The Epic Cycle Concludes

The Epic Cycle Concludes deals with the two separate epics that related the sack of Troy and with the two that recounted the returns home of the victorious Greek heroes and the further adventures and death of the most famous of those surviving heroes, Odysseus (the Nostoi and the Telegony, respectively). This volume completes a set of four commentaries by Malcolm Davies on the poems of the Epic Cycle, published within the Hellenic Studies series, which began with The Theban Epics and continued with The Aethiopis and The Cypria. As with the Cypria, those of the Little Iliad’s fragments which consist of verses quoted verbatim are sufficient in quantity to supply convincing linguistic evidence that the poem was post-Homeric in date. The smaller number of verbatim fragments from the Iliupersis and the Nostoi confirm the like conclusion. No verbatim fragments survive from the Telegony, but a late prose summary of its contents suggests both that it was intended as a sequel to the Odyssey; but also that, like the other epics analyzed in The Epic Cycle Concludes, it was strikingly un-Homeric in several of its subjects.