”A Little Iliad” by Daniel Mendelsohn

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Little Iliad by Daniel Mendelsohn One

Who, contemplating the vast catalog of vanished works of literature from the ancient world, really regrets the lost epics about the Trojan War known as the Cypria and the Little

Iliad?

To have just one more complete poem by Sappho, bringing the grand total to two, to have any of the 75 lost plays of Aeschylus, the 116 by Sophocles, the 70 by Euripides, to recover Ovid's lost Medea or even a single one of the much-admired love elegies of Virgil's friend Cornelius Gallus, which once comprised four whole books of which a single line now survives.

have the crucial missing books of Tacitus's annals, for any one of these, there is very little that even the most upstanding classicist wouldn't do.

Any one of them, after all, would add immeasurably to our understanding of classical civilization.

Any one of them would, indeed, add unimaginably to the treasure house of world literature.

but for the cypriot and the little iliad i suspect no one apart from the most scrupulous philagogue sheds a secret tear these were just two of what was once a grand cycle of eight epic narratives in verse composed at some point in the pre-classical greek past which together comprised many tens of thousands of lines and at least 77 books or papyrus scrolls and narrated pretty much everything having to do with the Trojan War, from its remotest prehistory, the wedding of Achilles' parents, to the final bizarre ramification of its most attenuated plotline.

the murder of Odysseus in his old age by his son Telegonus, his child by the witch Circe.

Of these eight, of course, only two survive, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

But later summaries, paraphrases, and even quotations in learned commentaries on classical works that have survived give details about the other six.

We know that the 11 books of the Cypria, for instance, made for rather an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink affair, covering all the action from the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis to the judgment of Paris to the abduction of Helen, all the way through to the first nine years of the war up until the moment when Homer's Iliad begins.

And we know that at some point after the Iliad came the so-called Little Iliad, also something of a laundry list of a poem from the sound of it, narrating as it did much of the action after the deaths of Achilles.

From the suicide of Ajax and the mission to fetch Philoctetes to the construction of the Trojan horse, the deceitful embassy to the Trojans of the Greek soldier Sinon, who convinced the Trojans to take the wooden horse, saying that the Greeks, fearing plague, had returned home.

And the Achaeans' terrible entry into Troy.

Various other poems filled in the blanks.

The Ethiopies narrated the deaths of the various ancillary characters like the Amazon queen Penthesilea and Memnon, an Ethiopian ally of the Trojans.

Another, called Nostoi, or Returns, narrated the arduous homecomings of the Greek heroes after the war, particularly that of Agamemnon.

It was presumably adjacent to the Nostoi in the epic cycle that the Odyssey once stood.

One reason that we don't hugely regret the absence of most of the lost epic is, in fact, the greatness of the two surviving Homeric epics, each a masterpiece that stands easily on its own, neither needing a prequel or a sequel.

Another reason is that much of the content of The Lost Epics was recapitulated in later Greek tragedies, to say nothing of Virgil's Aeneid, the second book of which provides as harrowing and satisfying an account of the fall of Troy as anyone could want.

But there is still another reason that we shouldn't mind too much the loss of poems like The Cypriot or The Little Iliad.

Apparently, they weren't all that good.

In the 23rd chapter of his Poetics, Aristotle suggests why.