Aoidos

In modern Homeric scholarship aoidos is used by some as the technical term for a skilled oral epic poet in the tradition to which the Iliad and Odyssey are believed to belong (compare rhapsode).

[2] In classical Greek the word aoidos, "singer", is an agent noun derived from the verb aeidein (ὰείδειν) or adein (ᾄδειν), "to sing".

Hesiod describes how the Muses visited him while he tended his sheep on Mount Helicon and granted him this inspiration, permitting him to sing of the future as well as the past.

For narrative (epic) poetry it is sometimes said that the audience was exclusively male; this is an exaggeration (for example, Penelope listens to, and interrupts, one performance depicted in the Odyssey) but it is probably largely true owing to the seclusion of women in early Greece.

[8] In oral narrative traditions there is no exact transmission of texts; rather, stories are transmitted from one generation to another by bards, who make use of formulas to aid in remembering vast numbers of lines.