Epic Cycle

This is a society dominated by small kingdoms ruled by kings and their warriors, with vast trade networks to the rest of the Mediterranean and beyond.

And if that sounds familiar, that's because this is the setting of the Epic Cycle.

You know, the Trojan War, the Odyssey, and all that stuff.

Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

It's, it's the kind of ancestor of the castle, high walls, towers, protects a, a valuable place.

Uh, it's also the starting point for Western literature through Homer, The Iliad, The Odyssey, and then, then the reversions of Homer, the Epic Cycle in the Roman times, Virgil's Aeneid, and so forth.

So, and I knew the book was gonna go all the way through to nuclear bunkers as the kind of lineal descendants of castles.

So then the question is, okay, what is the idea that the castle expresses, and what kind of different fortifications fulfill the same, um, function? And I, I was thinking a lot about great walls.

Weren't there other stories surrounding this that gave more context to the commoners and the rest of the battle?

There were, and they were part of what is known as the epic cycle.

Okay.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are the only two massive epics that survived intact, but they were originally just one part of a multi-volume ancient franchise.