Author Description

From a corpus of Greek epics known in antiquity as the Epic Cycle, six poems dealt with the same Trojan War mythology as the Homeric poems. Though they are now lost, these poems were much read and much discussed in ancient times, not only for their content but for their mysterious relationship with the more famous works attributed to Homer. In Device and Composition in the Greek Epic Cycle, Benjamin Sammons shows that these lost poems belonged, compositionally, to essentially the same tradition as the Homeric poems. He demonstrates that various devices well-known from the Homeric epics were also fundamental to the narrative construction of these later works. Yet while the Cyclic poets constructed their works using the same traditional devices as Homer, they used these to different ends and with different results. Sammons argues that essential difference between Cyclic and Homeric poetry lies not in the fundamental building blocks from which they are constructed, but in the scale of these components relative to the overall structure of the poems. This approach sheds new light on the meaning of the few surviving verse fragments and on the overall form of the poems themselves. Narratives -- Catalogue and Catalogic -- Narrative Doublets -- Character Roles and Narrative Design -- Aristeia -- The Role of the Gods and the Divine. Benjamin Sammons. Includes bibliographical references and index.