Epic Cycle reading order

Publication order

8 volumes·600·Completed

• Only two of these can be read.
• The Epic Cycle was eight poems telling the whole Trojan war from the wedding that started it to the deaths that followed it, and six of them are lost — Titanomachy, the Nostoi, the Iliupersis and the rest survive as a few quoted lines and a summary written centuries later.
• What is left is the Iliad and the Odyssey, which is why they are the ones everybody means.
• If you want the shape of the missing six, the summary is Proclus's Chrestomathy; if you want the story they told, the Renaissance and after filled it in, and Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica is the fullest ancient attempt.