Bibliographic record
Abstract
What is the ‘Epic Cycle’? The Greek is epikos kyklos , which literally means ‘epic circle’. Kyklos in its most primary meaning refers to an object of circular dimensions (e.g. wheel, shield), but it could also be applied metaphorically to a compilation of literary material. The ‘Epic Cycle’, simply put, is a collection of epic verse. Unfortunately the Epic Cycle is now lost, except for various kinds of fragments, testimony and summaries. Our challenge is to sort through this evidence and reconstruct the Epic Cycle as best we can. Many learned and rewarding attempts to do so can be found in this Companion . But all attempts, not least my own, ultimately result from guesswork that depends on arbitrary assumptions. Models of reconstruction The Epic Cycle included theogonic beginnings and the heroic wars at Thebes and Troy. The Trojan War and its aftermath have attracted the most attention, both in antiquity and in the modern world, because of its relevance to the Homeric poems. Indeed the Epic Cycle's useful contextualization of the Iliad and the Odyssey has led to the common conception of it as something secondary to ‘Homer’, both in chronology and value. For hermeneutic purposes I will call this the ‘Homer-centric’ model, which has been dominant from antiquity onward. In its starkest form, this model posits that a series of poems were composed on the basis of the Homeric poems, though falling far short of their poetics, in order to surround them with prequels and sequels. A different model, which I will label ‘Systemic,’ would link the Epic Cycle broadly with various material about the Trojan War in ancient literary and artistic traditions. In its starkest form, this model suggests that the Cycle poems represent mythological and epic traditions that were earlier than the Homeric poems. Adherents to both models have dedicated themselves to the scholarly sleuthing required to make sense out of the scanty evidence. But these two models vary widely on their conception of how the Epic Cycle relates to the Homeric poems and what role they generally played in early epic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".