Overview

"From a corpus of Greek epics known in antiquity as the ""Epic Cycle,"" six poems dealt with the same Trojan War mythology as the Homeric poems. Though they are now lost, these poems were much read and much discussed in ancient times, not only for their content but for their mysterious relationship with the more famous works attributed to Homer. In Device and Composition in the Greek Epic Cycle, Benjamin Sammons shows that these lost poems belonged, compositionally, to essentially the same tradition as the Homeric poems. He demonstrates that various compositional devices well-known from the Homeric epics were also fundamental to the narrative construction of these later works. Yet while the ""cyclic"" poets constructed their works using the same traditional devices as Homer, they used these to different ends and with different results. Sammons argues that the essential difference between cyclic and Homeric poetry lies not in the fundamental building blocks from which they are constructed, but in the scale of these components relative to the overall construction of poems. This sheds important light on the early history of epic as a genre, since it is likely that these devices originally developed to provide large-scale structure to shorter poems and have been put to quite different use in the composition of the monumental Homeric epics. Along the way Sammons sheds new light on the overall form of lost cyclic epics and on the meaning and context of the few surviving verse fragments."

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9780190614843

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Reviews

This searching and creative analysis of the Epic Cycle by Sammons is a great advance for the study of early Greek epic. The Cycle poems are revealed as employing the same traditional compositional methods as the Iliad and Odyssey, yet recognized as distinct from the Homeric epics and each other in literary effects. The original arguments in this book produce an amazing amount of insights from the little evidence available to us about the Epic Cycle. --Jonathan Burgess, University of Toronto While the Epic Cycle has received much scholarly attention in recent years, this book takes a truly fresh and engaging approach to the lost epics about Troy. By considering the evidence in the light of the traditional techniques of early Greek narratives, it succeeds in presenting these poems as different from Homeric epic in some ways, but not simply inferior. Presenting more material much more quickly than the Iliad and Odyssey, the cyclic epics adapted available narrative resources for their purposes. While the analysis can only suggest how these narratives were organized and why, the book's solutions for the many problems of the Cycle are always interesting and often plausible. --Ruth Scodel, University of Michigan

Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * S.E. Goins, CHOICE * [Sammon's] study, even when dealing with problematic issues, proves to be an invaluable tool for students and scholars alike. Despite the problems posed by the fragmentary nature of his material, S. succeeds in doing justice to the cyclic poets by identifying and bringing to the surface the narrative and structural devices employed in their composition, while steering away from speculative reconstructions of the poems. S.'s innovative study has opened the way for a positive revaluation of the Greek Epic Cycle, and no further study of the subject can afford not to take his contribution into account. * Classical Review * Brilliant in execution, his demonstration of these two points makes these poems come alive. S. brings them out of the shadows cast by the Homeric epics and, put simply, makes them sound good. His analysis imparts a greater degree of cohesion and coherence to the poems than previous investigations have detected. One comes away from this book wishing that they had survived ... This book will guide scholars of ancient Greek epic for years to come. Moreover, written by a practiced stylist, it will be accessible to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. One will give it pride of place in a course on ancient Greek epic broadly construed. * Classical Philology * Sammons has succeeded admirably in recovering those poems as works of art. * Classical Journal-Online *

Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --S.E. Goins, CHOICE This searching and creative analysis of the Epic Cycle by Sammons is a great advance for the study of early Greek epic. The Cycle poems are revealed as employing the same traditional compositional methods as the Iliad and Odyssey, yet recognized as distinct from the Homeric epics and each other in literary effects. The original arguments in this book produce an amazing amount of insights from the little evidence available to us about the Epic Cycle. --Jonathan Burgess, University of Toronto While the Epic Cycle has received much scholarly attention in recent years, this book takes a truly fresh and engaging approach to the lost epics about Troy. By considering the evidence in the light of the traditional techniques of early Greek narratives, it succeeds in presenting these poems as different from Homeric epic in some ways, but not simply inferior. Presenting more material much more quickly than the Iliad and Odyssey, the cyclic epics adapted available narrative resources for their purposes. While the analysis can only suggest how these narratives were organized and why, the book's solutions for the many problems of the Cycle are always interesting and often plausible. --Ruth Scodel, University of Michigan This searching and creative analysis of the Epic Cycle by Sammons is a great advance for the study of early Greek epic. The Cycle poems are revealed as employing the same traditional compositional methods as the Iliad and Odyssey, yet recognized as distinct from the Homeric epics and each other in literary effects. The original arguments in this book produce an amazing amount of insights from the little evidence available to us about the Epic Cycle. --Jonathan Burgess, University of Toronto While the Epic Cycle has received much scholarly attention in recent years, this book takes a truly fresh and engaging approach to the lost epics about Troy. By considering the evidence in the light of the traditional techniques of early Greek narratives, it succeeds in presenting these poems as different from Homeric epic in some ways, but not simply inferior. Presenting more material much more quickly than the Iliad and Odyssey, the cyclic epics adapted available narrative resources for their purposes. While the analysis can only suggest how these narratives were organized and why, the book's solutions for the many problems of the Cycle are always interesting and often plausible. --Ruth Scodel, University of Michigan

Author Information

Benjamin Sammons is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern, and Asian Languages and Cultures at Queens College, The City University of New York. He has published widely on ancient Greek literature and teaches at Queens College in the City University of New York.

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