constituent elements; the social and psychological interpretation of the themes as myth; the study of parallels in other ancient Greek oral poetry, especially that of Homer and Hesiod, and in other literatures of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean; and finally an examination of how the themes were manifested in the Hymns, a particular group of poems from a particular era of Greek literature. In some of this work, a computer was used. Any given manifestation of a given theme is always realized in the vocabulary of its place and time and of the particular poet, a relationship that is particularly amenable to computer-aided study. The present paper is a report of the way a series of programs developed since 1969 has been used. Since the method and the computer program have many potential applications in literature beyond the specific use to which we have put them, they are described in detail. The results given in this paper are only those from the computerized part of the study, but they tended at all times to corroborate the insights gained by other methods. The programs represent an application to literary material of computer methods first used for information retrieval and propaganda analysis. The purpose of information retrieval is to find documents on a particular topic by matching keywords assumed to belong to that topic against keywords in various documents. The methods of propaganda analysis were designed to study the changing bias ex ibited by the writers of the propaganda by finding what words are commonly conjoined with what others. Our interest was to see how the traditional themes used by ancient Greek oral poets changed in appearance according to the way they were used by each poet. The method in all of these procedures is to determine a particular author's emphasis by a quantitative study of his vocabulary. It differs, however, from a mere frequency count in that one is not only looking at the frequency of individual words, but at the groups or clumps of words that fr quently occur together. In the case of an oral po t, the clumps of words have an additional psychological interest. Since he composes the poetry "live," before an audience, the clumps provide insight into the processes of word association going on in his mind at the moment of composition. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey represent one branch of the o al epic tradition of ancient Greece. The poems of Hesiod belong to another. The Hymns seem to represent a third stream of this tradition; they share the same formulaic diction and the same mythological themes as the works of the two great poets, and it is most likely that they, too, were composed orally.2 Although this corpus of poems in dactylic hexameter has been associated with the name of Homer, it is doubtful that any of them were actually composed by Homer himself. In their present form, they probably date from some time between 700 and 500 B.C. There are 33 poems in all, varying in length from 3 to 580 lines (or "verses," in Classical terminology), each dedicated to one god or to a group of gods, such as the Muses. The longest and most important are the second, to Demeter; the third, to Apollo; the fourth, to Hermes; and the fifth, to Aphrodite.