Chapter 8

Six epics with the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ made up the Trojan Cycle—The _Cyprian Lays_, the _Iliad_, the _Aethiopis_, the _Little Iliad_, the _Sack of Troy_, the _Returns_, the _Odyssey_, and the _Telegony_. It has been assumed in the foregoing pages that the poems of the Trojan Cycle are later than the Homeric poems; but, as the opposite view has been held, the reasons for this assumption must now be given. (1) Tradition puts Homer and the Homeric poems proper back in the ages before chronological history began,…