The Iliad famously starts in medias res, as Horace said, and it ends inconclusively with nothing settled: Achilles is still alive, Troy still untaken, and no Trojan horse in sight. Yet Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides all wrote tragedies that presumed an audience familiar, as we are today, with the entire story of the Trojan War, from Zeus’s decision to reduce the world’s overpopulation and the judgment of Paris that started the strife, to the mustering of the expedition and the battles and the duels that lasted ten bloody years, and finally the vicissitudes of the heroes’ homecomings, most notably swaggering Agamemnon’s death at the hand of his envenomed wife Clytemnestra and Odysseus’s fittingly cautious return to his own long-neglected wife Penelope. Episodes from the full story are depicted on countless Greek ceramics and sculptures, either surviving as such or as Roman copies. In fact a fairly detailed rendition of the entire story could be derived from them alone.
So even if Aeschylus called his plays “slices from the banquet of Homer,” the fact remains that the stories he and other tragedians relied upon are not found in the Iliad or Odyssey. But the narrative consistency between all the tragedians certainly implies common textual sources. This was indeed the case: traceable to the end of the sixth century B.C., and in some cases earlier, are six epics that complemented the Iliad and Odyssey to tell the whole story of the Trojan War as we know it. These are the Cypria, whose text started the tale that leads to the Iliad; the Aethiopis, which began with the funeral of Hector that ends the Iliad; the Ilias Mikra (Little Iliad) that recounted the preparations needed to defeat Troy; the Iliou Persis (Fall of Troy), which told of the destruction of Ilion (another name for the city); the Nostoi (Returns), detailing the homecomings of the victorious, save Odysseus, who already had his own eponymous tale; and the Telegony tacked on last, in which Odysseus, bored in stony Ithaka, sets off again for adventure, acquiring a new wife and a child before he returns home and is finally killed by Telegonus, his own son birthed by Circe, who knows not his father.
By the fourth century B.C., all eight epics were jointly known as the Trojan epikos kyklos, or epic cycle. (There was also a smaller Theban cycle, comprising the Thebaid, the Epigoni, the Oedipodea, and the Alcmeonis.)
Of the eight Trojan epics, only the Iliad and Odyssey have survived down to our own days as full texts, each divided into twenty-four books by Alexandrian editors, exemplars of Hellenistic scholarship at its glorious best. Of the other Trojan epics we have brief plot summaries in what is left of the Chrestomathia (Useful knowledge), generally attributed to the Neoplatonist author Proclus (fifth century A.D.), and in the Bibliothēkē (Library), which was passed down under the name of Apollodorus of Athens (second century B.C.) but was likely written by an imitator. There are also brief extracts from the lost epics, mostly just short phrases, that survive as citations in the extant writings of other ancient authors. The curious reader can consult the great Homer scholar Martin L. West’s Greek Epic Fragments (2003) for a compilation of what remains of the Trojan epics, presented alongside relevant summaries or extracts from Proclus, Apollodorus, and other sources. But the reader may be disappointed to find that these meager remainders amount to little more than verbal cartoon strips.
The lost Trojan epics are but a tiny fraction of the lost works of Greek antiquity. To take Greek historians as an example, only the writings of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius have survived, along with a few Greek-language histories of Rome by Diodorus Siculus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Josephus, Appianus, Dio Cassius, and Zosimus—ten historians in all. But an authoritative survey counts 856 other Greek historians and chroniclers of which nothing survives save fragments embedded in other works.
Ancient texts disappeared when they lacked enough readers to keep them alive by procuring new copies to replace the manuscripts lost to the inherent fragility of papyrus, to the destructive over-writing of parchment, and to fires, floods, and simple oblivion. To reach us across the span of centuries, these texts therefore had to survive the vagaries of taste before they could reach the safe harbor of the printing press. When Aldus Manutius printed Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis in 1507, for example, with his marvelously legible typeface in a small octavo format that scholars and even students could afford, he produced more copies than had previously existed in the world. It was the Romans of the Eastern Empire which the popes enjoyed calling Byzantine who read and copied Euripides often enough over a millennium to preserve the text till it reached Venice as Constantinople was declining. The teaching of Greek had started in Florence by 1400, but texts were very scarce until the printing press of Manutius revived Greek literacy in Europe, and hence the study of Greek science that was to launch the Scientific Revolution. (Manutius should be ten times more famous than he is today.) But while printing ensured the survival of ancient texts in danger till then, it also destroyed manuscripts: early printers burned them to preclude competing editions.
In any case, we owe it to the non-readers of the intervening centuries that we have only the summaries of the Cypria, Aethiopis, Ilias Mikra, Iliou Persis, Nostoi, and Telegony, which might perhaps have offered us delightful poetry had they been preserved.
The Cypria, the lost Trojan epic whose plot we know in greatest detail, was originally in eleven books attributed to one Stasinus. It contains the main action that will start the Trojan war: conferring with Themis, the she-Titan who upholds the just balance of things, Zeus plans a war because the earth is groaning under the weight of overpopulation. This is not so absurd as it sounds, because many parts of Greece were already well inhabited while the Greeks knew little of the world beyond the Mediterranean.
The needed provocation was supplied by the goddess of strife, Eris: she arrives at the wedding of the mortal Peleus to the nymph Thetis that will produce Achilles and starts a dispute between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite as to which of them is fairest. At the command of Zeus, the three goddesses are led by Hermes to Paris (a.k.a. Alexander), the son of King Priam of Troy, on Mount Ida for his decision. Paris, won over by the promise of receiving Helen in adulterous marriage, decides in favor of Aphrodite.
Odysseus, who would never have chosen the least powerful of the three goddesses, also proves his worldly wisdom in the Cypria: when Agamemnon and Menelaus send heralds around Greece to summon kings and heroes to the fight, Odysseus feigns insanity to avoid joining the expedition and drawn-out war (it was widely known that Troy’s walls had been built by gods). What catches him out is a hostage-taking: the herald Palamedes snatches the baby Telemachus from Penelope’s bosom, whereupon Odysseus has to shed his pretense and intervene. (He takes elaborate revenge for this indecency in the Palamedes of Euripides.) The Cypria also details a more successful ruse for avoidance: one Cypriot ruler promises on oath to send fifty ships but then, as Proclus tells us, “he sent one . . . but the rest he shaped out of clay and launched them to sea.”
Odysseus makes another inglorious appearance in the Cypria’s most consummately tragic episode: Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia must be sacrificed at Aulis to appease the divine hunter Artemis, who was offended by Agamemnon’s boast that he exceeded her in skill when he killed a deer. Iphigenia is fetched from Mycenae by Odysseus with the cover story that she is to marry Achilles. In his own version, Euripides has us watch in fascinated horror as the innocent girl discovers too late that she is not to be wedded on arrival, but butchered.
The Cypria does dutiful service for the Iliad by providing the needed introductions of the protagonists, and of the casus belli: Helen, or rather the possession thereof. When Telemachus sets out to find news of his missing father in the Odyssey, he finds Helen seamlessly restored to her husband Menelaus after her interlude as the adulterous lover of not one but two Trojan princes (as we will see).
In the first post-Iliadic epic, the Aethiopis in five books, Odysseus fights off the Trojans while Ajax rescues the body of Achilles after he is killed at the Scaean gates of Ilion by the arrows of Paris and Apollo. (In Homer, the bow is the coward’s weapon; hence Paris is doubly dishonorable in relying on a god’s intervention and the bow.) In the ensuing funeral games, Ajax and Odysseus quarrel over the god-made arms and armor of Achilles that they had jointly saved from the Trojans.
It is in the next epic, the partly overlapping Ilias Mikra, that Athena intervenes to award the armor of Achilles to her favorite Odysseus. Ajax, maddened by impotent fury, slaughters the looted cattle and countless Greeks, and then kills himself. Odysseus next ambushes and captures the Trojan seer Helenus, the son of Priam and brother of Cassandra, who discloses the preconditions for the conquest of Troy.
The first condition is that the famed archer Philoctetes must be brought back to take part in the siege, along with the bow he inherited from Hercules; in book II of the Iliad, he was abandoned on Lemnos, snake-bitten and gangrenous. Odysseus, joined by his steadfast partner in adventure Diomedes, fetches him and the bow. Philoctetes is healed by Machaon, the son of Asclepius the god of medicine, and it is he who kills Paris, leaving Helen a widow—but only briefly, because Deiphobus, Priam’s most valiant son after Hector, quickly marries her.
The next requirements are the capture of the Palladium, the wooden Pallas Athena that was Ilion’s protective deity; the recovery of the bones of Pelops from Peloponnesian Pisa; and the recruitment of Neoptolemus, the son of the dead Achilles, to join in the war. Other sources tell us that Achilles came by his only son in a manner that anticipates the gender fluidity that is all the rage these days: while living on Scyros disguised as a girl under mother’s orders—Thetis was trying to save him from certain death in the Trojan War—he impregnated the local princess he roomed with.
Others fetch the bones of Pelops, but Odysseus does the heavy lifting of conveying Neoptolemus to besieged Ilion and presenting him with the arms and armor of Achilles. With his sidekick Diomedes, he also brings back a bitterly resentful Philoctetes, and with Diomedes again he enters Ilion disguised as a beggar to steal the Palladium. Helen recognizes him but, as if already the Helen encountered in the Odyssey living in matronly domesticity with Menelaus, does not raise the alarm.
It is in the Ilias Mikra that the story of the wooden horse is recounted, from its construction by Epeus and the ensconcing of the thirteen leading heroes, to the feigned departure for home of the Achaean fleet, which stops in nearby Tenedos once out of sight. The triumphant Trojans themselves breach the insurmountable walls to bring in the wooden horse, their trophy.
In the next epic, the Iliou Persis (originally in two books), the Trojans have their doubts but finally disregard the warnings of Cassandra and Laocoön, and they turn to revelry in celebration of their deliverance. The Achaeans sail back from Tenedos to link up with the heroes that emerged from the wooden horse to open the great gates, and the slaughter of the Trojans ensues. When the citadel falls, Neoptolemus kills Priam and takes Hector’s widow Andromache as his own prize, while Menelaus collects Helen, unperturbed by her very fresh remarriage to Deiphobus after the death of Paris. “When Menelaus glimpsed Helen’s bare apples,” one scholiast drily noted, “he dropped his sword, I believe.”
In the Iliou Persis the killer of Hector’s infant son Astyanax is Odysseus, whereas in the Ilias Mikra it was Neoptolemus: “after seizing him from the bosom of his nurse . . . holding him by the foot, [he] flung him from the battlement.” That was foul child-murder certainly, but for singer and audience it would not condemn either man: one could hardly be expected to live out his later years in perpetual fear of the obligatory revenge of Astyanax, still today a son’s highest duty in the Albanian mountains if not in downtown Athens.
Finally, in the Nostoi (in five books), Agamemnon sails to his fate at the hands of Clytemnestra and her lover, and many Achaean ships sailing straight across the Aegean are lost to storms; Menelaus with Helen is wind-driven all the way to Egypt. The Nostoi avoids retreading the events of the Odyssey, but Odysseus does appear briefly when Neoptolemus meets him in Thrace, at Maronea, which Odyssues has already looted, of course, having sailed up coastwise on ships that must have already been heavy from Ilion’s loot. One could never have too much kleos, heroic renown, the ultimate index of true worth, and very sensibly Homeric heroes measured it in tangibles: desirable captives and valuable metals, silver, gold, and worked iron most of all. The Iron Age was still fresh; novelty outdid scarcity.
Of the literary qualities of the lost epics we can know little from their abbreviated summaries, and hardly anything from the very brief extracts that survive in other works. Scholars have long wondered how they stacked up against the Iliad and Odyssey. Aristotle remarks that it would be hard to extract even one tragedy from the Iliad or Odyssey, while several tragedies have been made from the Cypria and more than eight from the Ilias Mikra, among which he then cites the Hoplon Crisis (Award of arms) of Aeschylus (of which little remains), the Philoctetes of Sophocles, the Eurypylus of Sophocles (also cited by Plutarch but lost), and the Trojan Women of Euripides. Aristotle takes this as evidence of the superior poetic unity of Homer’s work. Yet if the other, divisible Trojan epics had not proven so fertile to tragedians, we would know a good deal less about the stories they told.
In the West, the extinction of all the Trojan epics, the Iliad and Odyssey included, became inevitable once the easy bilingualism that defined educated Romans was lost in the decline and disintegration of the empire along with most other attributes of civilization. Small Greek-speaking minorities persisted in isolated villages in Calabria (in southern Italy) and Catania (in eastern Sicily), even into modern times, but in the formerly “classical” world of Europe, the Iliad and Odyssey were gone from the scene by the time of the humanist revival. In his day, Petrarch (1304–74) was deemed the most cultured of Europeans and his library was much admired, but he had no copy of the Iliad until a Byzantine envoy gave him one (it survives in Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana). He tried to learn Greek in order to read his treasure but did not succeed. It would have been reasonable to expect that the relentless shrinking of the Eastern Empire where Greek texts were still read and still recopied would soon extinguish Greek literature altogether, reducing it to fragmentary survivals in the manner of Akkadian or Ugaritic.
But soon after Manutius started publishing Greek texts in the late fifteenth century, an ever-increasing number of Europeans achieved the Greek literacy that eluded Petrarch and which would soon become the prerequisite for higher education. For many scholars of ancient Greek today, it can be hard to imagine a time when even those relatively few texts we have were not available en masse in print editions; if anything, we are too busy bemoaning what has been lost. But the fate of the Trojan epic cycle should also remind us that, if we are not careful, someday our own great books could likewise be lost to the vagaries of taste.
