Page:Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica.djvu/36

 counted the expedition of the "After-Born" against Thebes, and the sack of the city.

The Trojan Cycle.—Six epics with the Iliad and the Odyssey made up the Trojan Cycle — The Cyprian Lays, the Iliad, the Aethiopis, the Little Iliad, the Sack of Troy, the Returns, the Odyssey, and the Telegony.

It has been assumed in the foregoing pages that the poems of the Trojan Cycle are later than the Homeric poems; but, as the opposite view has been held, the reason for this assumption must now be given. (1) Tradition puts Homer and the Homeric poems proper back in the ages before chronological history began, and at the same time assigns the purely Cyclic poems to definite authors who are dated from the first Olympiad (776 B.C.) downwards. This tradition cannot be purely arbitrary. (2) The Cyclic poets (as we can see from the abstracts of Proclus) were careful not to trespass upon ground already occupied by Homer. Thus, when we find that in the Returns all the prominent Greek heroes except Odysseus are accounted for, we are forced to believe that the author of this poem knew the Odyssey and judged it unnecessary to deal in full with that hero's adventures. In a word, the Cyclic poems are "written round" the Iliad and the Odyssey. (3) The general structure of these epics is clearly imitative. As MM. Croiset remark, the abusive Thersites in the Aethiopis is clearly copied from the Thersites of the Iliad: in the same poem Antilochus, slain by Memnon and avenged by Achilles, is obviously modelled on Patroclus. (4) The geographical knowledge of a poem like

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