Homeric poems are founded in oral tradition but how did Homer overcome the audience's different levels of knowledge and familiarity with particular characters, myths and stories? What narrative strategies were used to make the performance both intelligible and pleasing to the audience? This study looks at how the Homeric tradition functioned and how it was received by an audience. `Scodel lifts the veil on the bard's delicate negotiations with his audience, exposes his rhetoric of traditionality, and unpicks his complicated relationship with the goddess' - Robert Fowler.