A Much Greater Story- The Iliad’s Lost Sequels

If you ever read the Iliad, you might find yourself asking a few questions: Why does the story pick up nine years into the war? Where’s the Trojan Horse? Wait, they don’t sack Troy in this poem? Will Achilles ever stop whining? What about his heel? Reading the Iliad for the first time can be frustrating. The events the Trojan War is most known for don’t happen in the story. Instead, the Iliad has a tight focus on a sliver of time during the war. The Iliad and Odessey were just two poems in a collection of epics that told a much greater story. Yes, the Iliad had sequels and prequels that can be broken down into smaller cycles kind of like Marvel’s phases. Sometimes separate from the Iliad and The Odyssey, we call these poems the Epic Cycle. I am not talking about later additions to the lore either like Virgil’s Aeneid or later adaptations of the poems into plays. Most of the Epic Cycle were composed around Homers’ epics as companion pieces to fill in the gaps. Homer might have even written some of them. Sadly we will never know because none of them survive except for Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey. So what were in these lost sequels?

To begin with, it’s important to note that the Greeks started writing with the Phoenician inspired script largely to preserve the epics of Homer and other early poets like Hesiod. Of course, there might not have ever been a Homer or a Hesiod, and these poems all come from some distant oral past. That is the generally held modern theory. These poems were passed along and performed by reciters called rhapsodes. At a certain point, the Greeks started writing with a modified Phoenician script to preserve these poems. There is debate about how much a rhapsode can change the poem during each retelling, and it’s why scholars think there is a lot of formula in the Greek poems. Even in translation, if you read the Iliad and Odyssey you’ll notice a repetition of sorts. Names usually appear with epithets like Swift-Foot Achilles and White-Armed Hera. These might be mnemonic devices to help the rhapsode with his verses. These are oral poems first, and by far the longest in the Epic Cycle. The Iliad and Odyssey are both 24 books long. The other poems are shorter, usually a handful of books.

Like Homer’s poems, the Cyclical poems were written in hexameter, but historically scholars appraise the fragments to be at a lower poetic quality than Homer’s. Of course, it should be explicitly pointed out that those scholars were judging the quality of poems they do not have in front of them. And only relatively recently did they get called out by newer generations of academics for uncritically passing judgement on the missing poems.

That out of the way, what about the stories? What does the big picture of the Trojan war look like? Well, the Cycle starts at the beginning, the literal beginning of Greek myth with the Titanomachy. This poem is named after the battle between the Olympic gods and the Titans, the previous generation of Greek gods. Much of the same ground is covered in Hesiod’s Theogony, with variations. If the Brad Pitt movie is all you know of the Iliad, it might surprise you why a prologue to the story starts with the birth of the gods. Unlike that movie, the gods are very active characters in the Iliad and the Epic Cycle, so much so that a prologue dedicated to their origins makes perfect sense.

After the Titanomachy is the Theban portion of the cycle. Ever heard of Oedipus? He’s a firm part of the Theban cycle, made up of the Oedipodeia, The Thebais, and the Epigoni. The first poem in the cycle, the Oedipodeia, is the literary source for all the Greek and Latin plays about Oedipus. There are key differences between the Epic version and the theatre versions of Oedipus’ story, however; one such difference is he never bore children by his mother Jocasta in the poem. The Thebais is also the source for many plays and poems this time about the siege of Thebes, an event that spins out of the Oedipodeia. The Epigoni covers a second siege of Thebes.

Why is Thebes so important to the Trojan War? The next poem might explain why the Theban Cycle is considered a prologue. The accepted understanding is that these two wars were the closing chapters of the age of heroes. This was a time when the gods were more in contact with humanity, enough to routinely have demi-god children with humans. Many characters in these two conflicts are demi-humans, such as Achilles whose mother was Thetis, and Aeneas whose mother was Aphrodite. The Titanomachy and Theban Cycle are sometimes excluded from the Epic Cycle because they have little to do with the Trojan War directly. That said, their literary heritage is just as important as the Iliad. Many Greek and Latin adaptations became important in their own right like Oedipus Rex, and the Thebiad by Statius. They had an impact on the Greek and Roman classical world, the medieval Latin West, and Byzantine culture. The entire Theban cycle is worth its own discussion, but for now we have the Trojan War to get to.

The real story begins in the Cypria, which not only begins the Cycle proper, but is the direct prequel to the Iliad. The Cypria fills in how the conflict starts, up to the opening scene of the Iliad and prepares for events after it. By fill in, I mean really fill in. With the boom in cinematic universes since Iron Man, have you ever seen a movie that tries too hard to front load future films? Think your Iron Man 2, your Batman Vs. Superman, and your Amazing Spider-Man 2. By surviving accounts, that was the Cypria. The story includes the beauty contest of the gods that sets events in motion. Zeus and an advisor god conspire to start the Theban and Trojan Wars. Why? Population control. This is also why we spent three whole epics telling the events surrounding the Theban wars: it is phase 1 of Zeus’ plan with the Trojan war being phase 2. There were simply too many of us, and we sinned too much, so we had to be put in our place. Zeus is also warned that the child of the goddess Thetis is destined to be stronger than him if fathered by another god. Thus, Zeus decides to marry her off to a mortal.

How do they set up the conflict? At the wedding of Thetis to the mortal Peleus, Zeus had the goddesses Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera fight over a golden apple. The disagreement turns into a beauty contest and they pick Paris Alexander, Son of King Priam of Troy to judge. Each goddess attempts to bribe Paris, but Aphrodite’s bribe has him hot and bothered. She promised him the beautiful Helen. The only problem? Not only is Helen married to King Menelaos, but Menelaos made a pledge with her suitors to form a coalition if harm ever came to Helen. Aphrodite assures Paris that she’s got this, and he chooses her as the fairest. She advises him to build ships and introduces him to her son, Aeneas, future mythical ancestor of the Romans. Thinking with his groin, Paris makes the trip to Sparta and is received hospitably by its king, Menelaos. Aphrodite has Helen and Paris meet, they slip between the sheets, and together pull off the heist of the Bronze age. They grab most of Menelaos’ treasures and sail off to Troy where they get married.

Menelaos is clearly unhappy about this development, he goes to his brother, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae. Agamemnon takes Menelaos around Greece to unite all of Helen’s previous suitors and other allies to go fight Troy. Of the people they visited was Odysseus at Ithaca. Odysseus had foresight, and he knew this war was going to drag longer than it should. He was also the new father of a baby boy, Telemachus. Thus, Odysseus pretended to be insane to avoid the war. The Achaeans saw through him, however, and grabbed baby Telemachus, and threatened to cut him if Odysseus didn’t drop the act. Having been backed into a corner, he agrees to go. They recruit Achilles, son of Thetis and Peleus from the wedding that started this whole conflict. In case you were wondering, Achilles is supposed to be 15 at this point.

Thetis tries to warn Achilles of his future, but he goes off with the Achaeans. In one episode he marries and fathers a son, Neoptolemus. Along they come across the city of Teuthrania. Thinking it was Troy, they attack the city, honest mistake. Figuring out their mistake, they move on. While stopping to hunt, Agamemnon boasts he’s a better hunter than Artemis. Big mistake. For his words, Artemis sends a storm to ground the ships. After consultations the Achaeans decided the only way to make Artemis happy is for Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter to her, because every good story needs child murder. Agamemnon sends for her with a lie; that she is to marry Achilles as payment for joining the coalition. However, Artemis it turns out, isn’t happy with the sacrifice but horrified. Thus, she swaps out Agamemnon’s daughter for a deer on the altar before she is sacrificed. Later, Achilles kills a king beloved by the god Apollo. His mother warned him earlier that if he was to kill that king, Apollo would eventually kill him. During that excursion one of the leaders, Philoctetes, gets bitten by a snake. The Achaeans found the smell of his festering wound so offensive that they left him on an island with his most treasured possession, the bow of Hercules. Throughout all these diversions, Achilles and Agamemnon bicker and clash quite a bit.

Near the end of the poem they arrived at Troy. The embarkation at Troy wasn’t peaceful, the Trojans met them on the shores and a bloody battle ensued until the Trojans were beaten back inside the city walls. The Achaeans sent a delegation, possibly Odysseus and Menelaos to demand Helen and Menelaos’ stolen goods. The Trojans tried to kill the delegation, but they managed to escape and started besieging Troy. Achilles wants to know what he’s fighting for, so his mother and Aphrodite have him meet Helen. Whatever was said during their meeting convinces Achilles to stay and he leads the Achaeans on a rampage through the Trojan countryside. He kills two of Paris’ brothers, captures and sells another into slavery, and comes face-to-face with Aeneas in his hometown of Ida. The Achaean leaders walk out with plenty of loot and slaves, including Briseis for Achilles, and Chryseis for Agamemnon. Only problem is, Chryseis’s father is a priest of Apollo, and he wants her back, setting us up for the opening scenes of the Iliad.

If you haven’t read the Iliad, I’ll help you out this one time with a very condensed version, and unlike the rest of the Cycle, you can read the Iliad if you want to. Chryseis’ father comes to the Achaeans and begs for his daughter back. Agamemnon turns him away and in despair the priest prays to Apollo to give him his daughter back. Apollo unleashes a plague on the Achaeans. Having had enough, they petition Agamemnon to give Chryseis up. Not wanting his reputation damaged, Agamemnon agrees only if he takes Achilles’ prize from the same raids, Briseis. Achilles is forced to give her up, and Achilles isolates himself and begins to sulk, and sulk hard. He prays to his mother to punish the Achaeans so they see his value. The tide of war turns on the Achaeans and they begin to lose. Eventually Agamemnon is willing to give Briseis back to Achilles, but that’s not good enough for him. Instead, Achilles sends his closest friend Patroclus on the battlefield wearing his armor. Paris’ brother and crown prince of Troy Hector kills Patroclus and takes the armor for himself. Achilles is finally ready to go into battle to avenge his friend. He kills Hector, and rides around with Hector’s corpse dragging behind his chariot. King Priam goes to Achilles and begs him to let him have Hector’s remains for a proper burial. Achilles has post murder clarity and realizes Priam is just a father that wants to bury his son. He lets Priam have Hector’s body and the war continues.

After the Iliad is the Aetheopia. The Trojans get reinforcements from their Thracian and Ethiopian allies. Among those reinforcements is an Amazonian, Penthesilea (who killed Queen Hippolyta, Wonder Woman’s mother if you want to throw that into the mix. Penthesilea was absolved of this sin through a ritual King Priam held for her.) She quickly becomes Achilles’ rival, but he manages to kill her. An Achaean named Thersites teases Achilles. He claims Achilles fell in love with Penthesilea before he killed her. Thersites must not have read the previous epic, the one about Achilles’ wrath, because if he had, he would know it’s best not to upset the man. Achilles kills Thersites for his teasing, only to realize, “yeah, I guess he’s right, I did fall in love with the Amazon.” The Achaeans aren’t happy about the murder and Odysseus takes Achilles to make sacrifices to the gods and is absolved. In the next battle the Ethiopians arrive and Achilles fights them. In the fight Paris shoots Achilles’ ankle with an arrow guided by Apollo, this is the Achilles’ Heel. Achilles dies and the Achaeans and Trojans fight over his body. Ajax and Odysseus bring his body and armor back to the Achaean camp while fighting off the Trojans. At his funeral, Thetis and her sisters come to mourn Achilles. The Achaeans make a grave mound and hold funerary games for the fallen hero. Several pieces of his armor are given away to winners of the contests, but Ajax and Odysseus clash over his weapons.

The clash is resolved in the beginning of the Little Iliad. Odysseus wins the contest and Ajax goes insane, needlessly destroying the Achaeans’ provisions before killing himself. This may have put a time crunch on the Achaeans to finish the war. After consulting a prophecy, they see what they need to do to win the war. Part of the prophecy is to return with the bow of Hercules. They fetch Philoctetes with Hercules’ bow and heal his snake bite. Odysseus fetches Achilles’ son Neoptolemos. With Neoptolemos and Philoctetes on board, the Achaeans battle with the Trojans. Philoctetes is the one who kills Paris in battle, Menelaos gets an opportunity to disfigure the body of the man who cuckolded him, and they leave the body for Priam to bury.

Athena guides them to collect timber from Aeneas’ town of Ida and they start to build the infamous Trojan Horse. While they do this, Odysseus sneaks into Troy to get a layout of the city. While spying he meets Helen, and she helps him plan the attack. At the end of the poem, a select group of Achaeans get into the wooden horse and are pulled to the walls of Troy. The rest of the Achaeans burn their tents, and leave the coast in their ships, to await the signal from their friends inside the horse. The Trojans tear down a section of their wall to pull the horse in.

The Sack of Troy starts a little earlier. It shows the Trojans deliberating about the Horse. Some think it’s a ruse, and advocate to push it off the cliffs into the ocean, while others are convinced it’s a sacred gift to the protector of the city, Athena. To destroy it would be sacrilege. Apollo tries to warn the Trojans by sending two snakes to kill the seer that predicted it was a trap. Probably walking away with the wrong idea, the Trojans decide to accept the gift, I can’t see why the warning was misunderstood. They bring the Horse in and start to party; the war is over. Aeneas reads the writing on the wall and decides to head out to Ida, and if you believe the Romans, to found Rome. The Trojans hold festivities. After all a ten-year war is now over. They get drunk and fall asleep. The Achaeans slip out of the Horse, signal their allies at sea, and the sacking of Troy begins. The internal and external assault works, and the Achaeans take the city. Neoptolemos kills King Priam, Menelaos gets what he came for, and along with Helen, the women of Troy are divided up among the Achaeans. After looting Troy they set fire to it, and kill stragglers in the surrounding area.

The Returns is a side-quel of the Odyssey. It tells what happened to the other heroes on their way home and how their stories end. The Odyssey even recounts some of these returns. I’ll just summarize the return of three characters we mentioned so far. Menelaos and Agamemnon fight about how to get home, ultimately going their separate ways. At first Menelaos loses many of his ships and gets stranded in Egypt. Legend says he upsets the Egyptians by sacrificing two boys, and they force him out. Whatever the case, eventually he makes it home. Achilles’ ghost warns Agamemnon of what would happen on his return. His wife Clytemnestra had taken a lover. When Agamemnon arrives at Mycenae he’s murdered by Clytemnestra and her lover. Veterans of the Trojan War later avenge Agamemnon and kill his murderers. Neoptolemos follows his grandmother Thetis’ advice and makes his journey inland, eventually bumping into Odysseus.

After the Returns comes the Odyssey, and after the Odyssey is the Telegony. The Telegony is far removed from the events of the Trojan War and continues the story of Odysseus after his further 10 year journey. Just like the Iliad, you can read the Odyssey for yourselves, but the important parts to understanding the Telegony are thus: While he was off fighting, suitors began to harass his wife Penelope thinking that Odysseus is dead. They wanted to seize Odysseus’ lands for themselves. His son Telemachus, schemes with his mother and grandfather to keep this from happening. Penelope comes up with ruses to keep delaying the time when she is forced to pick a suitor. On his journey home, Odysseus comes across the witch Circe. He lives with her for a year and fathers a son, Telegonus. He returns home, slaughters Penelope’s suitors with the help of his son Telemachus, and returns to power in Ithaca.

The Telegony opens with Odysseus burying the suitors and resuming his duties on Ithaca and the surrounding territory. After getting used to his old life again, Odysseus and Telemachus sail to the Thesprotians. Odysseus marries their queen and leads them into a defensive war against an invading force. Odysseus is so good, that gods come down to challenge him in combat. After saving the Thesprotians, he returns home with Telemachus. In another twist, His son by Circe, Telegonus, sets off to find his father. He arrives at Ithaca to raid it and ends up unknowingly killing Odysseus, possibly with a stingray’s barb. He realizes his mistake, so he takes his half brother Telemachus and Penelope to his mother. She makes them immortals and the boys swap moms; with Telegonus marrying Penelope, and Telemachus marrying Circe. And, finally, this is how the Age of Heroes ends in Greek mythology.

What happened to these poems? Why do we have the Iliad and the Odyssey, but not the others? From what we understand, the critical reception to these poems was mixed. Even very early, figures like Herodotus doubted that the Cyclical Epics attributed to Homer, were by Homer. Aristotle, Horace, and others criticized the poems for not being as good as Homer’s narratively or poetically. Despite the criticism they were very popular in their day. The smaller size of the poems meant that it was easier to own a copy. This is why you see many plays and adaptations based on them; they got around.

Much like Marvel’s main films vs their Disney+ spin offs, the Cyclical Epics were always overshadowed by the Iliad and Odyssey, and that was probably their downfall. The two poems along with Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days held a canonical status in Hellenic culture and religious life. Eventually the negative reception of the Epic Cycle and canonicity of the Homeric poems left the Cycle reduced to prose summaries. Sometimes these summaries are attached to copies of Homer’s poems, sometimes they are part of larger collections. The Greeks and Romans were happy enough reading prose summaries of these poems. Eventually with Christianity moving in and the culture rapidly changing, the Homeric Epics took on a different canonical form: that of Greek literature. The Epic Cycle was already considered inferior so they stuck to summaries so much that a Christian philosopher from the 6^th century claimed he could no longer find the complete epics in verse.

Other than the obvious, what did we lose? Other works stepped in for both the Latin and Greek worlds that filled in the gaps or expanded the story. What we lost was a substantial tradition of Greek epics, of which we have very little surviving. Not only are they worth knowing in their own right, but the prose summaries are… off. Sometimes they contradict each other, mostly they contradict surviving fragments of the poems. It is very clear the prose summaries smooth the poems over to make them fit more in line with the Iliad and Odyssey. This applies stylistically, and narratively. After all, the narratives were usually criticized as lacking unity by ancient critics. The big picture isn’t just incomplete, it’s very wrong. Maybe there were different versions of these poems, perhaps the tradition of prose summaries got distorted down the line.

The biggest loss in all of this is how much this could have helped us understand Greek mythology. The Homeric poems contain many diversions into myth and history, and even the contents of the poems are great sources for our understanding of Greek myths. We know from surviving references that the Epics diverged into myths as well. That said, with the negative reaction against them, if we ever found complete papyrus scrolls of the Epic Cycle, we, perhaps, shouldn’t expect a ground shaking reaction like the Dead Sea Scrolls had for the Bible. Much like if scholars a couple thousands years from now randomly discover She-Hulk, they’ll likely be quite disappointed compared to the no doubt still surviving Infinity saga.

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