This article and the one it is based on have been summarized in video format using Google NotebookLM.
During my middle school studies, I was introduced to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. This year, I decided to revisit these epics and acquired a French edition from the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (translated in 1955 by Victor and Jean Bérard, and Robert Flacelière). This particular edition is noteworthy for its clear demarcation of dialogue: each speech is prefixed with the speaker’s name, as illustrated by the following excerpt available on the La Pléiade website (see pages 12-13 for example).
The editorial practice of prefacing each speech with the interlocutor’s name greatly aids modern readers, giving the poems a somewhat theatrical feel. In antiquity, in an environment where the audience relied solely on auditory cues, it would have been indispensable to provide clear signals so that listeners could unambiguously follow the dialogues. Therefore, the modern convention of appending the speaker’s name appears anachronistic. It is more likely to be an editorial solution designed to help readers in navigating the complex interchanges of the poem rather than a reflection of Homeric or early performative practice. This led me to wonder how Homer originally indicated (or even encoded) these shifts in speech.
To answer, I turned to the primary text itself. Because I do not read Ancient Greek, I was primarily concerned with the structural aspects rather than lexical detail. In essence, focusing on the “architecture” of speech rather than dissecting its constituent parts. My goal was to determine if the epic contained explicit “delimiters”, or markers distinguishing Homer’s narrative passages from the direct speech of characters.
The idea of delimiters, as outlined in my previous article, posits a general principle: every interpretive language uses markers that signal transitions from a primary layer to an embedded level of expression. In contemporary English prose, quotation marks serve precisely this function; they separate the narrator’s description (e.g., It is raining) from a character’s utterance (e.g., Alice said: “It is raining”). I sought to identify analogous signals within the Homeric text that fulfil the same role.
In Homer’s era, punctuation marks such as quotation marks have not been invited yet, and even if they had existed, they would have been invisible to listeners in a purely oral performance. Therefore, my search was confined to intrinsic textual structures that could signal a shift from narrative to direct speech. It is plausible that a delimiter can be discerned through its structural properties when it shares the same alphabetic system as the surrounding text (in other words, when it is not a special character). As demonstrated in the previous article, languages can employ distinctive patterns, like palindromes, to mark boundaries. Thus, I sought regular linguistic constructs within Homer’s poems that could serve this delimiting function.
I used two resources to access the original text, hosted by Tufts University: the Perseus Digital Library (Greek text and English translation by A.T. Murray) and the Beyond Translation project (Greek text by David B. Munro and Thomas W. Allen). In this article, most of the examples come from the first book of the Iliad and the first book of the Odyssey to keep it readable.
My analysis revealed that Homer frequently employs formulaic constructions as structural cues for navigating between narrative and direct speech. These recurring phrases function as delimiters in three distinct roles:
Opening delimiters signal that the narrator yields the floor to a character (first‑to‑second order transition). Closing delimiters indicate that a character’s speech has concluded, and the narration resumes (second‑to‑first order transition). Transition delimiters are used when one speaker responds directly to another within a continuous block of dialogue (second‑to‑second order transition).
Opening Delimiters. The sentences that start a speech are highly variable. For instance: “… and he implored all the Achaeans, but most of all the two sons of Atreus, the marshallers of the people:” (Iliad 1.15-1.16) or “… yet the thing did not please the heart of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, but he sent him away harshly, and laid upon him a stern command:” (Iliad 1.24-1.25), or “… and spoke swift-footed Achilles” (Iliad 1.58). Homeric opening delimiters lack a fixed form, yet they sometimes contain the enigmatic formulaic phrase “ἔπεα πτερόεντα [winged words]”, like in “ἀγχοῦ δ᾽ ἱσταμένη ἔπεα πτερόεντα προσηύδα: [and she drew near to his side and spake to him winged words:]” (Iliad 5.123). As noted by a researcher: “All the usages of epea pteroenta / epea pteroent’—without any exceptions—introduce the direct discourse of a character in the epic.” (Françoise Letoublon. Epea Pteroenta (“Winged Words”). Oral Tradition, 1999, Oral Tradition, 14 (2), pp.321–335, p. 331). While all verses containing ἔπεα πτερόεντα are opening delimiters, all opening delimiters do not necessarily contain this expression.
... continue reading