The Epic Cycle ((ギリシア語:Ἐπικός Κύκλος), ''Epikos Kyklos'') was a collection of Ancient Greek epic poems that related the story of the Trojan War, which includes the ''Cypria'', the ''Aethiopis'', the so-called ''Little Iliad'', the ''Iliupersis'', the ''Nostoi'', and the ''Telegony''. Scholars sometimes include the two Homeric epics, the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', among the poems of the Epic Cycle, but the term is more often used to specify the non-Homeric poems as distinct from the Homeric ones.
Aside from the ''Odyssey'' and the ''Iliad'', the cyclic epics only survive in fragments and summaries from Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period. The epics were composed in dactylic hexameter verse.
The epic cycle 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 Mycenaean Bronze Age culture 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.
A longer Epic Cycle, as described by the 9th-century CE scholar and clergyman Photius in his ''Bibliotheca'', also included the ''Titanomachy'' and the Theban Cycle, which in turn comprised the ''Oedipodea'', the ''Thebaid'', the ''Epigoni'' and the ''Alcmeonis''; however, it is certain that none of the cyclic epics (other than Homer) survived to Photius' day, and it is likely that Proclus and Photius were not referring to a canonical collection. Modern scholars do not normally include the Theban Cycle when referring to the Epic Cycle.
==Evidence for the Epic Cycle==
Only the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'' survive intact, although fragments of the other epics are quoted by later authors, and a few lines survive in the tattered remains of ancient papyri.
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, ''Chrestomathy'' written by a "Proclus". This is known from evidence provided by the later scholar Photius, mentioned above. Photius provides sufficient information about Proclus' ''Chrestomathy'' to demonstrate that the Venetus A excerpt is derived from the same work.〔For further information see Monro 1883, and Severyns 1928, 1938a, 1938b, 1953, 1962, and 1963.〕 Little is known about Proclus, except that he is certainly not the philosopher Proclus 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,〔See e.g. Monro 1883.〕 but it is quite possible that he is simply an otherwise unknown figure.
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