Epic Cycle
The Epic Cycle (, "Epikos Kyklos") was a collection of Ancient Greek epic poems, composed in dactylic hexameter and related to the story of the Trojan War, including the "Cypria", the "Aethiopis", the so-called "Little Iliad", the "Iliupersis", the "Nostoi", and the "Telegony". Scholars sometimes include the two Homeric epics, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey", among the poems of the Epic Cycle, but the term is more often used to specify the non-Homeric poems as distinct from the Homeric ones.

Unlike the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey", the cyclic epics survive only in fragments and summaries from Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period.

The Epic Cycle was the distillation in literary form of an oral tradition that had developed during the Greek Dark Age, which was based in part on localised hero cults. The traditional material from which the literary epics were drawn treats Mycenaean Bronze Age culture from the perspective of Iron Age and later Greece.

In modern scholarship the study of the historical and literary relationship between the Homeric epics and the rest of the Cycle is called Neoanalysis.

A longer Epic Cycle, as described by the 9th-century CE scholar and clergyman Photius in codex 239 of his "Bibliotheca", also included the "Titanomachy" (8th century BC) and the Theban Cycle (between 750 and 500 BC), which in turn comprised the "Oedipodea", the "Thebaid", the "Epigoni" and the "Alcmeonis"; however, it is certain that none of the cyclic epics (other than Homer's) survived to Photius' day, and it is likely that Photius was not referring to a canonical collection. Modern scholars do not normally include the Theban Cycle when referring to the Epic Cycle.
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Ancient Greek
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