Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TuringTest 2302 days ago
> Personally, I think this means the opposite of recitation.

Possibly true, but my point was that Epic Poems would not have been transmitted merely by recitation of exact learned words, but by a rhapsodist learning the story and internalizing it.

Then it would be conveyed as a mixture of repeated learned verses and freestyle improvisation of parts of the story; that would explain how completely new sections appear in the different versions of epic poems.