The Ionic School of Epic poetry was, as we have seen, dominated by the
Homeric tradition, and while the style and method of treatment are
Homeric, it is natural that the Ionic poets refrained from cultivating
the ground tilled by Homer, and chose for treatment legends which lay
beyond the range of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. Equally natural it is
that they should have particularly selected various phases of the tale
of Troy which preceded or followed the action of the _Iliad_ or
_Odyssey_. In this way, without any preconceived intention, a body of
epic poetry was built up by various writers which covered the whole
Trojan story. But the entire range of heroic legend was open to these
poets, and other clusters of epics grew up dealing particularly with
the famous story of Thebes, while others dealt with the beginnings of
the world and the wars of heaven. In the end there existed a kind of
epic history of the world, as known to the Greeks, down to the death of
Odysseus, when the heroic age ended. In the Alexandrian Age these poems
were arranged in chronological order, apparently by Zenodotus of
Ephesus, at the beginning of the 3rd century B.C. At a later time the
term _Cycle_, “round” or “course”, was given to this collection.
Of all this mass of epic poetry only the scantiest fragments survive;
but happily Photius has preserved to us an abridgment of the synopsis
made of each poem of the “Trojan Cycle” by Proclus, _i.e._ Eutychius
Proclus of Sicca.
The pre-Trojan poems of the Cycle may be noticed first. The
_Titanomachy_, ascribed both to Eumelus of Corinth and to Arctinus of
Miletus, began with a kind of Theogony which told of the union of
Heaven and Earth and of their offspring the Cyclopes and the
Hundred-handed Giants. How the poem proceeded we have no means of
knowing, but we may suppose that in character it was not unlike the
short account of the Titan War found in the Hesiodic _Theogony_ (617
ff.).
What links bound the _Titanomachy_ to the Theben Cycle is not clear.
This latter group was formed of three poems, the _Story of Oedipus_,
the _Thebais_, and the _Epigoni_. Of the _Oedipodea_ practically
nothing is known, though on the assurance of Athenaeus (vii. 277 E)
that Sophocles followed the Epic Cycle closely in the plots of his
plays, we may suppose that in outline the story corresponded closely to
the history of Oedipus as it is found in the _Oedipus Tyrannus_. The
_Thebais_ seems to have begun with the origin of the fatal quarrel
between Eteocles and Polyneices in the curse called down upon them by
their father in his misery. The story was thence carried down to the
end of the expedition under Polyneices, Adrastus and Amphiarus against
Thebes. The _Epigoni_ (ascribed to Antimachus of Teos) recounted the
expedition of the “After-Born” against Thebes, and the sack of the
city.