Why was storytelling so central to Ancient Greek culture?

Explanation:Early, in various Greek city-states, great storytellers and singers birthed what we call myths. These myths, or stories, represent how they and their ancestors both perceived and related to the world.Before the development of writing, developing a body of stories was the only means  people had to preserve their history. ... Besides preserving history and culture, these stories were exciting, dramatic, and sometimes very sad. In short, they were entertaining because they appealed to the emotions of their listeners.

beowulf is filled with alliterations, caesuras, and kennings intended both to give the epic a musical, rhythmic quality and to assist the bard performing the epic in remembering the lines. just as the lyrics to our favorite songs are easier to remember than a context-free list of names or census data, poetic devices like those listed above stick in the bard's mind.

it is not known if beowulf was chanted, sung, or recited more like a modern day poem, but the poetic devices evident in the epic almost certainly had their origin in memorization and oral recitation.