is not only about knowledge that is reserved to the gods. Hesiod attributes to the Muses his ability to transmit accurate information about navigation at sea, something of which he has – or claims he has – no first-hand knowledge (WD 660–2): here again, the distinction is between direct access to truth and indirect report. When Apollo proclaims his prerogative over oracular knowledge, he warns that some omens are true and some false, and only with self-restraint can a mortal tell which is which (Hymn. Hom. Herm. 533–49).

A zenith of abstraction is reached in Parmenides’ poem, which relies heavily on a dichotomy between divine alētheia (‘truth’) and mortal doxa (‘opinion’). In his proem Parmenides evokes both Homeric and Hesiodic models: the gates of Night and Day through which the narrator passes (but in which direction?) echo Penelope's gates of dreams, while the divine instruction he receives from an unnamed goddess evokes the Theogony's visitation of the Muses. The poem goes on to repeat similar imagery elsewhere: truth ‘is’, and is represented by light or ethereal fire; opinion ‘is not’, and is represented by dense night (frs. B 8.50–61, B 9.1–5); but, Parmenides argues, both are worthy of study. The themes are philosophical but the tradition is a poetic one. The trope extends through hexameter poetry continuously from Homer to Parmenides. It is a distant ancestor to many philosophical sentiments in Plato: Socrates is surely thinking of it when he asks, in the Phaedo (65b), ‘Does human sight and hearing possess any truth? Or is it like the poets are always babbling: that we neither hear nor see anything accurately?’

(c) Simile

It is the Homeric simile that is most familiar to readers of early hexameter, and that served as a model for later epic poets. But they were used independently in other poems too, though typically not very frequently.Footnote ⁶⁸ Similes have an especially prominent role in the Shield and in the fragments of Empedocles; and there are a few exemplars in some of the major Hymns. A couple of examples will illustrate the basic format. Hymn to Hermes 43–6:

And Shield 437–42:

Similes add layers of meaning. When Heracles and Ares face each other, we already expect their confrontation to be fierce and cataclysmic; by adding the simile, with its imagery of the bouncing boulder, the poet superimposes less direct suggestions of speed, weight, noise, and a terrific momentum stoppable only by an immovable object. In Hermes’ case, the added layers are the whirlwind activity of a volatile mind: the lightning speed of a glance moving from one object to another, or a thought from one place to another.

Similes often appear in isolation, but they may also be used systematically, to add even more significance, in ways that will be familiar to readers of Homer. In the Iliad, comparisons of people and phenomena to stars (brightness, burning intensity) or lions (ferocity, violence, strength) indicate development of an ongoing theme (the escalation of violence throughout the Iliad). Parallels sometimes pop up in other poems. The pile-up of eight similes in Shield 374–442, marking the collisions of Heracles with Cycnus and Ares, embodies that poem's fascination with dense, crowded poetic textures and imagery. In the Hymn to Demeter, when Keleos’ daughters run to meet Demeter, two similes compare them to deer frisking through a meadow (174–5) and their flying hair to a saffron flower (177–8): juxtaposed, these images evoke the opening of the hymn, where Demeter's daughter Persephone frolics in a meadow gathering flowers, before being kidnapped by Hades. And similes in the Hymn to Hermes repeatedly compare Hermes to a baby (151–2, 163–4, 241); ordinarily these would just be platitudes, but since they are literally true (Hermes actually is a baby) they become ironic comments, alerting us to Hermes’ self-conscious attempts to disarm others by putting on a show of being a mere baby.

Comparisons may be more than a stylistic device. Beall argues that ploughing in the Works and Days acts as a metaphor for the human condition. Snell sees the history of similes as an integral part of the history of analogical thought.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the fifth century the history of the simile culminates with Empedocles, who uses similes not only to add poetic depth but also as explanatory tools. He often explains one physical process by comparing it to another, as in this passage where he explains the idea of vision rays emitted from the human eye (fr. B 84.1–8):Footnote ⁷⁰

(d) Other miscellaneous features

There is not space to cover every poetic device that is characteristic of early hexameter – at least, not as fully as the accounts given above. So this chapter ends with briefer notes on some further recurring features.

Oracle. Oracles are a genre unto themselves with their own set of formal features, whether they are the short poems spuriously attributed to the Delphic Oracle, the surviving fragments of oracle collectors, or prophecies made by legendary figures. The major studies of the Delphic Oracle provide good guides to oracles generally.Footnote ⁷¹ Fontenrose's formal study characterizes oracles as giving commands, warnings, or factual statements about past, present, and future, either simply or with some condition that has yet to be met.Footnote ⁷² He goes on to analyse oracles as being composed of up to six independent motifs, which may be combined in a manner similar to a type scene: A, a salutation to the person addressed; B, a restatement of the question posed; C, an assertion of mantic authority; D, a condition to be met; E, the core message; and F, a clarification of the message's context.Footnote ⁷³ The same analysis can be applied to the oracles in oracle collectors and in purely legendary stories. In Homer, for example, Calchas’ oracle to Achilles declaring the reasons for the plague (Il. 1.93–100) comprises a message (‘here is why Apollo is angry; here is how to appease him’) and a condition to be met (‘provided we give Chryseis back to her father, and offer a sacrifice’): that is, the motifs ED. By contrast, Teiresias’ prophecy to Odysseus (Od. 11.100–37) is a long string of conditions and predictions, in the sequence BAFEDEDEDEDECDEC.Footnote ⁷⁴

The obscurity and animal imagery of oracle collectors such as Epimenides, Musaeus, and Bacis link their oracles closely to the device of the competitive riddle. However, we have only a few riddles couched in hexameter: the famous riddle of the Sphinx (Oedipodea fr. 2); Calchas’ riddle to Mopsus in the Melampodia (Hesiodica fr. 214); a riddle about the lifespan of the Naeads (Hesiodica fr. 254); and the riddle of the lice that presages Homer's death in the Contest of Homer and Hesiod (Contest 18).

Parable and exemplum. Aesop's Fables are the popular archetype of the Archaic parable, though they do not survive in their original form. But moralizing tales also appear in hexameter in wisdom poetry, and as exempla or mythological paradigms in narrative poetry. The most famous is the parable of the hawk and the nightingale in Works and Days 202–12, where the hawk justifies its killing of the nightingale by right of strength: the story uses the hawk's manifest injustice to question the principle of ‘might makes right’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Closely related is the device of the mythological paradigm, where a character in a narrative poem tells a story from the past as a model for behaviour in the present: some especially famous examples in Homer are when Phoenix tells the story of Meleager to try and persuade Achilles to relent from his anger, and when Achilles tells the story of Niobe to persuade Priam to eat in spite of his grief.Footnote ⁷⁶ Outside Homer our most extended example comes from the fragments of Panyassis’ Heraclea, where King Eurytus of Oichalia first encourages his guest Heracles to drink heartily, only to become more hesitant as his guest becomes more drunk and dangerous (fr. 20.1–9):Footnote ⁷⁷

Recently a new exemplar was found in an elegiac poem of Archilochus, rediscovered and published in 2005, where an unknown speaker cites the Achaeans’ flight from Telephus as a paradigm for giving way to necessity.Footnote ⁷⁸

Route description. Poetry cannot easily portray geography in a two-dimensional map. Early Greek poetry resorts to describing linear routes through a landscape: point A to point B to point C and so on. This poetic device includes not only physical journeys but also the waypoints traced by catalogues. The most elaborate map of this kind is the Catalogue of Ships in Iliad 2.494–759, which follows a route in three parts: first winding clockwise around central and southern Greece, then eastwards through the Dorian islands of the south Aegean, and finally from Phthia northwards through Thessaly.Footnote ⁷⁹ The Hymn to Apollo has three journeys: Leto's path clockwise around the Aegean looking for a place to give birth to Apollo (30–49), Apollo's journey from Olympus to Delphi (216–86), and the journey of Apollo's new ministers from Crete to Delphi (409–39).Footnote ⁸⁰ Other, less clear, routes are outlined or implied in the Odyssey's catalogue of dead heroines, the Catalogue of Women's catalogue of Helen's suitors, and the journeys in the Hymn to Hermes.Footnote ⁸¹ Detailed ‘maps’ also appear in other poetic genres, in Simonides’ Plataea ode and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.Footnote ⁸²

Ekphrasis (rhetorical description). This device is best known from examples in Homer, especially the description of Hephaestus forging Achilles’ new shield (Il. 18.478–608). Most of our non-Homeric examples are fragmentary; the great exception is the colossal description of Heracles’ eponymous shield in Shield 144–319, also made by Hephaestus. Heracles’ shield is described in a systematic fashion, starting from a central section filled with monstrous personifications such as Fear, Tumult, and Murder, and working outwards with orientalizing animal motifs, scenes of gods and humans, and finally the river Ocean surrounding everything.Footnote ⁸³ It is not simply a cheap copy of the Homeric shield, though it certainly draws on the same set of tropes. Like Achilles’ shield it juxtaposes scenes of war and peace, a siege and a wedding; but it gives greater emphasis to divine figures and it appears that a few lines in the Iliadic ekphrasis were actually interpolated from the Shield.Footnote ⁸⁴

We have indications of several other ekphraseis. (1) Francis argues persuasively that the gods’ creation of Pandora (Theog. 570–89; WD 60–82) is an ekphrasis of an artefact, which is subsequently imbued with life.Footnote ⁸⁵ (2) Lesches, Little Iliad fr. 5: a description of Achilles’ spear (see also Cypria fr. 4?), a gift from the gods like his more famous shield. (3) Eugammon, Telegony arg. 1: a mixing bowl depicting the story of Trophonius, Agamedes, and Augeas.Footnote ⁸⁶ (4) Telegony fr. 5: Hephaestus forges Telegonus’ spear from the barb of a stingray (found in Phorcys’ lake, near Circe's home in Italy), a tip of adamant, a butt-spike of gold, and a haft of goat's horn.Footnote ⁸⁷ (5) Eumelus, Titanomachy fr. 14: probably from a description of a metal cup or jug, featuring as part of its decoration a group of golden-faced mute (or ‘scaly’?) fish (χρυσώπιδες ἰχθύες ἐλλοί).Footnote ⁸⁸ (6) It is possible to interpret Hymn 7 (to Dionysus) as a narrative based on a pictorial representation: the story of Dionysus turning the Etruscan sailors into dolphins was a popular theme in sixth-century art.Footnote ⁸⁹

Poet's ‘seal’ (sphragis). The sphragis, or signature left by the poet, is a rare device in hexameter. Where it appears, it usually takes the form of the narrator explicitly adopting a specific persona. At Theogony 22–34 the poet explicitly adopts the persona of Hesiod, telling the story of how the Muses personally inspired him with the gift of poetry; the poet of Works and Days 646–62 claims to have won a poetry contest at the funeral games of Amphidamas in Euboea, also (implicitly) adopting the persona of Hesiod; and at Hymn to Apollo 165–76 Cynaethus famously adopts the persona of Homer as a blind poet from Chios whose songs ‘remain supreme’. The device is more common in other genres, with important examples in Archilochus, Sappho, Solon, and Pindar. A notable example in a ‘heroic’ narrative is the end of Timotheus’ Persae, fr. 791.229–33 PMG, where the narrator compares himself to two semi-mythical hexameter poets, Orpheus and Terpander. This trope tends to gravitate towards the beginning or end of a poem.

Miscellaneous stylistic devices. Many features of narrative arrangement, word order, and language that are characteristic of Homer also appear in non-Homeric hexameter. Thalmann gives a good review of some of these, documenting them copiously with non-Homeric examples: parataxis (avoidance of subordinate clauses); hysteron prōton (where the chronologically latest event is mentioned first; or an AB–BA arrangement where the first element in one phrase appears last in the answering phrase); ring composition (a more elaborate version of hysteron prōton, with multiple concentric layers ABCD…DCBA); ‘spiral’ composition (like ring composition but the rings interlock with one another); and parallelism (ABC…ABC…).Footnote ⁹⁰ The formulaic style is also a key element of non-Homeric hexameter. It becomes progressively less prominent in fifth-century poetry but some non-Homeric poems display a creative use of the formulaic system, as we shall see in the following chapter.