Aoidos

The Greek word aoidos (ἀοιδός) referred to a classical Greek singer. 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).

In classical Greek the word aoidos, "singer", is an agent noun derived from the verb aeidein (ὰείδειν) or adein (ᾄδειν), "to sing". It occurs several times in varying forms in the Iliad and Odyssey in relation to poetry:

In the world described in these poems writing is practically unknown (though its use is implied in one minor episode, the story of Bellerophontes); all poetry is "song", and poets are "singers". Later, in the fifth and fourth centuries, the performance of epic poetry was called rhapsodia, and its performer rhapsodos, but the word does not occur in the early epics or in contemporary lyric poetry, so it is unknown whether Hesiod and the poet(s) of the Iliad and Odyssey would have considered themselves rhapsodes (it has been argued by Walter Burkert, and is accepted by some recent scholars, that rhapsodos was by definition a performer of a fixed, written text and not a creative oral poet). It is not even known to what extent the makers of oral epic poetry were specialists. Phemius and Demodocus, in the Odyssey, are depicted performing non-epic as well as epic songs.

There was, however, certainly a profession of aoidos. Eumaeus, a character in the Odyssey, says that singers (aoidoi), healers, seers and craftsmen are likely to be welcomed as guests, while beggars are not; outside the world described by Homer, Hesiod gives a similar list in the form of a proverb on professional jealousy:

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