What Was the “Epic Cycle” Really?

If you’re at all familiar with early ancient Greek literature, there’s a very strong likelihood that you’ve heard at some point that some ancient authors considered the Iliad and the Odyssey to belong to something called the “Epic Cycle.” This term refers to a particular group of eight epic poems in dactylic hexameter verse that originated from oral tradition during the Greek Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 490 BCE) and that all tell stories about the Trojan War and the mortal heroes who are said to have fought in it.

The poems that are included in the Epic Cycle are, in narrative order of the events they describe: the Kypria, the Iliad, the Aithiopis, the Little Iliad, the Iliou Persis or Sack of Ilion, the Nostoi or Homecomings, the Odyssey, and the Telegoneia. Sadly, of these poems, only the Iliad and the Odyssey have survived to the present day complete. Only a few tiny fragments of the other epics, preserved through quotation by later authors, and prose summaries of their contents remain.

Unfortunately, very few explanations of the Epic Cycle for a general audience exist and the vast majority of the ones that do exist are misleading and written by non-classicists. As a result, most people who are not classics specialists aren’t aware that it existed and most of those who are aware have some serious misunderstandings about what it was. That is why, in this post, I am going to discuss what the Epic Cycle was and—just as importantly—what it wasn’t. For the purposes of this post, I will assume that my readers have some basic knowledge about Greek myths of the Trojan War and at least a vague awareness of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but I will not assume that they have any familiarity with Greek literature, philology, or history beyond this.

Misleading popular descriptions of the so-called “Epic Cycle”

Let’s start out by talking about how most popular explanations of this topic are misleading. For example, an author writing under the pen name Jacopo della Quercia describes the Epic Cycle as follows in an article titled “7 Books We Lost to History That Would Have Changed the World” published on the American humor website Cracked on 12 January 2010:

“[The Epic Cycle is] the rest of the epic saga of Troy which Iliad and Odyssey are sandwiched between. It turns out the whole story of Troy’s fall and Odysseus’ journey home covered a total eight books, and the Greek poet Homer only authored two of them. The remaining six fleshed out all the gaping holes in its plot, such as the death of Achilles, the extent of Paris’ douchebaggery, the Trojan Horse and the spellbinding conclusion to the vast saga. *SPOILERS* Odysseus dies at the end! *END SPOILERS*”

That article is from over ten years ago, but the impression it gives of the “Epic Cycle” is very much still around. Earlier this week, on 30 January 2023, an anonymous Redditor asked the question in r/AskHistorians “What lost literary work has tantalized historians with its surviving fragments?” Another anonymous Redditor gives a reply which begins as follows:

“What some people don’t realize is that the Iliad and the Odyssey are but two epics in an expansive epic cycle which details everything from the start of the war to everyone getting home, with tons of side plots, character spotlights and narratives spread out over the course of more than two decades.”

“So why then, do people only know the Iliad and the Odyssey?”

“Because they’re the only two that survived.”

These descriptions are misleading in two ways. The first is that they make the Epic Cycle sound almost like some kind of ancient Greek equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), giving readers the impression that they were all originally composed together as an intentional series meant to tell one coherent, unified narrative over the course of many installments.

The second way these descriptions are misleading is that they make it sound like the Iliad and the Odyssey are only known better than the other poems of the cycle today because they’re the ones that happened to survive through random chance. As we shall see, the reality quite different.

ABOVE: Promotional image by Marvel showing various characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Don’t think of the Epic Cycle this way.

Background: what scholars know about the origins of the poems of the Epic Cycle

Now that my readers are aware of the misconceptions that are in circulation, let’s talk about the real history, as best as scholars can reconstruct it. The Iliad and the Odyssey are both traditionally attributed to a poet called “Homer.” Modern scholars who study ancient Greek literature, however, basically all agree that “Homer” is a mythical figure, not a real person who actually lived and breathed.

All the poems that are ascribed to the Epic Cycle, including the Iliad and the Odyssey, were (or are) products of a long tradition of oral poetry. During the Greek Archaic Period, there were poets known as ἀοιδοί (aoidoí) (singular: ἀοιδός [aoidós]) who would orally perform epic poems in dactylic hexameter verse at various occasions, including at public contests and festivals and at homes and courts of wealthy or powerful patrons.

The word aoidos literally means “singer” or “bard,” but this denotation is somewhat misleading. Unlike melic poets such as Sappho (whom I discuss in this post I made a couple of weeks ago) aoidoi most likely did not literally sing their poems. Instead, they most likely merely spoke rhythmically while performing, with their voices rising and falling in pitch in accordance with the natural intonation of the Greek language. They typically performed without musical accompaniment, but would often carry a stick which they would tap as they performed to help them keep the right meter and timing.

ABOVE: Detail from the British Museum website showing an Attic red-figure neck-amphora attributed to the Kleophrades Painter dating to between c. 490 and c. 480 BCE, discovered at Vulci in Etruria, currently held in the British Museum, depicting an aoidos (i.e., a performer of epic poetry) standing on a bema (i.e., a platform) holding a knotted stick which he is using to keep the rhythm while he performs

The texts of works of early Greek hexameter poetry that have survived through the manuscript tradition, including the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the various surviving fragments of the other poems of the Epic Cycle, display strikingly formulaic language, including the extensive use of epithets and formulaic phrases. Back in 1930, the legendary classical scholar Milman Parry identified these features as a hallmark of their oral origin (Parry, “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: I. Homer and the Homeric Style,” passim).

Parry convincingly demonstrated that early ancient Greek epic poets did not compose their poems in writing or memorize them word-for-word and recite them. Instead, they plotted out their poems in advance only in outline and then improvised as they were performing, extensively using traditional formulas that had been handed down through generations in order to fill out lines. Thus, the precise wording of an epic and even the plot could vary from one performance to the next.

Somehow or another, the Iliad most likely became more-or-less fixed in something resembling the form in which it has been passed down to the present day sometime around the second quarter of the seventh century BCE or thereabouts. The Odyssey most likely became fixed in such a form sometime shortly thereafter, around the middle of the seventh century BCE. (For more information about the dates of the Iliad and the Odyssey, this blog post by Peter Gainsford, a New Zealand-based scholar of early ancient Greek hexameter poetry, does an excellent job of summarizing the issue for a lay audience.)

There is not enough surviving information to determine a specific, reliable date for when the other poems of the “Epic Cycle” became fixed into something resembling standard forms. That being said, we can at least vaguely say that it most likely happened sometime in the seventh, sixth, or maybe even the early fifth century BCE.

Although many different oral poets almost certainly had a hand in shaping all the poems of the “Epic Cycle,” many scholars (including myself) consider it likely that a single poet is responsible for shaping the Iliad into something resembling the form in which we know it today. A different poet most likely did the same for the Odyssey. No one can know for certain whether a single poet was responsible for shaping the other cyclical epics into standard forms, but it is a likely possibility.

It is similarly impossible for anyone to know with any kind of certainty when any of the poems of the “Epic Cycle” were first written down in their entireties. The most likely transcription date for the Iliad and the Odyssey specifically, though, is sometime in the final quarter of the sixth century BCE or thereabouts. This is the same period in which all the evidence that is currently available indicates that the Iliad and the Odyssey first became widely known throughout the Greek world; before around the 520s BCE, both of these epics seem to have been obscure.

Notably, even though Greek vase painters produced many depictions of scenes of myths pertaining to the Trojan War, paintings that are agreed to depict scenes that are specific either to the Iliad or the Odyssey are rare to nonexistent before the 520s BCE. After this point, though, such scenes seem to have rapidly become far more widespread.

Similarly, unambiguous literary references to the Iliad and the Odyssey are basically nonexistent prior to the 520s BCE, but they suddenly become plentiful after that point (or at least as plentiful as literary references from over 2,500 years ago can be).

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing an Attic black-figure amphora by Exekias dating to between c. 540 and c. 530 BCE depicting the Achaian (i.e., Greek) warriors Achilleus (left) and Aias (right) playing petteia, an ancient Greek board game. This is evidently a scene from the Trojan War, but not one that is ever described or referenced in either the Iliad or the Odyssey.

Early mentions of the lost cyclical epics in surviving ancient sources

As we will see more in a moment, the other poems that are considered to belong to the Epic Cycle never really took off the way the Iliad and the Odyssey did; people in the Greek world were aware of these epics, but they never really became popular.

The earliest surviving securely datable mention of any of the poems in the cycle other than the Iliad and the Odyssey comes from the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE), who very briefly mentions the Kypria in his Histories 2.117 only to point out a narrative discrepancy between it and the Iliad and question its supposed Homeric authorship. He writes, as translated by A. D. Godley, with some minor edits of my own:

“These verses and this passage prove most clearly that the Kypria is not the work of Homer but of someone else. For the Kypria relates that Alexandros [a.k.a., Paris] reached Ilion [i.e., Troy] with Helen in three days from Sparta, having a fair wind and a smooth sea; but according to the Iliad, he wandered from his course in bringing her.”

Herodotos most likely wrote this passage sometime in around the late 430s or early 420s BCE. This indicates that, by at least the early 420s BCE, some Greek authors were already aware of at least the Kypria. Although Herodotos only mentions the Kypria, it is highly probable (but not certain) that all the poems of the so-called “Cycle” were in circulation in some form or another in his time.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of the Greek historian Herodotos, based on an earlier Greek original

Writing a couple of generations after Herodotos, the Greek philosopher Aristotle of Stageira (lived 384 – 322 BCE) in his Poetics 1459a–b criticizes the Kypria and the Little Iliad for being unfocused and diffuse in their plots, expressly contrasting them with the Iliad and the Odyssey, which he describes as more focused. He writes, in the original Ancient Greek:

“οἱ δ᾽ ἄλλοι περὶ ἕνα ποιοῦσι καὶ περὶ ἕνα χρόνον καὶ μίαν πρᾶξιν πολυμερῆ, οἷον ὁ τὰ Κύπρια ποιήσας καὶ τὴν μικρὰν Ἰλιάδα. τοιγαροῦν ἐκ μὲν Ἰλιάδος καὶ Ὀδυσσείας μία τραγῳδία ποιεῖται ἑκατέρας ἢ δύο μόναι, ἐκ δὲ Κυπρίων πολλαὶ καὶ τῆς μικρᾶς Ἰλιάδος πλέον ὀκτώ.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Some [poets] compose about one man and others about one time period and one action with many parts, such as the sort who made the Kypria and the Little Iliad. Thus, from the Iliad and the Odyssey one tragedy might be made for each or two alone, but from the Kypria many and from the Little Iliad more than eight!”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, based on an earlier Greek bronze original by the sculptor Lysippos

The late, retroactive grouping of these epics together as the “Epic Cycle”

Early sources like Herodotos and Aristotle only ever reference poems of the Epic Cycle individually; they display no awareness of any grouping of these poems together as a set. At some point after the time when these authors were writing, though, people began to group the cyclical poems together as a set based on their shared subject matter of the Trojan War.

The earliest evidence for this grouping comes from the Greek writer Aristoxenos of Taras, who flourished in around the mid-330s BCE and quotes an alternate version of the opening passage of the Iliad that someone seems to have edited in order to join it with the Kypria. The eminent British philologist M. L. West argues that this quotation indicates that, by the time Aristoxenos was writing, some people were already thinking of the poems as belonging to one continuous “cycle” (West, The Orphic Poems, 129).

A couple of generations after Aristoxenos, the early Hellenistic Greek poet Kallimachos of Kyrene (lived c. 310 – c. 240 BCE) complains in his Epigram 28 (Pfeiffer): “ἐχθαίρω τὸ ποίημα τὸ κυκλικόν,” which means “I hate the cyclical work.” The scholar of early Greek hexameter poetry Jonathan Burgess interprets this as most likely a reference to the Epic Cycle (Burgess, The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle, 15).

ABOVE: Detail of the frontispiece of an early modern edition of Aristoxenos’s work, showing an illustration of what an artist imagined he might have looked like. (No one knows what he actually looked like.)

The most extensive surviving sources of information about the “Epic Cycle”

These occasional, offhand mentions from well-known ancient Greek writers like Herodotos, Aristotle, and Kallimachos provide invaluable information about the lost poems of the Epic Cycle, but they are not our most extensive surviving sources on the subject. Instead, our most extensive sources come from authors in much later antiquity who are obscure or anonymous.

In particular, sometime during the Roman Principate (lasted c. 27 BCE – c. 284 CE), an obscure ancient writer named Proklos wrote a work titled Chrestomatheia, in which he summarizes each poem of the Epic Cycle. Proklos’s summaries have survived to the present day through their inclusion as excerpts in some early manuscripts of the Iliad, even though the poems he summarizes have not. (You can read a translation of his summaries into Modern English at this link.)

In addition to Proklos, a significant amount of the information that scholars today possess about the lost cyclical epics comes from scholia (singular: scholion), which are ancient scholarly commentaries on literary texts that medieval scribes sometimes copied in the margins of manuscripts of those texts, thereby preserving them.

One particularly important manuscript for ancient scholia is the Venetus A, a parchment codex manuscript that was most likely copied in the Byzantine Roman Empire in around the tenth century CE. This manuscript contains the complete text of the Iliad in the original Ancient Greek along with multiple layers of extensive scholia, which fill up most of the manuscript’s margins, and extracts of the summaries of the Epic Cycle from Proklos’s Chrestomatheia.

ABOVE: Photograph of folio 24 recto of the Venetus A, bearing the beginning of the Iliad, book two, with tons of ancient scholia filling the margins

What the lost cyclical epics were about (according to the extant summaries)

Based on surviving fragments, comments from known ancient writers, Proklos’s summaries, and later scholia, scholars today generally have a good impression of what the overall plots of the lost poems of the Epic Cycle were and which mythic events they each covered. Here is a very brief overview of what the extant summaries tell us:

• The Kypria, the longest of the lost cyclical poems, covered basically the entire mythic history of the Trojan War from the very first seeds of the conflict all the way up to the beginning of the Iliad, including the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the judgement of Paris, Paris’s seduction of Helen, the muster of the Achaian forces, Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his own daughter Iphigeneia to Artemis at Aulis, the arrival of the Achaian army at Troy, and the events of the first ten years of the Trojan War.

• The Aithiopis covered mythic events immediately following the funeral of Hektor, including the arrival of Penthesileia (an ally of the Trojans) and her army of Amazon warriors, Achilleus’s killing of her, the arrival of Memnon (another ally of the Trojans) and his army of Aithiopians, Achilleus’s killing of him, and finally Achilleus’s own death.

• The Little Iliad covered various events from the death of Achilleus leading up to the fall of Troy, including the contest between Odysseus and Aias over Achilleus’s weapons and armor, Aias’s madness upon losing the contest, his subsequent suicide, and his funeral, Odysseus and Diomedes’s visit to the island of Lemnos to retrieve their comrade Philoktetes (where they had abandoned him ten years earlier), Philoktetes’s killing of Paris, Helen’s remarriage to Paris’s brother Deïphobos, the introduction of Achilleus’s son Neoptolemos to the conflict, Odysseus and Diomedes’s theft of the Palladion (a sacred cult statue of Athena) from Troy, and the construction of the Trojan horse.

• The Iliou Persis or Sack of Troy covered the Trojans bringing the Trojan horse into the city, the Achaians coming out of the horse at night to brutally slaughter all the Trojans and burn the city to the ground, the events of the sack, and the Achaians’ division of their spoils afterward.

• The Nostoi or Homecomings covered the story of how all the Achaian warriors except Odysseus returned home and the various misadventures that they encountered on their returns.

• Finally, the Telegoneia, the very last poem of the cycle, which was set long after the conclusion of the Odyssey, covered the story of Odysseus’s tragic death in old age at the hands of his own son Telegonos.

(For more information about what these poems were about, I discuss some of their contents in greater depth this blog post I made back in July 2019.)

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing an Attic black-figure neck amphora by the Swing Painter dating to between c. 540 and c. 530 BCE, currently held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, depicting the judgement of Paris, a myth that was told in the Kypria

Were the lost poems of the Epic Cycle reliant on the Iliad and the Odyssey?

Despite the valuable information that Proklos’s summaries and other sources provide, many aspects of the lost poems of the Epic Cycle remain disputed among scholars, including whether they were reliant on the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The extant summaries leave the impression that each epic picked up exactly or almost exactly where the previous one left off, with few chronological overlaps. Because of this, many scholars have held that the lost epics were composed later than the Iliad and the Odyssey by poets who were both aware of them and consciously trying to imitate them.

Burgess, however, argues that the lost cyclical poems did not originally end and pick up from each other so neatly as the summaries suggest and were therefore not necessarily reliant on the Iliad and the Odyssey or on each other. Instead, he maintains that Proklos’s summaries are based on late texts of the Epic Cycle that someone had deliberately “cropped” to make them fit together more seamlessly (Burgess, “The Non-Homeric Cypria,” passim; The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle, passim).

Stylistic and narrative differences among the poems of the Epic Cycle

Regardless of whether they relied on the Iliad and the Odyssey or were independent, the lost poems of the Epic Cycle certainly had some significant differences from both the extant epics and each other. It’s true that they dealt with many of the same characters and sometimes the same events, but they differed drastically in other aspects, including length.

The standard text of the Iliad that scholars know today contains a total of 15,693 dactylic hexameter lines. The Odyssey is a few thousand lines shorter, at 12,110 lines. Both epics are divided into twenty-four “books” each, with most of these “books” having a length of between four hundred and eight hundred some lines. By sharp contrast, all the lost poems of the Epic Cycle are known to have contained far fewer “books” than either of the surviving epics.

The Kypria, which seems to have been the longest of all the lost poems by far, was only eleven books. After this, the Aithiopis and the Nostoi were both five books each, the Little Iliad was four books, and the Iliou Persis and the Telegoneia were tied for the shortest at only two books each. Assuming that each of these books was around the same length as a book of the Iliad or the Odyssey, the Iliou Persis and the Telegoneia may have each only been somewhere between 800 and 1,400 lines long.

In addition to being much shorter than the Iliad and the Odyssey, the lost poems of the Epic Cycle seem to have been, in general, much faster-paced. They most likely included fewer long descriptions and speeches and most likely featured a greater amount of summarizing and sudden leaps forward in time.

The Kypria, despite being less than half the length of the Iliad or the Odyssey at least in terms of its number of books, is recorded to have covered (most likely at least partly through prolific summarizing and chronological jumping) over a decade of mythic events. Similarly, the Little Iliad seems to have crammed so much material into so little space that it must have moved along at an absolutely breakneck pace, far faster than even the fastest-paced sections of the Iliad or the Odyssey.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing an Apulian red-figure oinochoë dating to between c. 360 and c. 350 BCE, currently held in the Louvre, depicting Odysseus and Diomedes stealing the Palladion from Troy, a myth that was told in the Little Iliad

The cyclical epics didn’t necessarily share the same continuity either. In fact, they seem to have often disagreed about certain details and even sometimes about the overall narrative of events. Even the two surviving epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, sometimes conflict with each other about matters of narrative fact.

For instance, the Iliad 18.382–383 expressly describes the god Hephaistos as being married to one of the Charites (i.e., the Graces, goddesses who were associated with charm, beauty, and creativity). The epic makes no mention of him having ever been married to anyone else. Meanwhile, the epic seems to characterize the goddess Aphrodite as unmarried and never mentions anything about her having ever been married in the past either. An inset story in the Odyssey 8.266–366 that is set at some point during the Trojan War, by contrast, expressly describes Hephaistos and Aphrodite as married to each other.

Some modern myth retellings have tried to reconcile these two different accounts using the convenient excuse that Hephaistos divorced Aphrodite after he caught her having sex with Ares and subsequently remarried to one of the Charites. Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey, however, ever says anything about Hephaistos remarrying and it’s far more likely that the poems simply disagree about which goddess he was married to. (Notably, another early Greek hexameter poem dating to roughly the same time period, Hesiod’s Theogonia 945–946, says that Hephaistos was married to Aglaia, the youngest of the Charites, and says nothing about him ever having been married to Aphrodite.)

ABOVE: Mars and Venus Surprised by the Gods, painted between c. 1606 and c. 1610 by the Dutch Mannerist painter Joachim Wtewael

The surviving prose summaries of the lost poems of the Epic Cycle make it clear that they also sometimes disagreed with each other about important matters of narrative fact. For instance, a scholion on Lykophron’s Alexandra line 1268 records that, in the Little Iliad, Achilleus’s son Neoptolemos is the one who kills Hektor’s son Astyanax, but Proklos’s summary of the Iliou Persis attests that, in that poem, Odysseus is the one who kills him instead.

The lost poems of the Epic Cycle may have also sometimes contradicted the Iliad and Odyssey. For instance, it is not clear whether the Odyssey and the Telegoneia agreed on how Odysseus died. In the Odyssey 11.134–137, the spirit of the blind Theban prophet Teiresias foretells to Odysseus that he will die a quick, painless death from the sea when he is very old and in comfort, saying:

“θάνατος δέ τοι ἐξ ἁλὸς αὐτῷ
ἀβληχρὸς μάλα τοῖος ἐλεύσεται, ὅς κέ σε πέφνῃ
γήραι ὕπο λιπαρῷ ἀρημένον: ἀμφὶ δὲ λαοὶ
ὄλβιοι ἔσσονται. τὰ δέ τοι νημερτέα εἴρω.”

This means, in my own translation:

“And death will come to you yourself from the sea,
one of a very gentle sort, which will strike you
in comfortable old age when you are worn out: and, around you, people
will be happy. And I say these infallible things to you.”

The extant summaries of the Telegoneia attest that, in that epic, it turns out that, while Odysseus was living on the island of Aiaia with the sorceress Kirke, he unknowingly impregnated her with a son named Telegonos, to whom she gave birth after he left the island. Kirke raises Telegonos on Aiaia and, when he reaches manhood, she reveals to him his father’s identity. Wanting to meet his father, Telegonos sets sail for Ithaka, armed with a spear fashioned by Hephaistos with the deadly stinger of a stingray attached to the end.

Telegonos is blown off course by a storm, becomes confused about his location, and comes ashore on Ithaka without realizing which island it is. He pillages Odysseus’s cattle for food and Odysseus, now a very old man, comes to defend his livestock. The father and son fight without recognizing each other and Telegonos pierces his father using his deadly stinger-tipped spear.

As Odysseus lies dying, he and Telegonos recognize each other, but, by this point, it is too late for anyone to save him, so he dies in his son’s arms. Telegonos brings his body to Penelope and Telemachos and they give him a proper funeral on Aiaia. There, Kirke makes Telegonos, Telemachos, and Penelope all immortal, Telemachos marries Kirke, and Telegonos marries Penelope.

Some scholars will argue that the poet of the Odyssey was aware of a version of the myth of Odysseus’s death that occurred in the Telegoneia and that Teiresias’s prediction of his death in the Odyssey accurately foretells this demise, since the Telegoneia did indeed depict his death as coming from the sea (in the form of the deadly stinger at the tip of Telegonos’s spear), and that the epics were consistent. I personally, though, think that Teiresias’s prediction in the Odyssey very much makes it sound like he will die peacefully and without pain, which does not accord well with the Telegoneia, which described his own son as mortally wounding him in combat.

One could, of course, argue that the poet of the Odyssey meant for his audience to understand Teiresias’s prophecy as an oracular allusion to this violent demise and that the words that make it sound like Odysseus’s death will be peaceful are meant to deliberately misdirect audiences away from his actual death. I personally, however, do not find this contention persuasive, since it requires us to explain away the words that are in the text in order to suit an interpretation based on an external source.

I think that the simplest solution to this problem is simply that the Odyssey and the Telegoneia have two different versions of the myth of Odysseus’s death; the Odyssey has him dying a peaceful death from the sea in his old age, whereas the Telegoneia has Telegonos killing him with his spear.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the Greek island of Ithaka, which was the setting for a significant portion of the Telegoneia

Obscure epics that very few people read

As I mentioned in the beginning, the second reason why most popular descriptions of the Epic Cycle are misleading is because they usually elide the fact that, as Peter Gainsford discusses in much greater detail in this blog post he made in February 2020, the reason why the Iliad and the Odyssey have survived, but the other poems of the Epic Cycle have not, is not random. Quite simply, none of the other cyclical epics were ever anywhere near as popular or influential in antiquity as the Iliad and the Odyssey.

From the very earliest surviving mention of them until the last, ancient audiences seem to have been interested in the now-lost poems of the cycle mostly only for their antiquarian value as early sources for myth or for their relationship to the Iliad and the Odyssey, rather than their value as independent works of literature. Even Herodotos, the very first author to mention any of the lost epics in a surviving work, only mentions the Kypria in order to contrast it with the Iliad.

In fact, nearly all the ancient authors who reference the lost cyclical epics only knew about them through reading summaries, not through reading the actual poems themselves. If you read my post from a couple of months ago in which I quoted the surviving opening lines of the Kypria, then congratulations! You’ve most likely read more of the actual text of the non-Iliadic, non-Odysseian Epic Cycle than Roman poets like Vergil or Ovid ever did.

ABOVE: Frontispiece illustration for an edition of the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses printed in 1731 in Leipzig, showing what the illustrator imagined Ovid might have looked like. (No one knows what he actually looked like.)

Were the lost poems of the Epic Cycle just bad?

Some modern scholars have argued that the reason why the lost poems of the “Epic Cycle” were unpopular with ancient audiences is because they were just objectively really bad. Most famously, Jasper Griffin, a British professor of classics at the University of Oxford in the late twentieth century, argues for this perspective in his 1977 paper “The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer.”

Griffin concludes, based on the surviving summaries and fragments, that the lost cyclical poems were totally different and not at all comparable to the greatness of the Iliad because they were replete with ridiculous and worthless tales of the supernatural, “unheroic” in their morality, unreflective on the human condition, and, at least for the most part, devoid of literary or aesthetic merit. His scathing conclusion on page 53 of that paper reads as follows:

“The strict, radical, and consistently heroic interpretation of the world presented by the Iliad made it quite different from the Cycle, still content with monsters, miracles, metamorphoses, and an un-tragic attitude towards mortality, all seasoned with exoticism and romance, and composed in a flatter, looser, less dramatic style. The contrast helps to bring out the greatness and the uniqueness of that achievement.”

Griffin is almost certainly right that the lost cyclical poems differed from the Iliad at least somewhat in their style and content and that these differences may at least partly explain their lack of popularity in antiquity, but his stridently negative assessment of their literary merit is questionable, for a couple of reasons.

First, Griffin is making aesthetic judgements about works that neither he himself nor any person alive today has access to—works that he only knows about through summaries and a few fragmentary quotations. As Peter Gainsford keenly points out in his blog post about the Epic Cycle that I’ve already linked:

“. . . bear in mind that we’d be raising eyebrows at the Iliad, too, if only a summary survived. Just imagine: ‘Achilles’ horses talk to him, then a river chases him across the battlefield.’ You can’t judge literary quality from a summary.”

Second, Griffin’s negative assessment of the lost cyclical poems is based on his own inherently subjective assumptions of what makes a literary work “good” or “bad.” Not every person will necessarily agree with his opinions on this issue.

Notably, a huge part of Griffin’s argument for the lost epics being mostly garbage is just the fact that they contained many supernatural elements, which he (along with the majority of classicists at the time he was writing) regards as primitive, superstitious, and inappropriate for any supposed work of high literature. For him, the mere presence of such elements in a literary work is a blight upon the work’s literary merit in and of itself.

In the decades since Griffin wrote this paper, though, I think that the opinion of most classicists regarding supernatural elements has shifted. Far fewer classicists today in the twenty-first century would regard the presence or even pervasiveness of the supernatural in a work of literature as an inherent literary deficiency. (Indeed, many young classicists, including I myself, first became interested in ancient literature partly due to a prior interest in fantasy and myth.)

Additionally, Griffin claims that the Iliad portrays its heroes as exhibiting superior morality to those of the lost cyclical epics. One aspect of the Iliad’s heroic morality that he deems superior is that its main protagonists are (supposedly) uninterested in sex or romance (“The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer,” 43–45). He especially praises the Iliad for supposedly stylizing “homosexual love” (which he contextually associates with “traitors and cowards”) “out of existence” (“The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer,” 45).

Griffin’s assertion that the Iliad’s heroes are basically uninterested in romance and that the poem excludes all mention of “homosexual love” is, of course, questionable. As I discuss in this post I made in October 2020, the overwhelming majority of ancient Greek authors agreed in interpreting the characters Achilleus and Patroklos in the Iliad as homoerotic lovers and this interpretation retains strong currency among classicists today.

Even leaving that aside, though, Griffin’s assumption that an interest in romance and sex, especially that of the homoerotic variety, is morally unsuitable for heroes is easy to recognize as the result of Christianity’s hegemonic influence throughout U.K. academia at the time when he was writing. Far fewer classicists today would regard mention of homoerotic romance or sex in a literary work as an inherent blight on the literary merits of that work.

ABOVE: Photograph of Jasper Griffin, an eminent British classics professor of the late twentieth century who argued that the Epic Cycle was mostly garbage that didn’t compare to the Iliad

Conclusion

Whatever the case, whether the lost poems of the Epic Cycle were garbage or brilliant, it is a tragedy that they have been lost. Even if they were really trash from a literary perspective, if they had survived, they still could have provided historians and classicists with valuable information about Archaic Greek myth, society, and culture. They could have also provided much more context for understanding the Iliad, the Odyssey, and other works of Archaic Greek literature.

Sadly, the poems have been lost and it is extremely unlikely that any more fragments of them will ever be recovered. As I discuss in my recent post about the transmission of Sappho’s work, due to a specific combination of historical circumstances, nearly all the surviving papyri from the ancient world come from extremely arid parts of Egypt during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Due to the lost cyclical poems’ general unpopularity, it seems that almost no one was reading them in Egypt during these periods.

Despite over a century and a quarter of scholars excavating, cataloguing, and publishing ancient papyri, to date, no one has ever found any papyrus fragment bearing any securely identifiable passage of any of the lost poems of the Epic Cycle. In all likelihood, the epics are lost forever.

Works cited

• Burgess, Jonathan S. “The Non-Homeric Cypria.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 126 (1996): 77–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/370172.
• — The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
• Gainsford, Peter. “The dates of Homer.” Kiwi Hellenist. November 19, 2021. http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2021/11/dates-homer.html.
• — “The Epic Cycle wasn’t as popular as you think.” Kiwi Hellenist. February 10, 2020. http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2020/02/epic-cycle.html.
• Griffin, Jasper. “The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977): 39–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/631020.
• Parry, Milman. “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: I. Homer and the Homeric Style.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41 (1930): 73–147. https://doi.org/10.2307/310626.
• West, M. L. The Orphic Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.