The early Greek hexameter poems that survive intact are the two Homeric epics; the Hesiodic Theogony, Works and Days, and Shield; thirty-one Homeric Hymns; and about two hundred short inscriptions. Homer comprises 27,803 lines of verse; the other poems comprise another 5,000 lines or so. But we can safely infer that there was once much more. For one thing, we are lucky to have what we do: as a general principle, the texts we have inherited through mediaeval manuscripts represent only a sample of what was available in ancient libraries. For another, in ancient authors who do survive we find references to over a hundred other poems or poets that were available to them but are now lost. In several cases we have indications of considerable length.

Is early hexameter poetry a single genre? Would it be useful to refer to the entire corpus as ‘epic’? The answer depends on context. The word ‘epic’ poses problems. This becomes a little clearer if we consider the Oxford English Dictionary definition:

Some of the generic elements we looked at in the last chapter were thematic, some stylistic, and some purely formal. An exhaustive catalogue would be impractical – not to mention tedious. But, taken together, generic elements like these constitute the traditional side of hexameter poetry. Typical features are the ones that define the tradition as a tradition: if poets repeat a feature, then it propagates successfully, survives, and becomes a traditional element of hexameter poetry. Or, to put it more aphoristically: repetition is tradition.

Archaic hexameter poetry could be declaimed by a rhapsode; in some circumstances it could also be sung or chanted to the accompaniment of a lyre. Beyond that we know disappointingly little about performance practices or about the social context of performance. Even Homer is only a partial exception. We know that Homeric epic was performed competitively at the Great Panathenaea festival in Athens, but that was not its only possible setting and we have no reliable evidence at all about its original setting. With Hesiod we know even less. We must make do with isolated snippets of information and hints. This chapter cannot offer many answers: only present what relevant information is available and indicate which kinds of guesses are reasonable ones.

We have lost much more early hexameter poetry than we have intact. We possess a certain amount of information about the lost poems, and even quotations from them, but only in a minority of cases: for the most part, we do not possess any fragments of their text. In several cases where a poem is attested by only a single source, we cannot even be certain that it really existed.

The first part of this final chapter outlines some modern scholarship on the ways in which ancient poems and poetic traditions developed around one another and interacted with each other. The second part of the chapter is more to do with ancient textual transmission and presents a catalogue of evidence for ancient editorial manipulation of the boundaries between poems, here described as ‘cropping’ and ‘splicing’.