The Epic Cycle
The lost Greek epics that told the rest of the Trojan War story, from the Judgment of Paris to the death of Odysseus, now surviving only as fragments and ancient summaries.
📖 Read the full bookThe complete public-domain novel, paired with the StoryBites version of every chapterThe Iliad and the Odyssey were once links in a longer chain of epics that told the rest of the Trojan story: how the war began, how Achilles died, how the wooden horse got inside Troy, and what became of Odysseus. Those other poems are lost. What survives is a few pages of ancient plot summary and scattered lines quoted by later writers, and even these sources contradict each other. Reading them is like rebuilding a lost saga from its table of contents, and the saga ends with Odysseus killed by a son who does not know him.
What happens in The Epic Cycle
The Epic Cycle was a set of early Greek epics that together told the story of the world from the first gods to the death of Odysseus. The poems are lost, so this account is a reconstruction from prose summaries, mostly Proclus’s Chrestomathia, and from lines quoted by later writers. Antiquity sometimes credited the poems to Homer, but the sources usually name other poets, and the Cycle is not the work of the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey. The Cycle began with the union of Heaven and Earth, and a few lines survive from a War of the Titans. The collection also keeps fragments of Theban epics, including the Thebaid, in which Oedipus curses his sons to die by each other’s hands. In the Cypria, Zeus plans the Trojan War with Themis. At the wedding of Peleus, Strife sets Hera, Athena and Aphrodite quarreling over which is fairest, and Alexandrus (Paris), lured by the promise of marriage with Helen, chooses Aphrodite. He and Helen sail away from Sparta while Menelaus is in Crete. At Aulis, Artemis, angered by Agamemnon’s boast, holds back the fleet, and the Greeks prepare to sacrifice Iphigeneia, but the goddess snatches her away and leaves a stag on the altar. The Greeks land at Troy, and Achilles raids the country around it. The Iliad came next, then the Aethiopis, in which Achilles kills the Amazon Penthesileia and Memnon, son of Eos, and is killed by Paris and Apollo. In the Little Iliad, Odysseus wins Achilles’ arms, and Aias goes mad and kills himself. Philoctetes kills Alexandrus, Neoptolemus joins the army, and Epeius builds the wooden horse, which the Trojans take into their city. In the Sack of Ilium, the men in the horse come out and the Greeks burn Troy. Neoptolemus kills Priam, Menelaus recovers Helen, Polyxena is sacrificed, and Astyanax is killed, though the sources disagree about who killed him. In the Returns, Menelaus is driven to Egypt, Locrian Aias meets his end in a storm, and Agamemnon is murdered and avenged by Orestes. After the Odyssey, the Telegony sends Odysseus to Thesprotis, where he marries its queen, Callidice. Back on Ithaca he is killed by Telegonus, a son who does not know him. Telegonus takes the body, with Penelope and Telemachus, to his mother’s island, where Circe makes them immortal. Telegonus marries Penelope, and Telemachus marries Circe.
Where and when The Epic Cycle happens
Troy (Ilium)
The city and the country around it, which the Greeks raid in the Cypria, besiege after the Iliad, and finally enter by the wooden horse and burn.
Aulis and the Greek world
The Greek leaders gather at Aulis twice before sailing. After the war the Returns scatter them by sea and land, to Egypt, Thrace, Colophon and their homes.
Ithaca and Thesprotis
Odysseus’s island home and the kingdom of Queen Callidice, where the Telegony sets his last adventures and his death.
From the first gods to the death of Odysseus
The Cycle ran from the union of Heaven and Earth, through the wars at Thebes and the whole Trojan War, to Odysseus’s last years.
Chapter by chapter summary + why it matters
- 1
Before Troy: Titans and Thebes
Photius’s epitome of Proclus says the Cycle began with the union of Heaven and Earth, and the fragments grouped under the War of the Titans, whose poet one source names as either Eumelus of Corinth or Arctinus, include a line of Eumelus about Zeus dancing. The Story of Oedipus, credited by an inscription to Cinaethon, gave Oedipus’s sons a mother named Euryganeia rather than Iocasta and had the Sphinx kill Creon’s son Haemon. In two Thebaid fragments Oedipus curses both his sons, once when Polyneices sets his father’s treasures before him and once when they send him a haunch he takes as mockery, and later Adrastus flees Thebes with his horse Areion. The Epigoni sang of the younger men, and a scholiast says their spoil included Teiresias’s daughter Manto, sent to Delphi.
Why it mattersAlmost nothing here is continuous story, and the sources already disagree: the Thebans named Asphodicus as the killer of Parthenopaeus, while the Thebaid named Periclymenus. The Contest of Homer and Hesiod credits Homer with both the Thebaid and the Epigoni, an early sign of how freely his name was attached to old epics.
- 2
The Cypria: How the War Began
Proclus’s summary of the eleven-book Cypria opens with Zeus planning the Trojan War with Themis and with Strife starting a quarrel among Hera, Athena and Aphrodite at the wedding of Peleus, which Alexandrus (Paris) settles on Mount Ida in Aphrodite’s favor. Alexandrus sails off with Helen while Menelaus is in Crete, the Greek leaders expose Odysseus’s pretended madness, and at Aulis Artemis snatches Iphigeneia from the altar and leaves a stag in her place. After sacking Teuthrania by mistake, the Greeks land at Troy, where Hector kills Protesilaus, and Achilles raids the countryside, kills Troilus and wins Briseis. Tzetzes names Stasinus as the poet while reporting that most people called the poem Homer’s, given to Stasinus as a dowry, and Athenaeus wavers between Stasinus and Hegesias.
Why it mattersA fragment gives Zeus’s purpose, to relieve an earth overburdened with people, and the summary ends with his plan to help the Trojans by detaching Achilles from the Greeks, leading straight into the Iliad. The fragments do not always match the summary: Herodotus says the Cypria brought Alexandrus and Helen from Sparta to Troy in three days of fair sailing, while Proclus has a storm drive them to Sidon.
- 3
The Aethiopis and the Little Iliad
In the Aethiopis, which Proclus credits to Arctinus of Miletus, Achilles kills the Amazon Penthesileia and then Thersites, who mocked him, and later kills Memnon, son of Eos, after Memnon kills Antilochus. Chasing the routed Trojans into the city, Achilles is killed by Paris and Apollo; Aias carries the body to the ships while Odysseus holds off the Trojans, and Thetis takes her son from the pyre to the White Island. The Little Iliad, credited to Lesches of Mitylene, gives Achilles’ arms to Odysseus through Athena’s contriving, drives Aias to madness and suicide, and brings in Philoctetes, who kills Alexandrus, and Neoptolemus, who kills Eurypylus. Epeius builds the wooden horse at Athena’s instruction, Odysseus spies in Troy and carries off the Palladium with Diomedes, and the Trojans pull down part of their wall to take the horse inside.
Why it mattersThese poems run from Hector’s funeral, which one ancient reading of the Iliad’s last line joins directly to the Amazon’s arrival, to the night Troy falls. Fragments cited from Lesches go on to describe the sack itself, so his version overlapped with Arctinus’s and does not always match it.
- 4
The Sack, the Returns and the Telegony
In Arctinus’s Sack of Ilium, the Trojans debate the horse and dedicate it to Athena, serpents kill Laocoon and one of his sons, and Sinon signals the fleet back from Tenedos. Neoptolemus kills Priam at the altar of Zeus Herceius, Menelaus kills Deiphobus and takes Helen back, Aias son of Ileus tears away Athena’s image while dragging off Cassandra, and after the Greeks sacrifice Polyxena and Odysseus kills Astyanax, Athena plans to destroy the fleet at sea. The Returns, credited to Agias of Troezen, bring Nestor and Diomedes safely home, drive Menelaus to Egypt, end Locrian Aias in the storm at the Capherides, and close with Agamemnon’s murder, Orestes’ vengeance and Menelaus’s return. The Telegony, credited to Eugammon of Cyrene, follows Odysseus after the Odyssey to Elis and Thesprotis until his son Telegonus kills him unknowingly.
Why it mattersThe sources openly disagree here: Arctinus has Odysseus kill Astyanax and Priam die at the altar, while a Little Iliad fragment has Neoptolemus throw the boy from a tower and Pausanias cites Lesches for a Priam dragged from the altar and killed at his doors. The Telegony’s final scene, with Circe making Penelope and Telemachus immortal, closes the last poem Proclus summarizes.
- 5
Other Poems Credited to Homer
The last section gathers poems that ancient writers connected with Homer, most known only by a title, a report or a line or two. A Life of Homer has him recite the Expedition of Amphiaraus to Thebes and compose the Phocais, and Eustathius reports that Creophylus of Samos either received the Taking of Oechalia from Homer as a reward for hospitality or wrote it himself and let Homer’s name stand. The Margites was a comic poem about a man who knew many things and all of them badly, and Suidas credits it, with the Battle of the Frogs and Mice, to Pigres of Halicarnassus. The Cercopes fragment describes two knavish brothers, Passalus and Acmon, said to have been turned to stone for trying to deceive Zeus.
Why it mattersNearly every poem here comes with a second possible author, which shows how loosely Homer’s name was used in antiquity. Creophylus is also cited for a version of the Medea story in which Creon’s relatives, not Medea, killed her children and then spread the tale that she had.
Characters and how they connect
Achilles
Greatest Greek warrior
The son of Peleus and Thetis. Before the Iliad he raids the land around Troy and wins Briseis; after it he kills Penthesileia and Memnon and is killed by Paris and Apollo, and Thetis carries him from his pyre to the White Island.
Odysseus
Greek hero of cunning
He pretends to be mad to avoid the war, wins Achilles’ arms, spies inside Troy in disguise and carries off the Palladium. The Telegony takes him past the Odyssey to a second marriage and a death at his son’s hands.
Alexandrus (Paris)
Trojan prince
The translation mostly calls him Alexandrus. He judges Aphrodite the fairest goddess, sails off with Helen, shares with Apollo in killing Achilles, and is killed by Philoctetes in single combat.
Helen
Wife of Menelaus
A Cypria fragment makes her the daughter of Zeus and Nemesis. She leaves Sparta with Alexandrus, marries Deiphobus after Alexandrus dies, plots with the disguised Odysseus inside Troy, and is taken back by Menelaus.
Aias
Greek hero (Ajax)
The translation’s spelling of Ajax. He carries Achilles’ body out of the fighting, loses the contest for the arms to Odysseus, goes mad and kills himself. He is a different man from Aias son of Ileus, who seizes Cassandra in the sack.
Neoptolemus
Son of Achilles
Brought from Scyros by Odysseus and given his father’s arms, he kills Eurypylus, then kills Priam in the sack and takes Andromache as his prize. Afterward he travels overland and is recognized by Peleus among the Molossi.
Telegonus
Son of Odysseus
He lands on Ithaca searching for his father, kills Odysseus without knowing him, and later marries Penelope. One fragment calls him Circe’s son; another says the Telegony’s author made Calypso his mother.
Zeus
King of the gods
The Cypria opens with Zeus planning the war with Themis, and a fragment says he meant it to lighten the earth’s load of people. He grants immortality to Memnon at Eos’s request and to Castor and Polydeuces on alternate days.
Character Relationships who connects to whom, and the themes that bind them
Love / marriage
Family
Rivalry / conflict
Friendship / ally
Themes in The Epic Cycle what the novel is really about
The plan of Zeus
A Cypria fragment says Zeus pitied an earth weighed down by too many people and caused the Trojan War to empty it. The summary ends with his plan to help the Trojans by detaching Achilles from the Greeks, so the whole war becomes part of a divine design that mortals cannot see.
Strength against cunning
Aias carries Achilles’ body out of the battle, but Odysseus, with Athena’s help, wins the dead hero’s arms. Odysseus’s tricks, from spying in Troy disguised as a beggar to carrying off the Palladium, help bring the city down.
Sacrilege and divine anger
Agamemnon’s boast that he surpassed Artemis holds the fleet at Aulis, and Aias son of Ileus tears away Athena’s image while dragging off Cassandra. The Sack ends with Athena planning to destroy the Greeks at sea, and the Returns open with her stirring a quarrel between Agamemnon and Menelaus.
Curses within families
In the Thebaid, Oedipus prays that his sons will fall by each other’s hands. Later poems repeat the pattern of violence inside a household: Agamemnon is murdered by Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra and avenged by his son Orestes, and Odysseus dies at the hands of his own child.
Homecoming and its costs
Victory does not bring the Greeks peace. The Returns scatter them, drive Menelaus to Egypt and end with Agamemnon’s murder, and even Odysseus, whose homecoming the Odyssey celebrates, finds new wars and a violent death in the Telegony.
Symbols & motifs
The arms of Achilles
The dead hero’s armor is the prize that splits Aias and Odysseus. Odysseus wins it through Athena, Aias goes mad, and Odysseus later hands it to Neoptolemus, passing Achilles’ place to his son.
The wooden horse
Epeius builds it at Athena’s instruction. The Trojans argue over whether to throw it from the rocks, burn it or dedicate it to Athena, and their choice to keep it brings the Greeks inside the walls.
The Palladium
A sacred image kept in Troy. The Little Iliad has Odysseus and Diomedes carry it out of the city, but Arctinus says Zeus gave the true one to Dardanus, that it was hidden, and that the Greeks took only a copy.
The stag at Aulis
Agamemnon’s boast over a stag he has shot angers Artemis, and a stag later takes Iphigeneia’s place on the altar. The animal marks both the offense and the goddess’s rescue.
Recurring motifs
Prophecy. Helenus, Cassandra and Calchas foretell the future in the Cypria, the captured Helenus reveals how Troy can be taken, and the ghost of Achilles warns Agamemnon’s men of what awaits them before they sail.
Disguise and deception. Odysseus feigns madness, Iphigeneia is summoned as if to marry Achilles, Odysseus enters Troy disguised as a beggar, and Sinon gets into the city by pretence. In a Cypria fragment even Nemesis changes shape to escape Zeus.
Rescue beyond death. Gods keep lifting mortals out of ordinary death: Artemis carries Iphigeneia to the Tauri, Eos wins immortality for Memnon, Thetis snatches Achilles from his pyre to the White Island, and Circe makes Penelope and Telemachus immortal.
Important quotes
“Zeus saw it and had pity and in his wise heart resolved to relieve the all-nurturing earth of men by causing the great struggle of the Ilian war, that the load of death might empty the world.”
“So he prayed to Zeus the king and the other deathless gods that each might fall by his brother’s hand and go down into the house of Hades.”
“He is a simple man who kills the father and lets the children live.”
“For Aias took up and carried out of the strife the hero, Peleus’ son: this great Odysseus cared not to do.”
“It was midnight, and the clear moon was rising.”
“He knew many things but knew all badly”
The ending of The Epic Cycle, explained
The last poem Proclus summarizes is the Telegony, two books he credits to Eugammon of Cyrene, and it begins where the Odyssey stops. The suitors’ kinsmen bury them. Odysseus sails to Elis to inspect his herds, returns to Ithaca to perform the sacrifices Teiresias ordered, and then goes to Thesprotis, where he marries Callidice, queen of the Thesprotians. He leads her people against the Brygi, and the gods join in: Ares routs his army and fights Athena until Apollo separates them. After Callidice dies, Odysseus’s son Polypoetes takes the throne and Odysseus goes home. Meanwhile Telegonus, travelling in search of his father, lands on Ithaca and ravages it. Odysseus comes out to defend the island and is killed by his son, who does not know him. When Telegonus learns the truth, he carries the body, with Penelope and Telemachus, to his mother’s island, where Circe makes them immortal. Telegonus marries Penelope, and Telemachus marries Circe. The Telegony shows the design of the whole Cycle. Proclus presents the poems as a chain with Homer’s two epics as fixed links: the Cypria leads into the Iliad; the Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Sack of Ilium and Returns fill the gap between the Iliad and the Odyssey; and the Telegony carries on after the Odyssey. Many modern readers find the double marriage an odd, mechanical tidying-up of Odysseus’s family. Others point out that a son who kills a father he does not recognize repeats the pattern of Oedipus, whose story the Cycle also told. Much remains uncertain. One fragment calls Telegonus the son of Circe, while another says the author of the Telegony gave Odysseus a son Telegonus, or Teledamus, by Calypso. The joins between poems were not always neat either: Proclus stops the Little Iliad as the horse enters Troy, yet lines cited from Lesches describe the sack. The summary never says how Odysseus was killed, so any weapon named in later versions does not come from these fragments.
Common misreadings
MythHomer wrote the poems of the Epic Cycle.
ActuallySome ancient writers credited them to Homer, but Proclus credits the Aethiopis and the Sack of Ilium to Arctinus of Miletus, the Little Iliad to Lesches, the Returns to Agias of Troezen and the Telegony to Eugammon of Cyrene, and names Homer only for the Iliad and Odyssey. The Cycle is not the work of the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey.
MythThe Epic Cycle poems survive and can be read in full.
ActuallyThey are lost. We know them from prose summaries, mostly Proclus’s, and from short passages quoted by later writers, which is why this text is a series of numbered fragments, each labeled with its source.
MythThe Epic Cycle tells how Paris shot Achilles in the heel.
ActuallyThe surviving summary of the Aethiopis says only that Achilles, chasing the routed Trojans into the city, was killed by Paris and Apollo. Neither the heel nor an arrow appears in these fragments.
Test yourself
1. According to Proclus’s summary of the Aethiopis, who kills Achilles?
Achilles chases the routed Trojans into the city and is killed by Paris and Apollo. Hector is already dead, and Achilles kills both Penthesileia and Memnon.
2. Who builds the wooden horse in the Little Iliad?
The summary says Epeius builds the horse by Athena’s instruction. Sinon’s part comes later, when he signals the Greek fleet.
3. Who is awarded the arms of Achilles?
Odysseus gains them by the contriving of Athena, and Aias goes mad and kills himself. Odysseus later gives them to Neoptolemus.
4. How does Odysseus die in the Telegony?
Telegonus lands on Ithaca in search of his father and kills Odysseus unknowingly when Odysseus comes out to defend the island.
5. Why is the Greek fleet held at Aulis the second time it gathers?
Agamemnon boasts that he surpasses Artemis, and she sends stormy winds until Calchas tells the Greeks to sacrifice Iphigeneia.
Flashcards flip, self-grade, and the deck remembers what you know
Nice work.
Long ago, Greek poets sang many long poems about the Trojan War, not just the Iliad and the Odyssey. Most of those other poems were lost, and today we have only short bits that later writers copied down, plus a few plot summaries. Together they tell how the war began, when a prince named Paris picked Aphrodite as the fairest goddess and sailed away with Helen. They tell how Achilles died, how the Greeks got into Troy with a wooden horse, and how the heroes sailed home. At the very end, Odysseus is killed by a son who does not recognize him. People once said Homer wrote these poems, but most of them were by other poets. Because so much is missing, the old sources sometimes tell the story in different ways.
Compare & connect the story universe
The Iliad
The Cycle was arranged around it: the Cypria leads up to its opening, and the Aethiopis picks up after Hector’s funeral.
The Odyssey
The Returns tell the other Greeks’ voyages home, and the Telegony continues Odysseus’s story after the Odyssey ends.
The Battle of Frogs and Mice
Another comic poem once credited to Homer. The Suidas entry in this collection names Pigres as the author of both it and the Margites.
Antigone
Sophocles’ play takes up the aftermath of the Theban war that Oedipus’s curse sets in motion in the Thebaid fragments.
Discussion & essay prompts for class, or your next paper
💬 Discussion questions
- What happens between the Iliad and the Odyssey
- How does Achilles die in the Epic Cycle
- Who built the Trojan horse
- How does The Epic Cycle explore the theme of the plan of Zeus?
- How does The Epic Cycle explore the theme of strength against cunning?
- What is the central conflict in The Epic Cycle, and how does it shape the ending?
✎ Essay prompts
- Analyze how Homer develops the theme of the plan of Zeus in The Epic Cycle. Support your argument with specific evidence from the text.
- Examine the significance of the arms of Achilles in The Epic Cycle. What does it represent, and how does it deepen the work’s meaning?
- How does Homer use epitome to shape the reader’s experience of The Epic Cycle?
- Some readers assume that homer wrote the poems of the Epic Cycle. Argue for or against this interpretation, using evidence from the text.
Key questions students ask
- What happens between the Iliad and the Odyssey
- How does Achilles die in the Epic Cycle
- Who built the Trojan horse
- How does Odysseus die in Greek mythology
- Did Homer write the Epic Cycle
- How did the Trojan War start in the Cypria
Analysis is original StoryBites commentary. Quotations and the full text are from the fragments and ancient summaries of the Epic Cycle and the other Homerica in the prose translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Loeb Classical Library, 1914; Project Gutenberg eBook #348). Antiquity attributed some of these poems to Homer, but most are the work of later poets and survive only in fragments. The fragments and this translation are in the public domain.