on adjectives

Going back and reading Autobiography of Red again, I'm realizing it's one of those texts where I just wasn't mature enough to really get into or appreciate it when I'd read it previously. But that's besides the point.

The introduction is interesting in how it points out that up through Homer's time (the Greek one, not the yellow one), adjectives were set and fixed. That is, anytime the dawn was mentioned, say, its rosy-fingers were also mentioned. And I remember learning that way back in eigth grade, even; of course, that probably made things easier, as my teacher of yore had pointed out, for all the balladeers reciting stuff from memory, to be able to flow through some stock adjectival description while remember the next part of the story.

But then this dude Stesichoros comes along. He's the guy who wrote the poem that Red is based upon. And, besides it totally twisting around one of Hercules' labors from heroic to tragic, he also blew the whole concept of adjectives out of the water. Instead of using the standards, he threw everything for a loop and started describing things poetically, and I don't have the text in front of me, but reading through his fragments he had some really interesting, clever turns of metaphor. Anyway, as was the point of that introduction, how much did that hep cat Stesichoros matter? I'd say a lot, given his historical and literary context. Otherwise maybe we'd have, say, rappers using the same old, tired, turns of phrase to desribe their wealth and women...oh...wait...hm.