Oral Story Telling and the Transmission of Texts

i'm obsessed with the idea of how and why some texts survive when others don't. One of the things that albert lord and other oralists show really convincingly is that theme creates diction and structure. We do know that the text we have was probably written down in athens, and it was probably influenced by athenian power and money around the time of the persian wars. But then nobody read it. And so this goes back againm to the problem of transmission. When you write down an oral tradition, people like don't read the transcript. So minna scota yenson has a book called homer where she says what likely happened is that if they were written down