In the history of canonised lyrical texts the few hundred years that passed between the origin of these texts (6th to 5th cent. B.C.) and their getting into the Alexandrian library (3rd cent. B.C.) are veiled in mist. Because of the scarcity of information about the Antiquities this obscurity is unlikely to be dissolved definitively and to general satisfaction. However, the problem can be addressed theoretically, the questions to be answered can be arranged around some focal points, parallelisms can be pointed out, the information available can be gathered and scrutinised and some newly discovered minor details can be added to them. That is how far this paper has purported to go.