Aspects of Synonymy in Homeric Diction: An Investigation of Dative Expressions for "Spear"

Abstract

Milman Parry's 1928 dissertation,' insofar as it drew upon and continued the work of earlier scholars, provided a dimension to the findings of DUntzer, Ellendt, Witte, and Meister. Parry pointed out that the coexistence of semantically equivalent but metrically different forms in the Homeric diction was not only the creation of epic verse (cf. the notion of the epic Kunstsprache as a hexametric language),2 but was also due to the need of the epic poets to have metrical alternatives for the sake of easy versification. In other words, many peculiarities of the Homeric language and diction could be shown to have not only a cause, but also a motivation. As is well known, Parry's main concern was to show that by adding epithets to names or substantives, the epic poet had various, metrically different forms at his disposal for one and the same essential idea.3 The regularity in the use of epithets, on the basis of which they form a system, could be shown to lie in their economy: for each relevant metrical form, there was one and only one noun-epithet combination, which suggested that the point of epithets was metrical differentiation in the first place, rather than to contribute to the content of the sentence. The idea that epithets are used in systematic ways for the sake of metrical diversity could be added to the observations made by Parry's predecessors, concerning the occurrence of morphologically and phonologically different alternatives (e.g., dialectal and even artificial forms) for a given word. To these, the same principle of economy applied. A third means to achieve metrical diversity was what can be called functional synonymy, that is, the use of synonyms, not for the sake of stylistic variation, but, again, for the sake of metrical diversity. Parry was aware of the importance of synonymy and introduced the concept in his discussion of noun-epithet