Study of Transmission of Ancient Greek and Roman Literature

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The oldest extant literature of Greek and Roman antiquity is Homer's epic poems which were formed during the eighth century BC.There was a tradition of the oral creation and transmission behind the Homeric literature. On the other hand the Greek alphabet was invented between the tenth and the eighth century BC and its usage was being propagated slowly in the Homeric times. It resulted from these circumstances that Homer's poems were recorded in letters and were left to us in the form of book, although the mainstream of the transmission of Greek literature after that was still the oral performance for a log time.Oral creation and transmission can be regarded as a form of open culure. Therefore the Homeric epics accepted and integrated various myths and folklore so that they grew into a big tree and became the greatest monument of ancient Greek culture. But it was not only the oral culture of Greek world that they absorbed and assimilated. As Homer lived and worked in Ionia, the west coast of Asia Minor, where people had made cultural exchanges since old times, we can find in the Homeric works many influences of oriental literary culture.This study aimed to clarify various forms of transmission of the ancient literature, especially those of the Greek and Roman epic poetry from Homer's on. We considered interactions between orality and lietracy, but we also paid attention to the questions on acceptance and transformation of the traditional mythic stories which had certain structures. Particularly we were interested in the connections between the Greek and Roman literature and the oriental traditions, which we hope to continue to investigate in our future works.