Greek Epic Fragments: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries B.C.

by M.L. West (Editor), Various, Thomas E. Jordan

Greek epics of the archaic period include poems that narrate a particular heroic episode or series of episodes and poems that recount the long-term history of families or peoples. They are an important source of mythological record. Here is a new text and translation of the examples of this poetry that have come down to us.

The heroic epic is represented by poems about Heracles and Theseus, and by two great epic cycles: the Theban Cycle, which tells of the failed assault on Thebes by the Seven and the subsequent successful assault by their sons; and the Trojan Cycle, which includes Cypria, Little Iliad, and The Sack of Ilion. Among the genealogical epics are poems in which Eumelus creates a prehistory for Corinth and Asius creates one for Samos. In presenting the extant fragments of these early epic poems, Martin West provides very helpful notes. His Introduction places the epics in historical context.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Mythology, Literature, History, Epic, Greece

316 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2003

About the author

Martin Litchfield West was an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His many publications include Ancient Greek Music (OUP, 1992), The East Face of Helicon (OUP, 1997), and Indo-European Poetry and Myth (OUP, 2007).

Reviews

[Marquise · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's so maddening (and saddening) to think of how much of the Epic Cycle and other perhaps great poetry from Ancient Greece was lost forever. I'm especially hurt by the loss of the rest of the Trojan War cycle epics, and just reading the teeny-tiny morsels that survived, any fan of Homer would want to cry.

[John Isles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find the two surviving poems attributed to Homer - the Iliad and the Odyssey - fascinating for the details they recall of Mycenaean Greece. The poems were part of an epic cycle that embraced all Greek mythology, but the other poems of the cycle have survived only in the fragments collected in this book, which don't amount to much, and it was tantalizing to reread them in this new edition. One day perhaps more will be recovered, perhaps from the carbonized scrolls that have been found at Herculaneum and have not yet been read.

[Eadweard · Rating 3 out of 5]

All those works, lost forever.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a fan of the Iliad and Odyssey, I was very excited to pick up this book. I was also interested since I studied some classical Greek in university and still have a yearning to retake up those studies. The Loeb series is a perfect solution. The left hand page includes the original text (in Latin or Greek) and the right hand page is an English translation.

The Iliad and Odyssey were part of the Trojan epic cycle, a collection of eight related epic stories. The lost six pieces only remain in fragments, summaries or commentary from various scholars writing much later than when the stories were composed. Sadly, this is all we have, but it is really exciting stuff that fills in the blanks, for me at least.

We have the Cypria, which covers the origin of the Trojan war and goes up to the beginning of the Iliad. Next is the Aethiopis, which starts after the end of the Iliad. It details the death of Achilles, his funeral games, the fight between Odysseus and Ajax Telamon and then the latter’s suicide. Next up is the Little Iliad. This covers the death of Paris, also known as Alexander. (That little alternative name fact I did not know.) This is also the story that has the Trojan horse and the sack of Troy. After that, we have The Sack of Ilion, an alternative telling of the sack of the city. It syncs up more closely with how the fate of Troy is described in the Odyssey. The fifth lost epic is called The Returns, which runs concurrently with the Odyssey. It covers the drowning of Ajax the Lesser due to some sacrilege he had committed earlier, as well as the murder of Agamemnon and other returns. The final lost piece is the Telegony, which is the sequel to the Odyssey. In it, we learn of three more sons of Odysseus, one born of Penelope, one of an inland queen he married after the Odyssey timeline, and one child born of the god Circe, where Odysseus stayed for a year on his roundabout way home from Troy. This last child ends up unknowingly killing his father, bringing closure to a prophecy about Odysseus’ end.

This volume also includes fragments from the Theban cycle, poems on Heracles and Theseus, other related epics and some fragments that have a claimed, though not necessarily proved, connection to Homer.

It’s a fine collection, although by its very nature, it is fragmentary. This is not a book to pick up for an introduction, but it is a welcome addition and an absolutely fun read.

[Dory · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the first stories of the Iliad I was told as a child was that of Achilles invincibility from being dunked in the river Styx held by the heels. It's amazing this piece of the story is so widely known yet only found in these fragments and not in the epic itself! This book was a mix of joy from being able to gain extra knowledge and insight into classical literature, and pain from knowing the full text of these epics will probably never be recovered, lost to time. Having the original Greek side by side the translation is also very helpful when trying to dig a little deeper into the text, much nicer than guessing what is what on the Greek Guttenberg translation.

[William Boyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Epic Greek fragments by the Loeb Classical Library is just what it sounds like, a lot of random exerts from other historical works from ancient times that include anything relating to these lost epics. If anything this book is only a sad what if, leaving readers wondering how good these actual works may have been.

While it is not the fault of the book but what it had to work with, this book is not interesting to read, even to someone who is interested in Ancient Greek history. The bits and pieces of these epics are not complete enough to make the book a worthwhile read, and in my opinion is not worth the money it would cost to purchase.

The fragments that do survive if these epics are not of the meaningful parts of the story, but just random side events because the writer of the fragment assumed that his readers would already know the events of the epics. This is unfortunate, because that is not enough to make the read fulfilling.

The best part of the book was just the editor describing the story of the lost epics, and that is because those descriptions are the only coherent narrative in the entire book. I wish the book had just been that style but longer.

Overall this is a book that you do not need to buy if you don’t have the means too, nor is it worth the time it will take. Half the book is written in Greek, so if you are an English reader it will be a very short read. Only about half the book is what most English readers like myself will read, so the book is not as long as the page count makes it seem

[Erik Rostad · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was amazing. The Iliad and the Odyssey are part of an Epic Cycle containing 8 works. Six of them are lost and so we are left with the Iliad and Odyssey as the two remaining works. However, the two big epics along with a variety of other writings refer to the lost works. They can therefore be pieced together and that's what this book containing fragments seeks to do.

Here are the 8 total works of the cycle:

1. Cypria - events prior to the Iliad (kidnapping of Helen, gathering of Greek troops for battle, attack of towns surrounding Troy)

2. Iliad

3. Aethiopis (death of Achilles)

4. Little Iliad (Trojan Horse)

5. Sack of Troy (destruction of Troy)

6. The Returns (return home of the Greeks)

7. Odyssey

8. Telegony (further travels of Odysseus, killing of Odysseus by son Telegonus)

This book presents the highlights for each of the 6 lost works and then mentions references from other works of the time (from Pindar, Apollodorus, Euripides, and many others). I was absolutely shocked to learn that the Cypria deals with "the will of Zeus," which is one of two key phrases in the first paragraph of the Iliad (along with the wrath of Achilles). According to the Cypria, the will of Zeus refers to an actual plan by Zeus to eliminate vast numbers of people from the earth through the use of two wars - Theban & Trojan wars. This sheds an entirely new light on how I read and understood the Iliad and Zeus' will in the ensuing events.

[Isiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those interested, primarily, the epics covered are The Theban Cycle, The Epic Cycle, Epic Poems on Hercules and Theseus, and some scattered bits of the Titanomachia, Corinthiaca (Connected to the Argonautica), and Europia.

A strong foundation is crucial when reading this book. It fills in the gaps and adds some great insight into the missing epics, but if you are not already familiar with them, it will be difficult to make sense of anything.

I mostly got this book because I really wanted as much information as possible about the missing books of the Epic Cycle, and this proved a great resource. It has a basic summary of each missing book, along with scattered lines from each. Some that were particularly tragic in leaving me wanting more.

For some of the other Epics included, there wasn't as much context provided, just a few scattered lines, so it was a bit more difficult to follow. Particularly, without a background on Hercules, Theseus, and Jason, those bits might be tricky to follow.

[Marino · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Iliad and the Odyssey were part of a longer and broader tradition of epic poetry. This tradition is not limited to the Trojan War but also included the cycle of Thebes, about Oedipous and his successors, and various poems about heroes such as Heracles and Thesseus.

In this book various fragments of text from and about these poems are collected. This includes short summaries of the Trojan poems, various discussions by classical writers (from Aristotle to late Roman writers) about the mythological events and the geneology of heroic characters in the poems and some quotations from the poems.

Parts of it are rather interesting and I definitely appreciate the effort that went into making this book, but the content is admittedly rather specialist and I cannot say that I enjoyed all of it. Worthwhile if you are really into Greek mythology.

[Samrat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't get much out of the fragments of the genealogical epics besides being able to situate Hesiod better, but I love having a collected repository of all the fragments and testimony we have for Theban epics. That said, I don't see myself turning to this instead of theoi (or maybe the new Routledge handbook?) unless I'm trying to find specific language.

I'm going to be stuck thinking about all the fragments in what they tell us about Theban myths that mythographers, dramatists, and Statius don't, but also in what they suggest the Homeric epics could be reacting to, or how they might be reacted to in Theban epic, as in Barker and Christensen (2019). Separately, jarring to learn that the lost (alleged?) Theban epic the Alcmeonis was not about Alcmene but instead an Orestian tale about Amphiaraus' son.

[Kevin Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been one of my favorite Loeb works yet.

I love reading Loeb books because it takes me down so many rabbit holes causing me to research and make connections and revelations while doing so.

It’s unfortunate that all of the great works referenced by these fragments have been lost.

I cannot begin to describe the amount of information I learned about the Epic Cycle and the plethora of other Greek myths by reading this book.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this hoping to fill in the gaps in between The Illiad and The Odyssey and quickly realised I should've just read The Library. I imagine I'll appreciate this more on a reread after having read some more completed stories first.

[Micah Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

As advertised, these are fragments. Some of them provide interesting details that fill out the Iliad and Odyssey. Most of them are unintelligible or are just ancient authors arguing about who wrote what text that no longer exists.

[Dani · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s like the Silmarillion of Greek epics. Underrated, full of lore, and occasionally difficult to understand

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

For what this book is, you couldn’t ask for anymore.

[Silvio Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were a lot of epics in ancient Greece, but sadly all of the ones between Homer and The Argonautica went out of circulation - some within only three or four centuries of being written down. This little book has all the quotations, summaries, or references that survived in other ancient writings. A lot of them, including the only complete plot-summaries, are about the cycle of poems that covered the parts of the Trojan War that aren't in the Iliad and Odyssey. Some are from a poem about the life of Hêraklês, and some from genealogical poems telling about more than one generation of a mythical family.

It was good for reviewing and expanding my knowledge of Greek mythology a bit, but of course the stories don't come alive the way they would with complete poems.

[Dustin Simmons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly useful if you're really interested in Greek epic. Not for the casual reader, but gold for advanced undergrads & grad students.