‘swift-footed Achilles’, ‘unharvested sea’, ‘cloud-gathering Zeus’, and so on. Such phrases, known in modern scholarship as formulae, are not only frequent, they are systematic. If the poet says that Achilles is doing something and wants him to occupy five syllables at the end of a line, he calls him ‘noble Achilles’. If he wants him to occupy seven syllables, he calls him ‘swift-footed Achilles’.
