The later twentieth century saw a trend in the study of classical authors from a historical ('diachronic') approach to one that focused more on the author’s own times (a 'synchronic' approach) and on the text itself. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Homer, where the identification of Homer as an oral poet turned critics inward on his text and its special character. This Homer newly created, or 're-created', each instance of epic for each performance and his work was accordingly part of a largely irrecoverable performance tradition, rather than one in a history of interacting texts.

Nevertheless, we cannot really understand Homer, or the emergence of Greek literature, if we have no idea of the tradition that preceded him and of the different uses made of that tradition by poets of his time. And we should not exaggerate the fluidity of these poems: our Iliad and Odyssey were relatively fixed texts, which could be badged 'Homer', as far back as the sixth century BC and probably a good deal earlier. It is credible that the poems of his contemporaries were fixed to a similar extent, making after all a family of 'texts', with a recognisable intertextuality. Depending on our views of what was fixed and what was improvised, we may differ on the nature of this intertextuality: perhaps it will be easier to accept the recognition of the argument between Achilles and Agamemnon as a typical motif, 'argument between heroes', than to see in the sudden appearance of Thetis to lead the lament over Achilles (23.14), the footprint of a specific epic that depicted Thetis mourning the dead Achilles.