goes against the very nature of the poems to be summarized. Yet this lengthiness is not the result of telling
a long and eventful saga from beginning to end: on the contrary, both poems are highly selective. In fact
there is reason to think that other epic poets composed poems which were shorter and yet which told of
many more events in a much more summary way. While this would be in keeping with the performance
of the bards whom we see in the Odyssey, the more direct evidence concerns other early epic poems
which were around in antiquity, though they are now all but lost. These were known as the 'Cycle' and
told other legends such as those of Thebes as well as stories connected with Troy, from the Apple of
Discord right through to the death of Odysseus at the hands of Telegonus, his son by Circe. The 'Cycle'
known to antiquity was clearly a response to the stature of the Iliad and Odyssey, since its poems were
constructed around them.
One of the most famous poems of the cycle was the Cypria. It was apparently longer than most, yet rather
less than half as long as Iliad or Odyssey. So the scant summary we have of its contents is revealing:
'Rivalry at the marriage of Peleus and Thetis .... the judgement of Paris on Mount Ida ... Paris visits
Sparta ... elopes with Helen ... sacks Sidon ... Meanwhile Castor and Pollux ... next Menelaus consults
Nestor ... the expedition is summoned ... Odysseus feigns madness ... At Aulis ... Achilles on Scyros ...
Telephus at Argos ... back at Aulis the sacrifice of Iphigenia ... Philoctetes ... Protesilaus.. .'-and there is
still quite a lot to come.
The contrast between this skimming saga and the Iliad and Odyssey is the subject of some observations
made by Aristotle which are extremely enlightening.
[Epic should be] about one whole or complete action with a beginning, middle parts, and end, so that it
produces its proper pleasure like a single whole living creature. Its plots should not be like histories; for in
histories it is necessary to give a report of a single period, not of a unified action, that is, one must say
whatever was the case in that period about one man or more; and each of these things may have a quite
casual interrelation.... Most epic poets do make plots like histories. So in this respect too Homer is
marvelous in that he did not undertake to make a whole poem of the war, even though it had a beginning
and an end. For the plot would have been too large and not easy to see as a whole, or if it had been kept to
a moderate length it would have been tangled because of the variety of events. As it is he takes one part
and uses many others as episodes, for example, the catalogue of the ships and the other episodes with
which he breaks the uniformity of his poem. But the rest make a poem about one man or one period of
time, like the poet of the Cypria or the Little Iliad. That is why the Iliad and Odyssey have matter only for
one tragedy or only for two, whereas there is matter for many in the Cypria, and in the Little Iliad for
more than eight ... {Poetics 1459, trans. M. E. Hubbard)
The Iliad
This prompts me to approach the Iliad by considering its shaping of time and place. It is not my purpose
to make great claims for these frameworks as such, but rather to use them to bring out something of the
thematic moulding of the Iliad, its underlying geology. I shall try to give some idea how this has a large-
scale artistry and coherence, whatever the problems, most of them trivial, of the narrative surface.