The Trojan Cycle

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Ever heard of an ancient conflict called The Trojan War? Quite a story, really. And then there's Homer's epic The Iliad and The Odyssey, telling the tale in forty-eight books and tens of thousands of lines of dactylic hexameter...all of which focus on less than one year of the decade-long conflict, and the years Odysseus spent lost afterwards.

Something's missing -- namely, the first nine years of the war, the actual end of the war, and associated myths. Surely they weren't just floating about in the Oral Tradition until some ancient tragedians got ahold of them?

As it happens, they weren't. It turns out that the The Iliad and the The Odyssey were not the only epics which pulled together the tales of the Trojan War. In fact, there were eight:

We've lost every one of the above except for Homer's epics, but yet we still know of them. References to and quotations from the lost epics have survived in fragments. By an incredible stroke of luck, we have a chrestomathy by an unknown Proclus which summarizes the events that take place in each epic.

Thanks to these sources, we know that the epics covered everything from the marriage of Peleus and Thetis to Odysseus's death.

Tropes provided by the Trojan Cycle as a whole: