Epic Cycle

• 1. Introduction

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  Aristotle, in his Poetics, singled out two poems from the Epic Cycle for a pointed criticism. He said the Cypria and the Little Iliad were built on plots that were too episodic, too loosely structured. From the Little Iliad alone, he said, a playwright could derive more than eight separate tragedies. From the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, only one. That criticism has outlasted the poems it described. Eight poems made up the Epic Cycle. Six of them are entirely gone. Their plots survive in outline, their titles are known, but the verses themselves have been missing for more than a thousand years. All of it once formed part of an oral tradition that developed during the Greek Dark Age. That tradition was rooted in localized hero cults. It preserved memories of Mycenaean Bronze Age events through the lens of Iron Age Greece.

• 2. The Eight Poems

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  The Cypria, the poem that opens the Cycle, ran to eleven books. It was most commonly attributed to a poet named Stasinus. Beginning before the war itself, it covered the judgment of Paris and the events that brought the Greek armies to Troy. The Cypria carried the story through the first nine years of the conflict. The Aethiopis, attributed to Arctinus and five books long, picked up directly after the Iliad's close. Two Trojan allies arrived in this poem: Penthesileia the Amazon and Memnon of Ethiopia. Both died at Achilles' hands, each in revenge for the death of his companion Antilochus. Achilles himself died in this poem as well.

  The Little Iliad was four books long, attributed to a poet named Lesches. It covered events after Achilles' death, including the construction of the Trojan Horse and the award of Achilles' arms to Odysseus. A surviving quotation records that Neoptolemus took the Trojan princess Andromache prisoner after the fall of Troy. The Little Iliad also credited Neoptolemus with killing Hector's son Astyanax during the sack. The two-book Iliupersis, meaning Sack of Troy and also attributed to Arctinus, narrated the destruction of the city. It gave the killing of Astyanax not to Neoptolemus but to Odysseus, contradicting the Little Iliad directly.

  The Nostoi, or Returns, was five books long, attributed to Agias or Eumelus. It followed the Greek leaders home from Troy and concluded with the returns of Agamemnon and Menelaus. The Telegony, two books long and attributed to Eugammon, continued Odysseus' story beyond the Odyssey. It sent him on a voyage to a region called Thesprotia, then back to Ithaca. There he died at the hands of Telegonus, his illegitimate son. The two Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, each ran to twenty-four books and both survive complete. Every other poem in the Cycle was shorter, and none of those survived.

• 3. A Single Damaged Source

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  The 10th-century manuscript known as Venetus A is the most celebrated surviving copy of the Iliad. Tucked into its damaged preface is a summary of the Epic Cycle. That summary is missing the Cypria entirely. Other manuscripts supply that poem, but each preserves only the Cypria and none of the rest. The preface summary is itself an excerpt from a longer work, the Chrestomathy, written by a figure known only as Proclus. Photius, a 9th-century CE Byzantine scholar and clergyman, described the full Chrestomathy in the 239th entry of his encyclopedia, the Bibliotheca. His description is the main reason scholars believe the Venetus A excerpt and the Chrestomathy are from the same source. Proclus himself remains essentially unknown. He is certainly not Proclus Diadochus, the philosopher. Some have proposed that he was Eutychius Proclus, a grammarian who lived in the 2nd century CE. The evidence is thin enough that he may simply be a figure otherwise unknown to history.

  Herodotus, writing his History in the mid-5th century BCE, was among the earliest writers to mention specific Cyclic poems. He knew both the Cypria and the Epigoni. He rejected Homer as the author of the Cypria and raised doubts about the Epigoni too. A work called the Library, attributed to Apollodorus, drew on the same mythological tradition. So did a 2nd-century CE Latin text called the Genealogia, attributed to Hyginus. Stone inscriptions known as the Tabula iliaca also depicted scenes from the same cycle of myths. Knowledge of a Trojan cycle goes back to at least the 4th century BCE. The writer Aristoxenus, in that period, mentioned an alternative opening to the Iliad.

• 4. The Stitching Problem

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  The last line of the Iliad reads: In this way they performed the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses. An alternative version of that same line was preserved alongside it. It replaces the close with: then the Amazon Penthesileia came, daughter of great-hearted man-slaughtering Ares. One ending closes the poem. The other passes the story forward into the Aethiopis. Scholars read this preserved alternative as evidence of deliberate editing. The six non-Homeric plots are arranged so that no two overlap. Each appears to follow smoothly from the last. Whether this integration was the work of the original poets or the result of later editorial stitching remains unresolved. It is one of the central questions in the field. The Cypria raises complications of its own. Some scholars argue it originally covered more of the Trojan War than the surviving summaries suggest. Others hold that it was always designed to end precisely where it does, delivering the story cleanly to the Iliad's opening.

  Neoanalysis is the modern term for the study of how the Homeric epics relate to the rest of the Cycle. Some Neoanalysts argue that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed after the Cyclic poems and drew on them directly. Others take the milder position that all the epics drew on a common legendary tradition, which later crystallized into separate poems. In the late 19th century, the scholar David Binning Monro challenged the concept of the Cycle itself. He argued that the Greek word kyklikos simply meant conventional or formulaic, with no reference to a fixed collection. His conclusion was that the Cycle as a unified anthology was assembled in the Hellenistic period, possibly as late as the 1st century BCE. More recent scholars have pushed that date slightly earlier while accepting his general argument. For Hellenistic scholars, the Cyclic poets bore the label neotерoi, meaning later poets. Being later, in their reckoning, was the same as being inferior.

• 5. The Stories That Survived

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  Virgil's Aeneid, in its second book, recounts the sack of Troy from a Trojan perspective. The Cyclic poem that covered the same events, the Iliupersis, is lost. Ovid's Metamorphoses, in its thirteenth and fourteenth books, drew on Cyclic material as well. From the Cypria it took the Greeks' landing at Troy; from the Little Iliad, the contest over Achilles' armor. Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica fills the gap between the end of the Iliad and the fall of Troy. It narrates the deaths of Penthesileia, Memnon, and Achilles, and the building of the Trojan Horse. That narrative ground once belonged to the Aethiopis, the Little Iliad, and the Iliupersis.

  The death of Agamemnon on his return from Troy stands at the center of the Nostoi. So does the revenge taken by his son Orestes. Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy made the same events the foundation of Greek tragedy. The Cyclic version of Agamemnon's homecoming survived in Aeschylus's hands long after the Nostoi itself was lost.

  Photius, writing in the 9th century CE, described a conception of the Epic Cycle far wider than the modern one. He placed it alongside the Titanomachy, an 8th-century BCE poem about the war of the gods. He also included a Theban series: the Oedipodea, the Thebaid, the Epigoni, and the Alcmeonis. Modern scholars do not normally include those texts in the Epic Cycle. None of them survived either. The Trojan War poems are only the most prominent among a far larger body of ancient Greek epic that has been lost.