Homer Against the Attention Economy  

Every design choice in the modern attention economy (the infinite scroll, push notifications, the autoplay feature on streaming services) rests on a single premise: repetition is friction, and friction is the enemy. Novelty keeps us moving, while familiarity makes continuing a certain course of action feel effortless. What matters is not whether the next thing is new or familiar, but that there is always a next thing. 

The internet makes the mechanism obvious, but the same logic now governs almost everything that competes for attention. Books open with increasingly graphic or high-stakes scenes. Films, series, and video games escalate spectacle and extremity. Art itself often chases shock as the default register. But escalation has a ceiling: the shock that works today has to get louder tomorrow just to register at all, and a culture running on that treadmill spends more and more energy to feel less and less impact. 

Yet familiarity has its place. Repetition is cognitive infrastructure: the scaffolding that lets memory form, identity cohere, and culture survive transmission from one mind to another. Many people report a subjective decline in sustained focus that follows the rise of the smartphone. Viral statistics about goldfish and shrinking attention spans deserve skepticism, yet the underlying concern is real. 

Written culture has learned to treat repetition itself as a flaw: redundant padding to be cut or a sign of insufficient originality. Translators of Homer’s ancient Greek have wrestled with this same tension for a century, and they haven’t agreed on an answer.  

Repetition in Translation 

Peter Green’s translation of the Odyssey keeps Homer’s repeated epithets and formulaic phrases fully intact. Achilles remains “swift-footed” whether he is fighting or sitting in his tent. Green’s English is plain and meant to be read aloud; he preserves the repeated epithets and formulaic phrases precisely because the repetition itself is part of the point. Read Green and you will hear “wine-dark sea” and “rosy-fingered dawn” exactly as Homer repeated them. 

Robert Fagles took the opposite approach. Uncomfortable with straight repetition, he worked to make the epithets contribute to the drama of each moment. Where Homer has Hector carry his “shining helmet” unchanged from line to line, Fagles makes the helmet flash repeatedly, until the device starts to feel more like a cinematic lighting effect than a Homeric formula.  

More recently, Emily Wilson made the choice consciously rather than instinctively. She explained to the Chicago Review of Books that repetition means something different depending on who is listening: in Homer’s oral culture, repetition signaled that something is important and worth listening to and remembering. Back in 2017 she shared in that same interview her belief that in a literate culture like ours, the same repetition reads instead as unimportant, something to skip. She therefore chose to preserve the feeling of Homer’s repetition through variation, rather than reproduce the exact words. Dawn still appears as often as she does in the Greek, and each appearance keeps the recurring imagery of roses, flowers, pinkness, fingers, and newness, but the phrasing changes from occurrence to occurrence. 

Wilson has since reconsidered that decision. After finishing her Iliad and living longer with the Homeric material, she returned to the Odyssey and began an entirely new translation. In a March 2026 talk at the University of Iowa titled “Realms of Gold: Re-translating Homer in the Twenty-First Century,” and in subsequent interviews, she has said that her experience has changed her understanding of repetition: she now sees more clearly how repeated phrases create patterns across the poem and help readers recognize connections between scenes. She is allowing herself more lines and syllables than in the first version precisely so that more of those repetitive elements can remain. The fact that she is willing to redo one of the most successful and widely read translations of the last decade because of this shift is rare and revealing. 

Three serious translators, three different verdicts on the same literary challenge—yet notice what they agree on even while disagreeing: none of them treats Homeric repetition as an accident. Green preserves it for the ear. Fagles varied it enough to disguise it. Wilson first tried to translate its function rather than its words, and is now testing whether a literate audience can tolerate more of the original texture than she once believed. The debate is not over whether repetition matters. It is over what to do with a technology built for the ear once it has been transplanted into a medium built for the eye. 

Homer’s Memory Technology 

Green’s instinct is closer to mine: repetition wasn’t merely an effect Homer was after; it was the mechanism itself. Poets today still use Homer’s phonetic, poetic, and literary devices; when a poet repeats a sentence, it is because he wants readers to remember it. Similarly, when a writer uses a recurring motif or catchphrase, he is trying to engage the reader’s attention and memory. 

The techniques Homer’s poets used were only later called “mnemonics.” But the devices baked into the poems look identical to the ones in a student’s flashcard deck. Human memory hasn’t changed; only our patience with it has. 

One of the main methods Homer used is known today among linguists as chunking. A phrase like “swift-footed Achilles” isn’t two words to the singer’s mind; it is one. The name and the epithet have fused into a single retrievable unit, so what would otherwise be separate pieces of information—a hero, a quality—a specific meter collapses into a single mental “click.” This is exactly what language learners are doing when they group a phone number into three chunks instead of ten digits or bundle a set of vocabulary under one theme instead of memorizing each word in isolation. The formula is chunking with three thousand years of use behind it: proof that the mind has always preferred to carry fewer, denser units rather than many loose ones. 

Take the epithet. “Resourceful Odysseus,” “grey-eyed Athena,” “wine-dark sea.” These aren’t merely decorative. They’re the keyword method, running in reverse: instead of linking a foreign word to a familiar one, the poet links a familiar name to a fixed sound-pattern, so the singer’s mouth can produce the phrase before the mind has finished composing the next line. This is exactly what happens when a French learner pictures a giant pomme (apple) to lock in the word, a stable, sensory hook doing the retrieval work that raw memorization can’t. 

Type-scenes do the same job at a larger scale. The arming sequence of greaves, breastplate, sword, shield, helmet, spear, always in that order, is a memory palace with the walls already built. The poet isn’t inventing structure in real time; he’s walking a known route and hanging new details on fixed pegs. A language learner building a mental house of vocabulary, or working through a peg system of numbered associations, is doing the identical thing: offloading the burden of structure onto a stable scaffold, so the mind is free to handle only what’s actually new. 

And the poem’s flat-out repeated lines, the messages delivered word-for-word, the dawn formula recurring untouched scene after scene, are nothing but spaced repetition. The line doesn’t change because it doesn’t need to; each recurrence is another pass that deepens the groove. This is the same principle behind a flashcard you review five times instead of once: not more information, more traction. 

These were not lazy padding; they were cognitive tools that allowed a singer to compose in performance, listeners to follow and remember, and a tradition to survive across generations without writing.  

Human Infrastructure 

Repetition is a feature of human nature, not a bug to be edited out. 

Recovering respect for it in education, language learning, liturgy, storytelling, and even ordinary conversation is part of resisting the attention economy’s demand that everything be new, fast, and disposable. Homer still teaches us how memory actually works when it is allowed to be human. 

Even ordinary conversation reveals how deeply repetitive human beings are. Linguists call these exchanges phatic: speech whose primary purpose is not to convey new information but to establish, maintain, or reaffirm social connection. I have seen this all my life. My mother can register my mood before I have finished saying “good morning.” The words themselves are almost secondary; what matters is the repeated act of opening the channel, carrying tone and presence that no transcript can capture. 

On the page, stripped of voice, timing, and presence, the same phrases can look empty or sentimental. In life they function as relational infrastructure. Each recurrence does not mainly add new data; it renews the bond, signals continued presence, and keeps the channel open. The repetition itself is the point. 

This is why language instruction begins with a small set of ritual formulas (Bonjour, Καλημέρα, Buenos días, Good morning, and the various forms of “I love you”) long before students meet complex grammar. These are not chosen because they are the most informative sentences in the language. They are chosen because they are the minimal repeated acts that allow human connection to begin and continue.  

In some cultures, the verbal formula is regularly paired with a further ritual. In Brazilian Portuguese a greeting is often followed at once by a request for a benção (a blessing), especially when addressing parents or grandparents. Among the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania, a younger person lowers the head and an elder responds by touching it, combining greeting, respect, and blessing in a single ceremonial act. In Japan, arigatō (thank you) is commonly accompanied by a bow. Words and gesture form one repeated unit. What looks like simple politeness is actually a compact social technology built on recurrence. 

Language learning starts here for the same reason ordinary life does: this is how people orient themselves toward one another. What looks redundant when flattened onto the page turns out to be load-bearing when it remains embodied and repeated. In this respect, the humble greeting and the declaration of love belong to the same family as Homer’s formulas. Both show that we do not merely tolerate repetition. We depend on it. 

Modern digital life runs on the opposite premise. Algorithmic feeds, infinite scroll, even our literary taste: all of it prizes perpetual novelty over return. We summarize, skip, and optimize, mistaking compression for progress. But nothing that matters to us was ever built in a single pass. Character isn’t formed by one good decision; it’s formed by the same decision, repeated, until it becomes who you are. A relationship isn’t secured by one “I love you”; it’s secured by the thousandth one. A language isn’t learned by hearing a word once; it’s learned by meeting it again, and again, until it stops being foreign. Homer’s singers understood that the mind doesn’t hold on to what’s new, it holds on to what returns. 

The attention economy is betting that we’ve forgotten this. Homer is still around to remind us we haven’t. 

 Image licensed via Adobe Stock.