Abstract The adjective (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
