Epithet - Literature

Literature

Epithets are characteristic of the style of ancient epic poetry, notably in that of Homer or the northern European sagas. See above, as well as epithets in Homer. When James Joyce uses the phrase "the snot-green sea" he is playing on Homer's familiar epithet "the wine-dark sea". The phrase "Discreet Telemachus" is also considered an epithet.

The Greek term Antonomasia, in rhetoric, means substituting any epithet or phrase for a proper name, as Pelides, signifying the "son of Peleus", to identify Achilles; an opposite substitution of a proper name for some generic term is also sometimes called antonomasia, as a Cicero for an orator. However, it should be noted that the use of a father's name or ancestor's name, such as "Pelides" in the case of Achilles, or "Saturnia" in the case of the goddess Juno in Vergil's Aeneid, is specifically called a patronymic device and is in its own class of epithet.

In William Shakespeare's famous play Romeo and Juliet, epithets are used in the prologue, used in the familiar phrase of "star-cross'd lovers" and "death-mark'd love."