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theTrojan War, which includes the Cypria, the Aethiopis, the so-called Little Iliad,
the Iliupersis, the Nostoi, and the Telegony.
Aside from the Odyssey and the Iliad, the cyclic epics only survive in fragments, the most
important of which is a detailed summary written by someone named Proclus (not the
same person as the philosopher Proclus Diadochus).
It was the distillation in literary form of an oral tradition that had developed during
the Greek Dark Age, which was based in part on localised hero cults.
The traditional material from which the literary epics were drawn treats
of Mycenaean Bronze Ageculture from the perspective of Iron Age and later Greece.
In modern scholarship the study of the historical and literary relationship between the
Homeric epics and the rest of the Cycle is called Neoanalysis.
Most of our knowledge of the Cyclic epics comes from a broken summary of them which
serves as part of the preface to the famous 10th-century CE Iliad manuscript known
as Venetus A. This preface is damaged, missing the Cypria, and has to be supplemented
by other sources (the Cypria summary is preserved in several other manuscripts, each of
which contains only the Cypria and none of the other epics). The summary is in turn an
excerpt from a longer work.
This longer work was entitled Chrestomathy, and written by someone named Proclus.
This is known from evidence provided by the later scholar Photius, in his Bibliotheca.
Photius provides sufficient information about Proclus' Chrestomathy to demonstrate that
the Venetus A excerpt is derived from the same work.[1] Little is known about Proclus,
except that he is certainly not the philosopherProclus Diadochus. Some have thought that
it might be the same person as the lesser-known grammarian Eutychius Proclus, who
lived in the 2nd century CE,[2] but it is quite possible that he is simply an otherwise
unknown figure.
Cypria 11 Stasinus the events leading up to the Trojan War and the
first nine years of the conflict, especially
the Judgement of Paris
Little Iliad 4 Lesches events after Achilles' death, including the building
of the Trojan Horse
Nostoi ("returns") 5 Agias orEumelus the return home of the Greek force and the
events contingent upon their arrival, concluding
with the returns of Agamemnon andMenelaus