The Cypria, so named because its poet supposedly came from the island of Cyprus, was an early Greek epic that is known to us primarily through quotations and references to passages by later authors, as well as through a prose summary of its plot and contents.

Malcolm Davies uses linguistic evidence from the available verbatim fragments, along with other considerations, to suggest that the Cypria was written after Homer and was intended as a sort of prequel to the plot of the Iliad. In light of this evidence, it is noteworthy that many of the incidents described in the Cypria seem markedly un-Homeric; to give just one example, the Judgment of Paris, a popular subject in later Greek literature and art, most likely received its first detailed treatment in the Cypria, whereas the Iliad mentions it only fleetingly.

Here Davies collects and translates the extant fragments of the Cypria and provides a commentary that anchors it in the Homeric context as well as in the broader world of ancient Greek art and literature.

It may seem odd to devote an entire book, however short, to a lost epic of which hardly any fragments (as normally defined) survive. The existence of a late prose summary of the epic’s contents hardly dispels that oddness. One (rather long) word may supply justification: Neoanalysis.

This once influential theory held that motifs and episodes in the Iliad derive from the Aethiopis, called thus after an Ethiopian prince who allied with Troy against the Greeks, only to be killed by the Greeks’ greatest hero, Achilles. The death of that hero himself, at the hands of Paris, was then described, followed by the suicide of Ajax and preparations for the sack of Troy. The prose summary thus suggests a sequel to Homer’s poem, rather than its source, and for various reasons, especially the theory’s apparent failure to allow for the concept of oral composition, Neoanalysis fell into disfavor. Its recent revival in subtler form, given its vast potential implications for the Iliad’s origins, has inspired this volume’s critical reappraisal of that theory’s more sophisticated reincarnation. In addition, even more than with other lost early epics, the possibility that Greek vase paintings may reflect episodes of the poem must be examined.

In antiquity, the story of the failed assault of the Seven against Thebes ranked second only to the Trojan War. But whereas the latter was immortalized by Homer’s Iliad, the account of the former in the epic Thebais survives only in fragments preserved in later authors. The same is true of the Oedipodeia and Epigoni, which dealt respectively with events leading up to the Seven’s campaign and with the successful assault on the city in the next generation. The Thebais was probably the most important of the three—certainly more and longer fragments of it have survived—and it has been alleged that its recovery would tell us more about Homer than any comparable discovery.

Paradoxically, these fragments suggest very un-Homeric content and style (in particular its detail of the hero Tydeus forfeiting immortality by gnawing on the head of a dying enemy). The same is true of the epic Alcmaeonis, named after one of the Epigoni, whose few surviving fragments pullulate with un-Homeric features. Malcolm Davies provides the first full commentary on all four epics’ fragments. He attempts to set them in context and examines whether artistic depictions of the relevant myths can help reconstruct the lost epics’ contents.