ABSTRACT
The Homeric corpus rapidly became part of the common cultural legacy of all Greeks, although ironically Homer never used the word ‘Greeks’ in his work, using instead Argives, Danaans or Achaians. Fragments of Homer are extant in manuscripts from the sixth century BC, but it was in Alexandria from the third century BC onwards that scholars, most famously Aristarchus of Samothrace. Like Sophocles, Homer portrays humanity as insignificant yet capable of a nobility in suffering denied the gods. As the culmination of the oral poetry tradition, both epics feature its conventions; Homer uses ‘epithets’, adjectives which generally describe a noun when it appears in the work—‘glorious Achilles fleet of foot’, ‘crafty Odysseus’, ‘rose-fingered dawn’. It never becomes a stale convention, as Homer varies his stock of epithets and uses them to enhance our awareness of the individual characters of the vast work.
