There are long and formal speeches by many characters. You will not have any trouble spotting these. Sometimes they happen in the heat of battle and other seemingly inappropriate times, but more often they occur at various kinds of meetings, as in an assembly of the chieftains. Gods intervene in the affairs of human beings in these stories. Of course, no one else present can she her .
Epics frequently have epic digressions.
These are passages that do not further the action of the story because they are asides or because they are repetitions. Remember that these recitations did not have TV replay shots. The audience had to remember a vast amount of material, so redundancy or reminding them of background material would have been helpful to them. The settings of these stories are vast. The stories use the epic simile.