Of Hector, horse-taming and man-slaying
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2011
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Abstract
That the Iliadic Hector possesses a pair of epithet-phrases—ÜEktorow éndrofÒnoio and
ÜEktorow flppodãμoio—that violate Milman Parry’s law of economy has been known since
Parry invented his law of economy. He addressed the problem himself in L’Epithète
traditionnelle dans Homère, where his solution to the redundancy was to ascribe the appearance
of flppodãμoio to analogy with the epithets of other heroes, and to state categorically “the
obvious impossibility of inferring from it any theory of analysis whatever.”1
Parry, by the innovative persuasiveness of his profoundly illuminating research,
changed the questions we ask about the composition and meaning of the Homeric corpus, and
for some time also dictated the answers. His system of analysis held sway for some decades,
and even those who took a different approach had to argue on his terms. Albert Lord2 and
John Miles Foley,3 in particular, continued studies in comparative orality which tend to
confirm and refine Parry’s findings among South Slavic oral poets. On the other hand, in the
last thirty years or so, Parry’s stranglehold on Homeric studies has loosened. One of the more
intriguing lines of thought is Irene De Jong’s work in applying narratological principles—
formerly restricted to the novel or other clearly literary works—to oral poetry, and specifically
to the Iliad. The Iliad troubles both the scholar of literature and the oralist, because the poem, as
we have it, is neither an oral artifact nor the kind of text we usually encounter. No one would
now maintain that the Iliad is not orally derived, but the text we have need not represent an
oral performance perfectly—it is not a recording we can play. Still, we are reluctant to move
away from the oral framework; our reluctance to treat the poem as at all literary may be
founded in our inability to reconstruct even the terms of the recension ... And the Iliad, as it is, contains this redundant epithet pair for Hector. I do not accept
Parry’s solution of explaining this away by analogy. This paper will, therefore, investigate
differently the sources of these two epithets and their effect on the poem. It will try, in doing
so, to address the concerns of the multiple camps within the field, starting from an oralist
framework and then moving beyond that framework to address its inadequacies for
interpretation.
First, the paper will set out all Hector’s epithet-groups, case by case, and investigate
how fully they meet Parry’s expectations, and thence demonstrate the peculiarity of the
redundant genitive group. The following section will consider and evaluate the sources of this oddity. The paper will then, using a narratological framework, survey the possible
compositional implications for the epic, and finally will treat the implications for Hector’s rôle
in the Iliad.