Cypria - Date and Authorship

Date and Authorship

The Cypria, in the written form in which it was known in classical Greece, was probably composed in the late 7th century BCE, but there is much uncertainty. The Cyclic Poets, as the translator of Homerica, Hugh G. Evelyn-White noted "were careful not to trespass upon ground already occupied by Homer," one of the reasons for dating the final, literary form of Cypria as post-Homeric, in effect a "prequel". "The author of the Kypria already regarded the Iliad as a text. Any reading of the Kypria will show it preparing for events for (specifically) the Iliad in order to refer back to them, for instance the sale of Lykaon to Lemnos or the kitting out of Achilles with Briseis and Agamemnon with Chryseis". A comparison can be made with the Aithiopis, also lost, but which even in its quoted fragments is more independent of the Iliad as text.

The stories contained in the Cypria, on the other hand, were fixed much earlier than that, and the same problems of dating oral traditions associated with the Homeric epics also apply to the Cypria. Many or all of the stories in the Cypria were known to the composer(s) of the Iliad and Odyssey. The Cypria, in presupposing an acquaintance with the events of the Homeric poem, in the received view thus formed a kind of introduction to the Iliad though there is an overlap in events from the death of Palamedes, including the catalogue of Trojan allies. J. Marks observes that "Indeed, the junction would be seamless if the Kypria simply ended with the death of Palamedes." (p. 2).

The title Cypria, associating the epic with Cyprus, demanded some explanation: the epic was said in one ancient tradition to have been given by Homer as a dowry to his son-in-law, a Stasinus of Cyprus mentioned in no other context; there was apparently an allusion to this in a lost Nemean ode by Pindar. Some later writers repeated the story. It did at least serve to explain why the Cypria was attributed by some to Homer and by others to Stasinus. Others, however, ascribed the poem to Hegesias (or Hegesinus) of Salamis in Cyprus or to Cyprias of Halicarnassus (see Cyclic poets).

It is possible that the "Trojan Battle Order" (the list of Trojans and their allies, of Iliad 2.816-876, which forms an appendix to the "Catalogue of Ships") is abridged from that in the Cypria, which was known to contain in its final book a list of the Trojan allies.