The Cypria: Reconstructing the Lost Prequel to Homer's Iliad

The Cypria: Reconstructing the Lost Prequel to Homer's Iliad (Reconstructing the Lost Epics of the Trojan War Book 1)

In Classical times, the story of the Trojan War was told in a series of eight epic poems known as the Epic Cycle, of which only the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer survive to the present day. The first poem in the sequence was the Cypria, which described the early years of the war from Erisâ€™ casting of the golden apple at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, to Parisâ€™ abduction of Helen, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Odysseusâ€™ treacherous murder of Palamedes, and finally, the enslavement of Briseis and Chryseis, which sowed the seeds of the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon in the Iliad.

The Cypria is now lost, but the myths it once contained are known from a number of later writings. In an ambitious exercise in literary back-breeding, editor D. M. Smith attempts to reconstruct the lost prequel to Homerâ€™s Iliad from the available material. Included are excerpts from Ovidâ€™s Metamorphoses, Apollodorusâ€™ Bibliotheca, Euripidesâ€™ Iphigenia at Aulis and Colluthusâ€™ The Rape of Helen, as well as lesser known documents such as Dictys Cretensis Ephemeris Belli Trojani, and the Excidium Troiae â€” a medieval summary of a lost Roman account of the Trojan War, discovered among the papers of an 18th century clergyman in the 1930s. This eclectic melange of Greek and Latin texts has been carefully edited and arranged in accordance with the known chronology of the Cypria, thus allowing readers to trace the story of this vanished epic as a continuous narrative for the first time in over a thousand years.
Country USA
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2017-08-09
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2017-08-09
Format	Kindle eBook

The Cypria: Reconstructing the Lost Prequel to Homer's Iliad (Reconstructing the Lost Epics of the Trojan War Book 1)

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