An important, but under-examined dimension to Indo-European poetics is the fact that an archaic pattern, simply because it is inherited, can be used to express something which is difficult or out of the ordinary. Being ancient, the pattern may carry with it "baggage" which is important in some new context but which would be awkward if explicitly stated. The topic is one which I have touched on, but not developed fully in three presentations in the past ten years.
An example is Solon 1.2. Having often been defeated by Megara when fighting over Salamis, Solon's fellow-Athenians forbade any further discussion of the matter. Solon, however, circumvented this by composing a poem dealing with Salamis. As I show in "Greek Kosmos 'Order, Arrangement' and Indo-European Poetics", in Actes du XVe Congrès International des Linguistes, vol. 4, pp. 15-18 (1993), Solon sets the stage for this through the use of a traditional formula kosmon epeon "arrangement of words", which has Vedic and Avestan parallels.
Another, Sanskrit example is provided by Rig-Veda 1.114, which I discuss in an unpublished paper, "Rudra-Siva in Rig-Veda 1.114", read at the World Sanskrit Conference, Bangalore, India, January, 1997. (Click here for an abstract of this paper.) Siva is not really a Vedic god, but the use of traditional formulas in Rig-Veda 1.114 serves to accommodate Rudra (the "prototype" of Siva) into the Hindu pantheon.
The use in Greek of "man-slaying", which I discussed at the 2000 UCLA Indo-European conference, is also illustrative. In my UCLA paper and in its expanded version "The Persistence of the Indo-European Formula 'Man-Slaying' from Homer through Gregory of Nazianzus", to appear in the JIES monograph series, though, I merely touch on the question "Who killed Patroklos?"
As everyone knows, the answer is "Hektor". Patroklos himself, though, presents a more complex picture at Iliad 16.849-850, as he says he was slain by fate and Apollo, followed, among men, by Euphorbos, with Hektor being only in third place. Just ten lines previously, at 16.840, Hektor had taunted Patroklos with not having accomplished what Achilleus had undoubtedly spoken of in sending him out against "man-slaying Hektor". This correlates well with the resonances of the combination "man-slaying" elsewhere in Greek, and in Vedic, Avestan, and English. Outside of the Iliad most of the uses of "man-slaying" are with (1) a god, (2) a weapon or implement, (3) a woman or women, or (4) a vegetal product. Each of the three agents Patroklos specifies in 16.849-850 can be correlated with one of these. Apollo is a god (1), Euphorbos' name can be directly correlated, etymologically and phonologically, with phorbe, used in the Iliad only of fodder (4) for horses and asses, and Hektor is presented by Patroklos as merely the implement (2) which struck the coup de grace.
But how are we to accommodate the remaining element - woman? One possibility, which I consider in my JIES article, is to observe that, in addition to Apollo, the divine element also includes the feminine noun moira "fate".
More important, though, is Achilleus, responsible for sending Patroklos out in the first place. This correlates well with the fact that Achilleus himself is later associated with the epithet "man-slaying", as at Iliad 18.317, his hands, as he lays them on Patroklos' corpse, are described as "man-slaying". One can also hear a sequence which starts with Achilleus - "unspeakable" as this may seem - in 16.849-850, as Euphorbos is described as one among mortals, with Hektor being third; if the sequence is just mortals, it cannot be Apollo who stands in first place behind Euphorbos.
Moreover, the "unspeakable" element does not merely draw on an ancient paradigm, it develops it. We can in fact hear Achilleus as a "woman", vis-a-vis Patroklos. The resulting homoerotic element is just under the surface in the Iliad in passages such as 16.100, in which Achilleus separates himself and Patroklos from all the other Achaeans (cf. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 1978: 194). Subdued in Homer's prersentation, this theme is simply assumed in many later Greek texts such as Plato, Symposium - and it also appears to be formulaic as a resonance in the Iliad