Abstract

The article shows that in the Archaic period the Greeks did not possess a term equivalent to Classical ποιητής “poet-composer.” The principal meaning of the word άοιδός, often claimed to correspond to ποιητής and modern English poet, was “tuneful” or “singer” . The secondary meaning “poet working in the hexameter medium” is limited to the post-Iliadic hexameter corpus. It is furthermore possible to show that the simplex άοιδός was backderived from a compound. More specifically, following Hermann Koller, I propose that the secondary meaning, being an epic innovation, developed from the compound *θεσπιαοιδός “singer of things divine,” whereas the primary meaning “singer” may go back to έπαοιδός, which later acquired the specialized meaning “singer of incantations.”