The author, on grounds of certain aspects of the diction concerning the term ἀνήρ in the poem, detects the heritage of an oral gnomic tradition, independent of the Homeric one. In the great majority of the cases when ἀνήρ appears in the Works the term goes together with an adjective originating a series of «formulae», of which a certain number appears in the rest of the traditional poetry only very occasionally. When they appear at all they do so in aphorisms, or else in passages which are presumably more recent. In the more numerous group of such syntagmata the adjective is a hápax in Hesiod and Homeric poetry; but since the metric-morphologic structure of each one of those formulae tits other types of formulae external to the poem itself, the presence, therefore, of these parallels guarantees the traditional base of the former.