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.
Continue reading “What Was the “Epic Cycle” Really?”