Why Does Homer Keep Repeating Himself?

Homer repeats himself because repetition is part of the machinery of Homeric poetry.

A modern reader can find this mildly alarming. Dawn is rosy-fingered again. The sea is wine-dark again. A hero speaks, and the poem uses a phrase suspiciously like the phrase it used when another hero spoke. Warriors arm themselves in familiar sequences. Meals, voyages, assemblies, sacrifices, challenges and arrivals often seem to know how they are supposed to go.

Some of this repetition is formulaic. Some belongs to recurring narrative patterns. Some is artistically conspicuous repetition whose effect depends on our remembering the earlier instance. Those categories overlap, but they are worth separating.

A formula is not just a cliché

Milman Parry gave Homeric scholarship its most influential account of the formula. In his 1930s work on oral verse-making, he defined a formula as a group of words regularly used under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea. The Center for Hellenic Studies publishes Parry's study here.

The metrical part matters. The Iliad and Odyssey are composed in dactylic hexameter. A traditional phrase that names a person, introduces speech, marks dawn, launches a ship or completes some other recurring poetic task is useful partly because it already fits a known portion of the verse.

That helps explain famous name-and-epithet combinations. An epithet is not always being freshly selected because it is the most psychologically revealing adjective for that exact instant. Formulaic language gives the singer inherited ways to place names and ideas into the meter.

This can feel strange if we approach Homer as though a writer sat at a desk repeatedly choosing between synonyms. Parry's argument was that the diction itself points toward a different compositional environment.

Parry went to Yugoslavia to see a living oral tradition

The comparative tradition that transformed this argument was South Slavic, not Turkish.

Parry traveled to Yugoslavia in 1933 and again from 1934 to 1935 to study living singers of oral epic. With Albert Lord and other collaborators, he collected an enormous body of songs, dictated texts, conversations and recordings. Harvard's Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature describes itself as the largest single repository of South Slavic heroic song in the world.

The point was not that Homeric Greece and twentieth-century Yugoslavia were the same culture. They plainly were not. Parry wanted a living comparison that could show how long narrative poetry might be composed and transmitted without a poet memorizing a single fixed text word for word.

Lord continued the work and developed it in The Singer of Tales. The central insight is composition in performance. The singer learns a traditional poetic language, including formulas and larger story patterns, and uses that language to make the song as it is sung. The performance is neither free invention from nothing nor mechanical recitation of a frozen script.

That middle ground is important. Formula does not mean automation in the modern pejorative sense. It is closer to fluency in a highly specialized poetic language.

Repetition can happen at the level of a whole scene

Readers often notice more than repeated phrases. Homeric characters repeatedly arm for battle, feast, sacrifice, launch ships, receive guests, deliver messages and hold assemblies. The details and order can be familiar even when the wording is not identical.

Scholars often discuss such recurring narrative structures as themes or type-scenes. They give the audience an intelligible pattern while leaving room for variation.

A hospitality scene, for example, is not interesting because every host does exactly the same thing. It becomes interesting because the audience knows roughly what proper hospitality looks like. Deviations can therefore mean something. Repetition creates the standard against which variation becomes visible.

This is one of the places where a modern reader can stop treating recurrence as dead weight. A pattern can carry information precisely because it has occurred before.

The Turkish evidence is a useful comparison, but a separate one

A much later study provides an interesting parallel from another oral tradition. In 2023, Recai Bazancir examined formulas in Turkish folk stories, concentrating on performances by the storyteller Aşık Müdami. The paper is available here.

The Turkish material mixes prose narration with poems sung to the saz. Crucially, versions of Müdami's stories were recorded at different times and in different settings, including performances for different audiences. Bazancir could therefore examine formulaic elements while also seeing how a storyteller's performance responded to narrator, audience and social environment.

This does not prove anything directly about an archaic Greek singer. It does make one broader point easier to grasp: repeated formulas and live variation are not opposites. A traditional storyteller can rely on inherited verbal structures without every performance becoming identical.

That is a useful corrective to the modern assumption that originality requires avoiding anything one has said before.

Not every repetition should be explained away by oral technique

Oral-formulaic theory is powerful enough that it can tempt readers into using it as a solvent. Once a repeated phrase has been labeled a formula, perhaps there seems to be nothing more to say.

That would be a mistake.

A traditional phrase still occurs in a particular place. A repeated action can acquire a different emotional weight when the person performing it has changed. A familiar sequence can be interrupted. A speech can be repeated imperfectly. The audience's memory of the pattern is part of the poetic material.

Oral technique explains how repetition can belong naturally to the poem. It does not require us to stop asking what a particular repetition is doing.

Translations make their own decisions about repetition

An English translator faces an awkward choice. Repeating the same English phrase can preserve something important about the Greek, but modern English prose and poetry are often trained to distrust obvious repetition. Varying the wording may sound more polished while hiding part of Homer's texture.

Different translations therefore produce different impressions of how repetitive Homer is. A translator may preserve an epithet mechanically, vary it, omit it, rearrange it for meter, or choose a different recurring English phrase.

This is one reason comparing translations can be genuinely illuminating rather than merely indecisive. Repetition is one of the features being translated.

How to read the repetitions

You do not need to stop at every epithet and perform a miniature dissertation. A better first approach is to notice the scale of the recurrence.

• Repeated phrase: it may be part of the formulaic diction that helps make the verse.
• Repeated kind of scene: notice the pattern, then notice what changes.
• Conspicuous return of earlier language or action: ask what the memory of the first occurrence contributes now.

The repetition that initially makes Homer seem alien is one of the best clues to the history embedded in the poems. We are reading written texts whose language carries the habits of a tradition built for performance, memory, meter and listeners.

Once that becomes audible, rosy-fingered dawn is doing more than announcing another morning.