When the oral poetry was dead, perhaps in the fourth century B.C., scholars began to collect the remnants of it, the series being, in the words of Proclus, "made complete out of the works of divers poets." But this collection of the original ballads was never widely read, and soon ceased to exist. Our knowledge of the rejected epics comes almost entirely from the handbooks of mythology, which collected the legendary history contained in them into groups or 'cycles.' We possess several stone tablets giving the epic history in a series of pictures.[1] The best known is the Tabula Iliaca, in the Capitoline Museum, which dates from just before our era, and claims to give 'the arrangement of Homer' according to a certain Theodorus. One of the tables speaks of the 'Trojan Cycle' and the 'Theban Cycle'; and we hear of a 'Cycle of History'—of all history, it would seem—compiled by Dionysius of Samos[2] in the third or second century B.C. The phrase 'Epic Cycle' then denotes properly a body of epic history collected in a handbook. By an easy misapplication, it is used to denote the ancient poems themselves, which were only known as the sources of the handbooks. Athenæus, for instance, makes the odd mistake of calling Dionysius' 'Cycle of History' a 'Book about the Cycle'—i.e. Athenæus took the word 'cycle' to mean the original poems.[3]
Our main ostensible authority is one Proclus, apparently a Byzantine, from whom we derive a summary of the Trojan Cycle, which is given in the Venetian MS. A and in the works of the patriarch Photius. If what he said were true, it would be of great importance. But not
