Hades’ Famous Foals and the Prehistory of Homeric Horse Formulas

The adjective κλυτόπωλος (of famous foals) appears five times in early Greek poetry, thrice in the Iliad as an epithet of Hades, once in the fragmentary Hesiodic Catalogue in reference to the hero Ion, and later in a very brief fragment from Pindar where it refers to Poseidon.1 The Iliadic corpus, however, provides us the best forum for understanding the word’s usage in oral poetry and opens a special window into the generation of Homeric horse formulas generally.2 In what follows I will show that κλυτόπωλος and a wide array of Homeric expressions used to describe horses should be viewed as part of a unified network of historically and linguistically connected oral formulas. All of the formulas in this network will be shown to relate to ὠκέeς ἵπποι (swift horses), one of the oldest and best attested formulas preserved in Greek from Indo-European poetry’s ancient past. I will argue that the origin of κλυτόπωλος is linked to a wide range of formulas that all convey the idea of “good horses” and that recognizing the position of κλυτόπωλος within this formulaic network helps us to chart the diachronic evolution of this network as a whole. This analysis will, I hope, prove especially useful since existing scholarship does not approach the epithet from the perspective of oral verse mechanics or consider its relationship to other Homeric formulas, but instead focuses exclusively on the mythological and religious significance of the term’s application to Hades, which is difficult to Oral Tradition, 29/1 (2014):149-162