Meta-Cyclic epic and Homeric poetry

Abstract

In recent years, scholars who sought to combine Neoanalytic Quellenforschung with the theory of oral composition have become aware of the fact that Homer uses epic tradition, first and foremost that represented in the poems of the Trojan Cycle, in a rather idiosyncratic way: he does not just evoke the Cycle tradition or borrow its motifs but, rather, deliberately reshapes it, making it serve his own agenda. This strongly suggests that, rather than behaving as two traditional poems among many, the Iliad and Odyssey claimed a special status within the tradition to which they belonged. To render this new awareness as regards the position of Homer vis-à-vis other traditional poetry, the terms ‘metaepic’ and ‘meta-Cyclic’ have been proposed in scholarly literature. Homer's acknowledgment of the Cycle tradition It is universally accepted today that the Iliad and Odyssey lean heavily upon the nomenclature of Trojan subjects dealt with in the poems of the Epic Cycle. The recognition of this fact has been one of the major contributions of neoanalysis to Homeric scholarship. At the same time, this should not be taken to mean that, as the pioneers of neoanalysis initially supposed, Homer directly addressed the very poems that were known as ‘Cyclic’ in later periods and that eventually formed the basis of Proclus' summary. The sources on which Homer drew must have belonged to pre-Homeric Trojan tradition of which the poems of the Cycle were post-Homeric representatives. To quote Gregory Nagy, ‘Paradoxically the textual fixation of the Homeric poems is older than that of the Cycle…and yet the inherited themes of the Cycle appear consistently older than those of the Homeric poems.’ The range of the identifiable ‘Cyclic’ subjects to which Homer refers is quite impressive. These references may come either as direct reminiscences of Cyclic episodes (both the Iliad and the Odyssey ) or as re-enactments of events narrated in the poems of the Cycle (the Iliad only).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 99 citations exist upstream.