In Classical times, the story of the Trojan War was told in a series of eight epic poems known as the Epic Cycle, of which only the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer survive to the present day. The first poem in the sequence was the Cypria, which described the early years of the war from Eris' casting of the golden apple at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, to Paris' abduction of Helen, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Odysseus' treacherous murder of Palamedes, and finally, the enslavement of Briseis and Chryseis, which sowed the seeds of the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon in the Iliad. The Cypria is now lost, but the myths it once contained are known from a number of later writings. In an ambitious exercise in literary back-breeding, editor D. M. Smith attempts to reconstruct the lost prequel to Homer's Iliad from the available material. Included are excerpts from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Apollodorus' Bibliotheca, Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis and Colluthus' The Rape of Helen, as well as lesser known documents such as Dictys Cretensis Ephemeris Belli Trojani, and the Excidium Troiae - a medieval summary of a lost Roman account of the Trojan War, discovered among the papers of an 18th century clergyman in the 1930s. This eclectic melange of Greek and Latin texts has been carefully edited and arranged in accordance with the known chronology of the Cypria, thus allowing readers to trace the story of this vanished epic as a continuous narrative for the first time in over a thousand yea

The Cypria, so named because its poet supposedly came from the island of Cyprus, was an early Greek epic that is known to us primarily through quotations and references to passages by later authors, as well as through a prose summary of its plot and contents. Malcolm Davies uses linguistic evidence from the available verbatim fragments, along with other considerations, to suggest that the Cypria was written after Homer and was intended as a sort of prequel to the plot of the Iliad. In light of this evidence, it is noteworthy that many of the incidents described in the Cypria seem markedly un-Homeric; to give just one example, the Judgment of Paris, a popular subject in later Greek literature and art, most likely received its first detailed treatment in the Cypria, whereas the Iliad mentions it only fleetingly. Here Davies collects and translates the extant fragments of the Cypria and provides a commentary that anchors it in the Homeric context as well as in the broader world of ancient Greek art and literature.

The poems of the Epic Cycle are assumed to be the reworking of myths and narratives which had their roots in an oral tradition predating that of many of the myths and narratives which took their present form in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The remains of these texts allow us to investigate diachronic aspects of epic diction as well as the extent of variation within it on the part of individual authors - two of the most important questions in modern research on archaic epic. They also help to illuminate the early history of Greek mythology. Access to the poems, however, has been thwarted by their current fragmentary state. This volume provides the scholarly community and graduate students with a thorough critical foundation for reading and interpreting them.

Although the Iliad and Odyssey narrate only relatively small portions of the Trojan War and its aftermath, for centuries these works have overshadowed other, more comprehensive narratives of the conflict, particularly the poems known as the Epic Cycle. In The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle, Jonathan Burgess challenges Homer's authority on the war's history and the legends surrounding it, placing the Iliad and Odyssey in the larger, often overlooked context of the entire body of Greek epic poetry of the Archaic Age. He traces the development and transmission of the Cyclic poems in ancient Greek culture, comparing them to later Homeric poems and finding that they were far more influential than has previously been thought.

West presents all the source material and provides the first comprehensive commentary on the lost Troy epics, making full use of iconographic as well as literary evidence. Discussing the individual fragments and testimonia, he endeavours to reconstruct the connections between them and to build up a picture of the plan and course of each poem.

"Seventeen-year-old Alex Clarke is a nerdy boy from Pennsylvania Dutch country who finds himself the obsession of a sweet Mexican vampire girl. She's faces death if she's not ready to kill the one human she's allowed. Cypria is the first book in the Minersville Vampire series"--Title page verso.

From a corpus of Greek epics known in antiquity as the "Epic Cycle," six poems dealt with the same Trojan War mythology as the Homeric poems. Though they are now lost, these poems were much read and much discussed in ancient times, not only for their content but for their mysterious relationship with the more famous works attributed to Homer. In Device and Composition in the Greek Epic Cycle, Benjamin Sammons shows that these lost poems belonged, compositionally, to essentially the same tradition as the Homeric poems. He demonstrates that various compositional devices well-known from the Homeric epics were also fundamental to the narrative construction of these later works. Yet while the "cyclic" poets constructed their works using the same traditional devices as Homer, they used these to different ends and with different results. Sammons argues that the essential difference between cyclic and Homeric poetry lies not in the fundamental building blocks from which they are constructed, but in the scale of these components relative to the overall construction of poems. This sheds important light on the early history of epic as a genre, since it is likely that these devices originally developed to provide large-scale structure to shorter poems and have been put to quite different use in the composition of the monumental Homeric epics. Along the way Sammons sheds new light on the overall form of lost cyclic epics and on the meaning and context of the few surviving verse fragments.

Cyclic verse. Greek epics of the archaic period include poems that narrate a particular heroic episode or series of episodes and poems that recount the long-term history of families or peoples. They are an important source of mythological record. Here is a new text and translation of the examples of this poetry that have come down to us. The heroic epic is represented by poems about Heracles and Theseus, and by two great epic cycles: the Theban Cycle, which tells of the failed assault on Thebes by the Seven and the subsequent successful assault by their sons; and the Trojan Cycle, which includes Cypria, Little Iliad, and The Sack of Ilion. Among the genealogical epics are poems in which Eumelus creates a prehistory for Corinth and Asius creates one for Samos. In presenting the extant fragments of these early epic poems, Martin West provides very helpful notes. His Introduction places the epics in historical context.