Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / Elizabeth Minchin -- Poetry in Performance The Audience Expects: / Adrian Kelly -- The Presentation of Song in Homer’s Odyssey / Deborah Beck -- Comparative Perspectives on the Composition of the Homeric Simile / Jonathan Ready -- Composing Lines, Performing Acts: / Anna Bonifazi and David F. Elmer -- Works and Days As Performance / Ruth Scodel -- Literacy and Orality Empowering the Sacred: / McComas Taylor -- Prompts for Participation in Early Philosophical Texts / James Henderson Collins II -- Performing an Academic Talk: / Patrizia Marzillo -- The Criticism—and the Practice—of Literacy in the Ancient Philosophical Tradition / Mathilde Cambron-Goulet -- Reading Books, Talking Culture: / Jeroen Lauwers -- Eumolpus Poeta at Work: / Niall W. Slater -- Index / Elizabeth Minchin.

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The ninth meeting in the international Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World series - in the fiftieth year since the publication in 1960 of Albert Lord's The Singer of Tales - took as its theme 'Composition and Performance'. This volume contains a selection of those papers, several of which illustrate methodologically innovative approaches to the act of composition, the nature of performance, and vocalization in text. Under consideration are Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Isocrates, the orators of the Second Sophistic, and Proclus. Cross-cultural studies include, amongst others, South Slavic epic and a text from the Sanskrit archive.