A History of Ancient Greek Literature. Gilbert Murray

and organised into complex unity, there remained a quantity of authorless poetry, originally of equal rank with the exalted two, but now mangled and disinherited. This rejected poetry was not fully organised into distinct wholes. The lays and groups of lays were left for each reciter to modify and to select from. It is an anachronism to map out a series of epics, to cut off Cypria,* Iliad, Æthiopis,* Little Iliad,* Sack of Ilion,* Homecomings,* Odyssey, Télegoneia,* as so many separate and continuous poems composed by particular authors. The Cypria,* for instance, a great mass of 'Epê' centring in the deeds of Paris and the Cyprian goddess before the war, is attributed to Homer, Creophy+̂lus, Cyprias, Hêgêsias, and Stasinus; the Sack* is claimed by Homer, Arctînus, Leschês, and a person who gives his name as Hegias, Agias, or Augias, and his home as Troizên or Colophon. Some of these names perhaps belonged to real rhapsodes; some are mere inventions. 'Cyprias,' for instance, owes his existence to the happy thought that in the phrase τà Κúπρια ὲΠη the second word might be the Doric genitive of a proper name, Κυπρíας, and then the question of authorship would be solved.

When the oral poetry was dead, perhaps in the fourth century B.C., scholars began to collect the remnants of it, the series being, in the words of Proclus, "made complete out of the works of divers poets." But this collection of the original ballads was never widely read, and soon ceased to exist. Our knowledge of the rejected epics comes almost entirely from the handbooks of mythology, which collected the legendary history contained in them into groups or 'cycles.' We possess several stone tablets giving the epic history in a series of pictures.1 The best known is the Tabula Iliaca, in the Capitoline Museum, which dates from just before our era, and claims to give 'the arrangement of Homer' according to a certain Theodôrus. One of the tables speaks of the 'Trojan Cycle' and the 'Theban Cycle'; and we hear of a 'Cycle of History' -- of all history, it would seem -compiled by Dionysius of Samos2 in the third or second century B.C. The phrase 'Epic Cycle' then denotes properly a body of epic history collected in a handbook. By an easy misapplication, it is used to denote the ancient poems themselves, which were only known as the sources of the handbooks. Athenæus, for instance, makes the odd mistake of calling Dionysius' 'Cycle of History' a 'Book about the Cycle' -- i.e.Athenæus took the word 'cycle' to mean the original poems.3

      Our main ostensible authority is one Proclus, apparently a Byzantine, from whom we derive a summary of the Trojan Cycle, which is given in the Venetian MS. A and in the works of the patriarch Photius. If what he said were true, it would be of great importance. But not only does he start from a false conception of what the poems were -- they had probably perished before the days of Pausanias, centuries earlier -- he also seems to have reached his results by first taking the contents of some handbook, of which we can only say that it often agrees word for word with that of Apollodôrus, and then, by conjecture or otherwise, inserting "Here begins the Little Iliad of Leschês of Mitylênê," or "Here comes the Æthiopis of Arctînus of Milêtus." It is known from quotations in earlier writers that the individual poems covered much more ground than he allows them. For instance, the Little Iliad* begins in Proclus with the contest of Alas and Odysseus for the arms of Achilles, and stops at the reception of the Wooden Horse. But a much earlier beginning is suggested by the opening words of the poem itself, which still survive: "I sing of Ilion and Dardania, land of chivalry, for which the Danaoi, henchmen of Ares, suffered many things;" and a later ending is proved by the quotations which are made from it to illustrate the actual sack. It is the origin, for instance, of Vergil's story about the warrior who means to slay Helen, but is disarmed by the sight of her loveliness; only, in the Little Iliad* he is Menelaus, not Æneas. In general, however, Vergil, like Proclus's authority, prefers the fuller version derived from the special epic on the Sack by 'Arctinus of Milêtus,' while Theodôrus again sets aside both epics and follows the lyrical Sackof Stesichorus.

      Again, Proclus makes the Æthiopis* and the Sack* two separate poems with a great gap between them. His Æthiopis* begins immediately at the end of the Iliad, gives the exploits of the Amazon Penthesileia and the Æthiop Memnon, and ends with the contest for the arms of Achilles; the Sack* begins after the reception of the Wooden Horse. The Æthiopis* has five books, the Sack* two; seven in all. But one of the tables treats them both as a single continuous poem of 9500 lines, which must mean at the very least ten books. On the other hand, Proclus makes the Homecomings,* which must have been a series of separate lays almost as elastic as the Eoiai* themselves (see p. 60 ), into a single poem.

      As for the date of these poems, they were worked into final shape much later than our Homer, and then apparently more for their historical matter than for their poetic value. They quote Iliad, Odyssey,and Theogony; they are sometimes brazen in their neglect of the digamma; they are often modern and poor in their language. On the other hand, it is surely perverse to take their mentions of ancestor-worship, magic, purification, and the like, as evidence of lateness. These are all practices of dateless antiquity, left unmentioned by ' Homer,' like many other subjects, from some conventional repugnance, whether of race, or class, or tradition. And the actual matter of the rejected epics is often very old. We have seen the relation of δ to the Little Iliad.* In the Cypria* Alexander appears in his early glory as conqueror of Sidon; there is a catalogue of Trojans which cannot well have been copied from our meagre list in B, and is perhaps the source of it; there is a story told by Nestor which looks like the original of part of our Hadeslegend in λ. And as for quotations, the words "The purpose of Zeus was fulfilled" are certainly less natural where they stand in the opening of the Iliadthan in the Cypria,* where they refer to the whole design of relieving Earth of her burden of men by means of the Trojan War. We have 125 separate quotations from the Cypria,* which seems to have stood rather apart and independent in the general epic tradition.

      The Têlegoneia,* too, though in its essence a mere sequel, making Têlegonus, son of Odysseus and Kirkê, sail in search of his father, just as Têlemachus did, is full of genuine saga-stuff. Odysseus is repeated in his son, like Achilles, like Launcelot and Tristram. The sons of the 'Far-wanderer' are 'Far-fighter' and 'Farborn,' and a third, by Calypso, is 'Far-subduer' (Têledamus). The bowman has a bowman son, and the son wanders because the father did. And the end of the Têlegoneia* is in the simplest saga-spirit. Têlegonus unknowingly slays his father, who gives him Penelope to wed and protect. He takes all the characters to Kirkê in the magic island; she purifies him of blood, and makes Têlemachus and Penelope immortal; finally, the two young men marry their respective step-mothers, Odysseus apparently remaining dead. That is not late or refined work. 'Eugamon' ('Happy-marrier') of Cyrene must have seemed a grotesque figure to the men of the fifth century; he was at home among those old saga-makers who let Heracles give Deianira to Hyllus, and Œdipus take on the late king's wife as part of the establishment.

      The critical questions suggested by the rejected epics are innumerable. To take one instance, how comes it that the Little Iliad* alone in our tradition is left in so thin a dress of conventional 'Epic' language that the Æolic shows through? One line actually gives the broad a and probably the double consonants of Æolic, νùξ μέν ὲην μàμἄσσα, λàμποà δ επετελλε σελáνα. Others are merely conventionalised on the surface. Possibly some epics continued to be sung in Lesbos in the native dialect till the era of antiquarian collection in the fourth century B.C. or after; and perhaps if this poem were ever unearthed from an Egyptian tomb, we should have a specimen of the loose and popular epic not yet worked up by Ionic genius. Its style in general seems light and callous compared with the stern tragedy of the Milesian Æthiopis* and Sack of Ilion.*

      Among the other rejected epics were poems of what might be called the World-cycle.Of these, Proclus uses the Theogony* and the Titan War,* of which last there exists one really beautiful fragment. The Theban 'Ring,' which was treated by grammarians as an introduction to the Trojan, had an Œdipodea,* a Thebais,* and a Lay of the After-born,* treating of the descendants of the Seven, who destroyed Thebes. The Driving forth