ABSTRACT
Composing poetry and handing on the poems that have been composed do not require writing. Peculiar word-forms and metrical assumptions present in the Homeric and Hesiodic poems reveal that these poems are only the endproducts of a poetic tradition which certainly stretches back continuously to a stage of linguistic usage earlier than that represented by the Linear B tablets that survive from the last century of Mycenaean Greece. Linguistic and metrical evidence of a similar sort suggests that that poetic tradition was not one shared by the whole Greek world, but one that had particular antecedents in essaly and then in Lesbos and the other Aiolian settlements of Asia Minor, before being taken up by the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor and reimported to mainland Greece, perhaps through Euboia. e tradition of the Homeric epics shows less Ionian inuence on its language than does the tradition of the Hesiodic poems, and this may suggest that poetry of the sort we know from Hesiod had a slightly shorter history.
