Iliad 19.084–085

Agamemnon says that he will say a mūthos, and the word occurs twice here: I.19.084, I.19.085. As Richard Martin (1989) has shown, this word as used in Homeric poetry means ‘wording that is spoken for the record’. Thus mūthos “is a speech-act indicating authority, performed at length, usually in public, with a focus on full attention to every detail” (Martin 1989:12). Another example of mūthos occurs at I.19.107, where it is Zeus who says something for the record, ‘wording spoken for the record’. In Homeric terms, any wording that is called a mūthos by the Master Narrator himself in the act of actually quoting the words of the wording will have the prestige of reality—to the extent that the listeners were actually expected to accept the idea that such wording had once upon a time been really spoken exactly as quoted. In short, any mūthos that is quoted in Homeric poetry must be real because it is supposedly spoken for the record by Homer himself. The modern word myth, derived from post-Homeric uses of the word mūthos, has obviously veered from the Homeric meaning (HQ 119-125, 127-133, 152).