Register in Early Greek Hexameter Poetry

Abstract This chapter follows on from the previous, but expands the scope of the discussion, in that it thinks about how different sub-genres of early Greek hexameter poetry might have been composed with more or less consistency diachronically. After some discussion and definitions, the chapter discusses what we can know about our main non-heroic sub-genres and their prehistory—cosmogony, didactic, and hymnic hexameter. It then turns to a second argument, picking up a recurring theme of Part 1, which concerns formulae. It is argued that formulae exert a significant analogical pressure in terms of the linguistic archaisms often contained within, and therefore that poems with relatively fewer formulae are therefore less likely to exhibit linguistic archaisms.