Oral tradition in Athens was of the most fluid kind, its transmission casual, and its lifespan usually short. Apart from much earlier oral poetry, the strict mechanisms for accurate transmission found by anthropologists are absent. The same is probably true of the rest of Greece. This means that memory and oral tradition were peculiarly prone to change and selection according to later beliefs and ideals. In evaluating the reliability of oral tradition as evidence, one must therefore ascertain above all the means of transmission and the length of time since the incidents referred to took place. Large vacuums of ignorance and dramatic telescoping of chronology occur only three or four generations back.

Living oral traditions continued to be transmitted alongside the written histories of the classical period, apparently unaffected by them. The Athenian democracy encouraged a new emphasis on the recent past as a source of prestige more important than legendary origins. Family tradition now had to remember the historical period, and it recorded it with greater precision than the wider traditions. But official tradition and ideals fostered an image of Athens' past in the old aristocratic mould, acquiring for the demos an aristocratic legendary ancestry. Combined with certain democratic ideals, this produced a bare and anonymous past, rendering much of Athens' history irrelevant. However, the popular and general polis traditions maintained much more variety and detail. Between them they could produce traditions of some complexity for perhaps three or four generations. Family traditions were also important in preserving individual memories which were not stereotyped.