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Concept
Cypria
Summary
The Cypria ('sɪpri.ə; Κύπρια Kúpria; Latin: Cypria) is a lost epic poem of ancient Greek literature, which has been attributed to Stasinus and was quite well known in classical antiquity and fixed in a received text, but which subsequently was lost to view. It was part of the Epic Cycle, which told the entire history of the Trojan War in epic hexameter verse. The story of the Cypria comes chronologically at the beginning of the Epic Cycle, and is followed by that of the Iliad; the composition of the two was apparently in the reverse order. The poem comprised eleven books of verse in epic dactylic hexameters.
The Cypria, in the written form in which it was known in classical Greece, was probably composed in the late seventh century BCE, but there is much uncertainty. The Cyclic Poets, as the translator of Homerica, Hugh G. Evelyn-White noted "were careful not to trespass upon ground already occupied by Homer," one of the reasons for dating the final, literary form of Cypria as post-Homeric, in effect a "prequel". "The author of the Kypria already regarded the Iliad as a text. Any reading of the Kypria will show it preparing for events for (specifically) the Iliad in order to refer back to them, for instance the sale of Lycaon to Lemnos or the kitting out of Achilles with Briseis and Agamemnon with Chryseis". A comparison can be made with the Aethiopis, also lost, but which even in its quoted fragments is more independent of the Iliad as text.
The stories contained in the Cypria, on the other hand, were fixed much earlier than that, and the same problems of dating oral traditions associated with the Homeric epics also apply to the Cypria. Many or all of the stories in the Cypria were known to the composer(s) of the Iliad and Odyssey. The Cypria, in presupposing an acquaintance with the events of the Homeric poem, in the received view thus formed a kind of introduction to the Iliad though there is an overlap in events from the death of Palamedes, including the catalogue of Trojan allies. J.
Official source
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