“Unveiling the Untold: Discover the Enigmatic Lost Sequels of The Iliad That Could Rewrite History!”
Like Homer’s poems, the Cyclical poems were written in hexameter, but historically scholars appraise the fragments to be at a lower poetic quality than Homer’s. Of course, it should be explicitly pointed out that those scholars were judging the quality of poems they do not have in front of them. And only relatively recently did they get called out by newer generations of academics for uncritically passing judgement on the missing poems.
That out of the way, what about the stories? What does the big picture of the Trojan war look like? Well, the Cycle starts at the beginning, the literal beginning of Greek myth with the Titanomachy. This poem is named after the battle between the Olympic gods and the Titans, the previous generation of Greek gods. Much of the same ground is covered in Hesiod’s Theogony, with variations. If the Brad Pitt movie is all you know of the Iliad, it might surprise you why a prologue to the story starts with the birth of the gods. Unlike that movie, the gods are very active characters in the Iliad and the Epic Cycle, so much so that a prologue dedicated to their origins makes perfect sense.
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