This is the premise that Aloni has received from Gentili and that puts him in dialogue with like-minded scholars in other countries, most notably Gregory Nagy, whose sometimes controversial work on performance will be for many the background of their reading of this review. Aloni provides a model, based on comparative anthropology, of the communication of poetry in an oral, traditional society. Authoritative and memorable, oral poetry has a pragmatic function in the self-maintenance and continuity of its culture. The most conspicuous trait of a traditional society is its conservation of identity in time, its faith that nothing ever really changes. Turning to archaic Greece, Aloni refers to myth and ritual as forces for cultural stability.
Stability is illusory, of course.
Things do change. Individuals remember, or think that they remember, while the tradition as a whole changes, forgets, in order to accommodate historical change. In archaic Greece, sung is marked, spoken is unmarked. But song takes various forms, some of which lose melody and retain only rhythm. Meter in particular is a bond that ties poetry to the sphere of the marked and that therefore confers on poetry its special role in the preservation of its audience's group or society.