The epithet is connected with dolphins ( Greek δελφίς ,- ῖνος ) in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo ( line 400 ), recounting the legend of how Apollo first came to Delphi in the shape of a dolphin, carrying Cretan priests on his back.

This district, which, under the name of Pieria ( Ancient Greek ," Πιερία ") or Pieris ( Ancient Greek ," Πιερίς "), is mentioned in the Homeric poems, was, according to legend, the birthplace of the Muses and of Orpheus, the father of song.

Milman Parry rigorously defended the observation that the extant Homeric poems are largely formulaic, and was led to postulate that they could be shown entirely formulaic if the complete corpus of Greek epic survived ; ;

The story indicates that Epimenides was probably heir to the shamanic religions of Asia, and proves together with the Homeric hymn, that Crete had a resisting religion up to the historical times.

The archaic ( Homeric ) pronunciation of the name was approximately.

It was brought to the gods in Olympus by doves, so it may have been thought of in the Homeric tradition as a kind of divine exhalation of the Earth.

Alexander Pope was inclined to give Homeric nods the benefit of the doubt:

" Thus Thrax, like contemporary Alexandrian scholars who edited Attic Greek and Homeric texts, was concerned with facilitating the teaching of classic Greek literature to an audience who spoke Koine Greek.

Moses I. Finley observes " this typical bit of fiction must mean that there was an old Theban hero Hector, a Greek, whose myths antedated the Homeric poems.

According to the Homeric Hymn III to Delian Apollo, Hera detained Eileithyia to already prevent Leto from going into labor with Artemis and Apollo, since the father was Zeus.

The formative influence played by the Homeric epics in shaping Greek culture was widely recognized, and Homer was described as the teacher of Greece.

Independent of the question of single authorship is the near-universal agreement, after the work of Milman Parry, that the Homeric poems are dependent on an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets ( aoidoi ).

Another version, in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo and in an Orphic hymn, states that Artemis was born before Apollo, on the island of Ortygia, and that she helped Leto cross the sea to Delos the next day to give birth there to Apollo.

Little is known of the latter two ( both teachers of Latin ), but Alexander was a major littérateur, the leading Homeric scholar of his day.

Assonance, where the use of similar vowel sounds within a word rather than similar sounds at the beginning or end of a word, was widely used in skaldic poetry, but goes back to the Homeric epic.

There is a Homeric hymn to Poseidon, who was the protector of many Hellenic cities, although he lost the contest for Athens to Athena.

Persephone was gathering flowers with Artemis and Athena, the Homeric hymn says — or Leucippe, or Oceanids — in a field when Hades came to abduct her, bursting through a cleft in the earth.

In the Homeric hymn the ritual is connected with the myth of the agricultural god Triptolemos The high point of the celebration was " an ear of corn cut in silence ", which represented the force of the new life.

Part of the reason for her disappearance from the standard canon was the predominance of Attic and Homeric Greek as the languages required to be studied.

Most classical Greeks thought that the war was an historical event, but many believed that the Homeric poems had exaggerated the events to suit the demands of poetry.

As " first to be devoured ... and the last to be yielded up again ", Hestia was thus both the eldest and youngest daughter ; this mythic inversion is found in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite ( 700 BC ).

Homeric Thrace was vaguely defined, and stretched from the River Axios in the west to the Hellespont and Black Sea in the east.

Finley detected only few authentic Mycenean beliefs in the eighth-century Homeric world, but Nilsson suggested that the Mycenean religion was the mother of the Greek religion.

However certain elements in some Greek cults indicate the survival of some older cults from a less rationalized world, old cults of the dead, agrarian magic, exorcism of evil spirits, peculiar sacrifices, and animal headed gods, In the Homeric poems the avenging Fate was probably originally a daemon, acting in parallel with the gods.

Plutarch mentions an interesting element of Epirote folklore regarding Achilles: In his biography of King Pyrrhus, he claims that Achilles " had a divine status in Epirus and in the local dialect he was called Aspetos " ( meaning unspeakable, unspeakably great, in Homeric Greek ).

It was named Achílleion ( Αχίλλειον ) after the Homeric hero Achilles.

Albert B. Lord suggests that the Homeric poems were dictated to a scribe by a minstrel who held in his mind the poems fully matured but did not himself possess the knowledge of writing since it would be useless to his guild, and Magoun argues that the Beowulf poet and Cynewulf may have dictated their verse in the same fashion.

Thinking that Homeric Troy must be in the lowest level, Schliemann and his workers dug hastily through the upper levels, reaching fortifications that he took to be his target.

Other works, such as the corpus of Homeric Hymns, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia (" The Frog-Mouse War "), and the Margites were also attributed to him, but this is now believed to be unlikely.

The Batrachomyomachia, Homeric Hymns and cyclic epics are generally agreed to be later than the Iliad and the Odyssey.

According to the Homeric hymn, the goddesses who assembled to be witnesses at the birth of Apollo were responding to a public occasion in the rites of a dynasty, where the authenticity of the child must be established beyond doubt from the first moment.

It continues to be read in the Homeric Greek and translated into modern languages around the world.

In the Homeric poems, there seems to be a lingering cultural memory of human sacrifice in King Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia ; several of the stories of Trojan heroes involve tragic human sacrifice.

" In fact one modern scholar has observed in Bacchylides a general tendency towards imitation, sometimes approaching the level of quotation: in this case, the eagle simile in Ode 5 may be thought to imitate a passage in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter ( 375 – 83 ), and the countless leaves fluttering in the wind on " the gleaming headlands of Ida ", mentioned later in the ode, recall a passage in Iliad ( 6. 146 – 9 ).

Despite any difficulties with Homer's description of the island, in classical and Roman times the island now called " Ithaca " was universally held to be the home of Odysseus ; the Hellenistic identifications of Homeric sites, such as the identifications of Lipari as the island of Aeolus, are usually taken with a grain of salt, and attributed to the ancient tourist trade.

In Ovid's retelling, placed in the mouth of the aged Homeric hero Nestor, Caenis, the daughter of Elatus ( a Lapith chieftain ) and Hippea, was raped by Neptune, who then fulfilled her request to be changed into a man so that she could never be raped again ; he also made Caenis invulnerable to weaponry.

Once paired in later myths with her Titan brother Hyperion as her husband, " mild-eyed Euryphaessa, the far-shining one " of the Homeric Hymn to Helios, was said to be the mother of Helios ( the Sun ), Selene ( the Moon ), and Eos ( the Dawn ).

Whenever and wherever Eudocia needed to express greatness, pain, truthfulness, deceit, beauty, suffering, mourning, recognition, understanding, fear, or astonishment, there was an apt Homeric line or passage ready in her memory to be recalled.

The noble sentiment of line 1 seems to be original yet the vocabulary is entirely Homeric and, though lines 5 – 7 are adapted from Homer's Iliad ( 13. 130 – 33 ), there is an important difference: Homer describes the advance of one side in close formation, whereas Tyrtaeus describes two sides meeting in the hoplite style of fighting.

" The whole collection, as a collection, is Homeric in the only useful sense that can be put upon the word ;" A. W. Verrall noted in 1894, " that is to say, it has come down labeled as ' Homer ' from the earliest times of Greek book-literature.

This still places the older Homeric Hymns among the oldest monuments of Greek literature ; but although most of them were composed in the seventh and sixth centuries, a few may be Hellenistic, and the Hymn to Ares might be a late pagan work, inserted when it was observed that a hymn to Ares was lacking.

In his American publications of the 1930s Parry introduced the hypothesis ( first suggested to him by Meillet and amply demonstrated in his own fieldwork ) that the formulaic structure of Homeric epic is to be explained as a characteristic feature of oral composition ( the so-called Oral Formulaic Hypothesis ).