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Humans have long been using writings and oral traditions to pass on and preserve ways of life and stories with useful lessons and morals. One of the most interesting ways the oral tradition was used to keep religious information spreading and evolving was used by Ancient Greeks. For the most part, the classic religious epic literature that we have today attributed to Homer, for example, was almost exclusively composed and performed as an oral tradition. The oral traditions in Ancient Greece were paramount to Greek culture. Prehistorically, oral poets would compose and perform their songs about the creation of the world, gods and goddesses, and stories that accounted for a mix of real and fictional events; the truth is often attributed to have been embellished for drama, whereas the fictional stories would include names of people that were common enough to have potentially existed in reality in order to blur the lines between fact and fiction, making all the poems both more and less believable.

This furthers the agenda of Ancient Greek literature and storytelling: the point was to impart concepts of morality through parables and examples, instead of having a type of how-to manual that many religious Holy Books are considered to be today. A poet would compose a song, and then perform it, and poets would travel often and learn from one another, so each poet would have a different compendium of stories in the back of their minds to tell. Often poets would have been and then have taken on apprentices at some point, so to give the newer generation of bards a starter-pack of songs to sing until they could compose their own.

This level of knowledge sharing meant that most of the most popular and well-known stories began to be debated extensively on meaning, finessing the concept of morals of stories. Each new person that learned the story, poet or not, would take it in a different way, as well, which lead to innumerable copies of the story with slight differences being spread rapidly. However, in the most popular ones, often the main facts didn't change: names of major characters remained the same, general actions and outcomes remained the same, and the moral of the story was often left the same. This way, there was a form of religious unity, since the general interpretation of the core, unchanged aspects of the story remained relatively similar, while smaller details became nuanced points of lesser arguments. 

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  1. Knowledge & Communication Sam Henrickson

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