One area of Greek cultural activity that was certainly affected by the introduction of writing was traditional song. It is only thanks to writing that we can study what we call, in a significant divergence from the Greeks, their early “literature.” The translation of Greek song into texts is easily taken for granted, but I will try to show how the very creation of “classical” literature and its perennial reuse as a special source of knowledge and pleasure depended upon the ways that song texts were put to use in the latter part of the classical period. My focus will be on how the Greeks read what we might call, reverting to a Greek term, their poetry, except that my argument will imply that the very notion of poetry as the production (poiēsis) of self-standing works of verbal design, of poiēmata rather than of songs, was a new conception of the ancient singer's art and one that was fostered by an increasing tendency through the fifth century to consult and study songs in the form of written texts.

The “song culture” of my title is taken from John Herington's Poetry into Drama, which documented the ways in which Greek poetry was regularly presented and often preserved through oral performances rather than through writing and reading. Herington was able to see that, though written texts of poems were far from unknown in early Greece, “texts were no part of the performed poem as such” until well into the fifth century.