This romanticization of a single genius creating or arranging this work 2500 years ago never stuck with me. Obviously, this seems an anachronism of violently im

This romanticization of a single genius creating or arranging this work 2500 years ago never stuck with me. Obviously, this seems an anachronism of violently imposing the modern concept of authorship. I wouldn't go so far as to declare "The Death of the Author"[0] but I find it a provocative stance against the over-reliance on the supposed, hidden or even unaware intentionality of an author. While it is certainly interesting to entertain the idea of an author it can only be a rudimentary and fragmentary picture at best, given the discontinuity of the text itself, its sources and the time which had since passed. What I find more fascinating than the search for a single authorship is how the written sources give us a peek into a lively oral tradition.[1] What we understand today as "texts" must have been radically different back then, for the vast majority of people at the time there was no such thing as a final reference in the form of a written text, the presenter itself was the source. Infamously in the western tradition Socrates introduced by Plato is known for his refusal to write things down, the arguments given in Phaedrus against writing can be easily discarded today, but I think the effort put into the mastery of the spoken word in order to tell captivating 'stories' (or like in the case of Socrates engaging in arguments) must have been extraordinary to witness back then. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral-formulaic_composition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral-formulaic_composition