The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics by M. L. West (review)

The “Epic Cycle” was a collection of archaic Greek epics perceived in antiquity as furnishing a unitary account of the “cycle” of Greek myth. The idea of this “cycle” remained vague and the Epic Cycle itself a loose and permeable corpus; at minimum the term referred to a core group of six poems all dealing with the Trojan War and, taken together with the Homeric epics, providing a full history of the war from beginnings to aftermath. These poems are of crucial importance to our understanding of early Greek epic, since they date to the archaic period, dealt with the same heroic mythology as the Homeric poems, and were composed in essentially the same poetic language; yet they differed from the Iliad and Odyssey in length (they were much shorter), in organization (some at least seem to have been rather loosely constructed), and in overall tone (relatively less dignified). Despite their importance, however, they have played as yet an undersized and inconsistent role in Homeric studies, since their reconstruction has remained an esoteric corner of scholarship. M. L. West therefore does a great service in providing an account of these poems, the evidence for them, and the fragments themselves, in an accessible, erudite, and forthright presentation that will set future discussions on a much firmer basis.

West’s “Prolegomena” (1–54) deal with the nature and origins of the Cyclic epics from their murky beginnings to the summaries attributed to Proclus (probably of the second century CE) that constitute our only comprehensive account of their content. West argues that, while the poems were independently composed, they show a “cyclic” tendency away from freestanding epics like the Iliad and towards poems “composed to cover particular sections of the whole story of Troy that were not already covered by other epics” (18). This partly explains their seeming lack of real structural unity, though West reminds us that the poems were not homogenous in this regard: while the Aethiopis was “cyclic” in furnishing a kind of continuation to the Iliad, it was a carefully organized composition (133); whereas the Little Iliad, a poem of broader scope that had significant overlap with others, was “a concatenation of at least six potential Einzellieder, worked together in a sequence that is only partly determined by organic logic” (19). The cyclic impulse that conditioned the poems’ composition also conditioned their eventual reception, and it was only natural that they came to be read and eventually summarized together as a single “cycle”—a process that West dates, rather surprisingly, to the classical period and the activity of a shadowy Phayllos (23–25).

The rest of the book is devoted to the individual poems, for each of which West provides a useful introduction followed by fragments and other evidence. West divides up the summary of Proclus and then interleaves each piece of evidence or fragment according to the actual order of events in the narrative of the poem; commentary is offered on each episode of the reconstructed work rather than on isolated bits of evidence. This procedure makes for an eminently readable presentation and sets the poems vividly before the imagination. As with any fragmentary text, however, the very presentation of the evidence constitutes an argument about its interpretation; this is particularly so in cases where the summaries of Proclus are an unreliable guide for the original arrangement of the poem, as with the second half of the Little Iliad and much of the Nostoi. In such cases West leans heavily on mythographic sources not exclusively dependent on the Cycle (especially Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca) and sometimes indulges in highly speculative arguments, as with the “flight of fancy” in which he imaginatively “translates” a portion of the Nostoi recounting Menelaus’s stay in Egypt (281–82)—an episode that we don’t even know to have been narrated in the poem!

At times readers may feel that they lose sight of...