Some other literary devices, such as catalogs and digressions, may seem tedious to the modern reader. To his audience in ancient Greece, however, Homer's various lists of heroes or villains were familiar.
For modern readers, the epic also has an unusual amount of repetition. Nevertheless, this repetition is one of the features of oral tradition that help to identify The Odyssey as a primary epic. Repetition was used as a touchstone for the rhapsode; it helped him keep his place. Repetition aided the listener in the same way.
