INTRODUCTION
Aeneid ii, comprising the episodes of the wooden horse, of Laocoon, of Sinon, the return of the Achaeans from Tenedos, the actual Sack of Troy, the division of spoils and the burning of the city.
Lesches or Lescheos (as Pausanias calls him) of Pyrrha or Mitylene is dated at about 660 B.C. In his Little Iliad he undertook to elaborate the Sack as related by Arctinus. His work included the adjudgment of the arms of Achilles to Odysseus, the madness of Aias, the bringing of Philoctetes from Lemnos and his cure, the coming to the war of Neoptolemus who slays Eurypylus, son of Telephus, the making of the wooden horse, the spying of Odysseus and his theft, along with Diomedes, of the Palladium: the analysis concludes with the admission of the wooden horse into Troy by the Trojans. It is known, however (Aristotle, Poetics, xxiii; Pausanias, x, 25-27), that the Little Iliad also contained a description of the Sack of Troy. It is probable that this and other superfluous incidents disappeared after the Alexandrian arrangement of the poems in the Cycle, either as the result of some later recension, or merely through disuse. Or Proclus may have thought it unnecessary to give the accounts by Lesches and Arctinus of the same incident.
The Cyprian Lays, ascribed to Stasinus of Cyprus[1] (but also to Hegesinus of Salamis) was designed to do for the events preceding the action of the Iliad what Arctinus had done for the later phases of the Trojan War. The Cypria begins with the first causes of the war, the purpose of Zeus to relieve the overburdened earth, the apple of discord, the rape of Helen. Then
- ↑ No date is assigned to him, but it seems likely that he was either contemporary or slightly earlier than Lesches.
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