Epic Cycle - Evidence For The Epic Cycle

Evidence For The Epic Cycle

Only the Iliad and the Odyssey survive intact, although fragments of the other epics are quoted by later authors, and a few lines survive in the tattered remains of ancient papyri.

Most of our knowledge of the Cyclic epics comes from a broken summary of them which serves as part of the preface to the famous 10th-century CE Iliad manuscript known as Venetus A. This preface is damaged, missing the Cypria, and has to be supplemented by other sources (the Cypria summary is preserved in several other manuscripts, each of which contains only the Cypria and none of the other epics). The summary is in turn an excerpt from a longer work.

This longer work was entitled Chrestomathy, and written by someone named Proclus. This is known from evidence provided by the later scholar Photius, in his Bibliotheca. Photius provides sufficient information about Proclus' Chrestomathy to demonstrate that the Venetus A excerpt is derived from the same work. Little is known about Proclus, except that he is certainly not the philosopher Proclus Diadochus. Some have thought that it might be the same person as the lesser-known grammarian Eutychius Proclus, who lived in the 2nd century CE, but it is quite possible that he is simply an otherwise unknown figure.