The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics by Martin West

394 PHOENIX rejects that of the crooked basileis in the Works and Days, when he overrides popular epainos for Homer and awards victory to Hesiod. An afterword turns briefly to the Odyssey, which deploys two of the Iliad’s five response formulas, the silence of failure and the epainos of success, in complementary ways. The thesis that the Iliad’s conflict-ridden communities in fact reinforce communitarian values is persuasive, the identification of those communities with the interpretive communities that propagated Homeric poetry is intriguing, and both of these ideas are sure to play a significant role in shaping the interpretation of epic poetry in the future. The case for epainos being a key traditional theme can be regarded as proven, and its suggestive reception points the way to further inquiry. This reevaluation of Iliadic politics also has important implications for the use of Homeric epic by historians; in particular, the relatively generous view of Homeric assemblies offered here will need to be taken into account when the epics are adduced in studies on the origins of the polis. The poem of force, Elmer has shown us, conditions its audiences to pay attention as closely to the decisions that actually are reached as to the threats and howls of wounded pride that attend those decisions. University of Florida James Marks The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics. By Martin West. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. Pp. ix, 334. Writing from Bonn on January 14, 1836, Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker described to K. O. Müller in Göttingen (reviewer of his recent Der epische Cyclus) their differences. “For you the Iliad appears more like an isolated peak, the Odyssey another, while for me both are just the highest crests of great mountain formations that, for us, lie in mist right up to the summit.”1 This split vision of the Greek literary landscape persisted for nearly two centuries. Müller’s view is memorialized in the oft-cited article by Jasper Griffin, “The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer” (JHS 97 [1977] 39–53). Welcker’s, on the other hand, after underwriting the mid-twentieth-century Neo-analysis of Kullmann and others, gained fullest appreciation in the wake of newer work on oral traditions. Rock-fall off Homeric heights, or granite up-thrust from heroic depths? Martin West manages to circumvent any dubious aesthetic binary in judging the remains of pre-fifthcentury non-Homeric hexameter verse dealing with the Trojan War. This periphrastic description is necessary because “the Cycle” designated a wide variety of poems at least up to the era of Aristotle, who favored Homeric narrow focus in contrast to the baggy, multiepisodic Cypria and Little Iliad (Poet. 1459a37). As West explains in his lucid 54-page “Prolegomena,” even though the full term “Epic Cycle” is not attested until the second century a.d., Aristotle’s usage in several other passages (e.g., Soph. elench. 171a10) signals awareness of some larger notional body of interlinked compositions. At its broadest, the Cycle could cover theogonic material and non-Trojan epic (the Theban saga, stories of Theseus and Heracles), poetry which West himself included in his Loeb edition of 2003 under the capacious title Greek Epic Fragments. For the commentary he shrinks the term to mean the six poems narrating events at Troy and their aftermath. They probably formed a canon arrived at by the time of Augustus, to judge by a series of captioned 1 R. Kekulé, Das Leben Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker’s (Leipzig 1880) 236 (my translation). BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 395 Roman plaques (the Tabulae Iliacae) that correspond to plot summaries by the shadowy Proclus, as we have them excerpted within the Bibliotheke of the ninth-century patriarch Photius. This history is concisely presented, with convincing reasons for situating the author of the Khrestomatheia grammatike in the second century a.d. (rather than the fifth century of the Neo-platonist Proclus), by which time direct knowledge of the poems was fading fast and they were not re-copied (witness the total absence of papyri). At the start of the process, West postulates oral poems being textualized in two waves, the second half of the seventh...

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