Device and Composition in the Greek Epic Cycle

by: Sammons, B.

Uses the Homeric poems to shed light on cyclic epics while setting aside contentious assumptions about the direct relationship between these works
Takes the cyclic poets seriously as accomplished and competent artists, and sheds new light on their aims
Offers a new perspective on innovation vs. tradition in the early Greek literature (while early Greek poets used highly traditional compositional methods, the poems they produced show a startling variety in overall form)

Description
From a corpus of Greek epics known in antiquity as the 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 compositional 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 the 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 construction of poems. This sheds important light on the early history of epic as a genre, since it is likely that these devices originally developed to provide large-scale structure to shorter poems and have been put to quite different use in the composition of the monumental Homeric epics. Along the way Sammons sheds new light on the overall form of lost cyclic epics and on the meaning and context of the few surviving verse fragments.

Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Preface ..L....... i
Introduction .. 1
Chapter 1: Narratives .. 32
Chapter 2: Catalogue & Catalogic .. 80
Chapter 3: Narrative Doublets .. 126
Chapter 4: Character Roles & Narrative Design ..155
Chapter 5: The Aristeia ... 194
Chapter 6: The Gods & the Divine ..222
Conclusions . 265
Appendix A: On the Summaries of Proclus ... 285
Appendix B: English translation of Proclus .. 305
Bibliography 312

Device and Composition in the Greek Epic Cycle

by: Sammons, B.

• ISBN-13: 9780190614843 / 978-0-19-061484-3
• ISBN-03: 0190614846 / 0-19-061484-6
• Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017