Hecuba goes ahead and does what she has been told to do, which is, to offer a peplos ‘robe’ for Athena as the goddess of the citadel of Troy. The repetition of ritual wording in the sequence of three passages—from I.06.090–093 to I.06.271–273 to I.06.286–296—will culminate in a master plan, as it were, for performing the ritual of presenting the peplos ‘robe’ to Athena as goddess of Troy. What has just been described as a “repetition,” however, needs to be explained further (HPC 268):
In this sequence of three passages [I.06.090–093 to I.06.271–273 to I.06.286–296], we see three consecutive restatements of the same ritual act. I say three restatements instead of one statement and two restatements because none of the three passages is basic, from the standpoint of traditional formulaic diction. Not one of the three passages is formulaically predictable on the basis of the other two passages. To put it another way, the variation that we find in the three passages shows that none of the three forms is formally prior to the other two. What priorities we find are purely a function of the narration, not of any chronological order in the composition of the three passages. In terms of oral poetics, such variation is a display of virtuosity in the art of composition in performance.