Odyssey 5.21 · Book 5, line 21

A single formulaic verse: it names the speaker and his fixed epithet before he answers. Homer uses lines like this to pass the floor cleanly from one voice to the next, and the audience hears the familiar frame click into place.

Still, the epithet is not idle here. Zeus answers as νεφεληγερέτα, 'the cloud-gatherer,' the storm-god's own title — and the decree he is about to issue will end, some two hundred lines later, in the storm Poseidon raises to wreck Odysseus's raft. The weather-name sits over the god who governs the very sky the hero must cross.

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