Editing Oral tradition (section)

==== Ancient Greece ====
{{See also|Rhapsode|Aoidos}}
"All ancient Greek literature", states Steve Reece, "was to some degree oral in nature, and the earliest literature was completely so".<ref>Reece, Steve. "[https://www.academia.edu/30640456/Orality_and_Literacy_Ancient_Greek_Literature_as_Oral_Literature Orality and Literacy: Ancient Greek Literature as Oral Literature]", in David Schenker and Martin Hose (eds.), ''Companion to Greek Literature'' (Oxford: Blackwell, 2015) 43-57. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200101220823/https://www.academia.edu/30640456/Orality_and_Literacy_Ancient_Greek_Literature_as_Oral_Literature |date=2020-01-01 }}.</ref> [[Homer]]'s epic poetry, states Michael Gagarin, "was largely composed, performed and transmitted orally".<ref>{{cite book |author=Michael Gagarin |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vkfRvkgDTOsC |title=Signs of Orality |publisher=BRILL Academic |year=1999 |isbn=978-9004112735 |editor=E. Anne MacKay |pages=163–164}}</ref> As folklores and legends were performed in front of distant audiences, the singers would substitute the names in the stories with local characters or rulers to give the stories a local flavor and thus connect with the audience, but making the historicity embedded in the oral tradition unreliable.<ref>{{cite book |author=Wolfgang Kullmann |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vkfRvkgDTOsC |title=Signs of Orality |publisher=BRILL Academic |year=1999 |isbn=978-9004112735 |editor=E. Anne MacKay |pages=108–109}}</ref> The lack of surviving texts about the Greek and Roman religious traditions have led scholars to presume that these were ritualistic and transmitted as oral traditions, but some scholars disagree that the complex rituals in the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations were an exclusive product of an oral tradition.<ref>{{cite book |author=John Scheid |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=uZ5JP8gZgJEC&pg=PA17 |title=Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome |date=2006 |publisher=Franz Steiner Verlag |isbn=978-3-515-08854-1 |editor=Clifford Ando and Jörg Rüpke |pages=17–28 |author-link=John Scheid}}</ref>