In the Cypria, Aphrodite, mother of Aeneas (in Homer), sends him with Paris. Landing in Lacedaemon, Paris is welcomed by the brothers of Helen, and in Sparta by Menelaus, who then sails to Crete. (Different reasons for this voyage are given by later writers.) Paris then seduces Helen, who is brought to him by Aphrodite (as in Iliad, iii.); they take away property of Menelaus (as in Iliad, vii.). (The italics mark probable hints from the Iliad.)
The pair are wedded in Troy, where the story leaves them, and very needlessly goes back to Lacedaemon. Here are Helen's brothers, Castor and Polydeuces, who fall into a feud about cattle with Idas and Lynceus, the keen-eyed. Lynceus is merely the Keen-Eye, who can see through everything, a common personage in Märchen. The brothers of Helen hide themselves in a hollow tree, but Lynceus climbs to the crest of Mount Taygetus and "looks over all the isle of Pelops," that is, Peloponnesus. Homer never speaks of the country as a geographical unity, nor uses the word "Peloponnesus"; this is manifestly a post-Homeric term.[19] Idas slays Castor; Polydeuces slays both Lynceus and Idas, and Zeus assigns to Castor and Polydeuces immortality on alternate days. This is wholly unknown to the Iliad, both heroes are dead and buried in Iliad, iii. 243, 244. Their alternate immortality with their divine honours, mentioned in Odyssey, xi. 298-304, may be an interpolation (a kind of footnote in verse); it is, at all events, non-Iliadic. Homer knows the deaths of the two brothers, at home in Lacedaemon: we cannot tell whether he knew about the Keen-Eye of Märchen, Lynceus.
In the Cypria, Menelaus is now informed, in Crete, about the flight of Helen: he returns to the isle of Pelops and consults Agamemnon about collecting an army. Nestor, called to council, abounds in anecdotic digressions (whether the author borrows this trait from the Iliad or the Iliad from him, it is not hard to guess!). Among Nestor's themes—for he simply poured out stories—are Epopeus and his seduction of the daughter of Lycus; Oedipous; the madness of Heracles; and the tale of Theseus (whom Homer steadily avoids), and Ariadne. Theseus, as an Athenian, is dear to the Ionian poet: Homer ignores him.
The Atridae go through Greece collecting the heroes. Odysseus feigns madness with a view to shirking the war; he ploughs the sand, and Palamedes detects his sanity by placing the child Telemachus in the way of the plough. Here we have a hero, Palamedes, unknown to Homer, and an equally unknown Odysseus who is a coward, but is baffled by the superior wisdom of Palamedes. It is obvious that the poet of the Cypria is here introducing an un-Homeric character to serve his private ends: his methods are unveiled in Chapter XVII., "The Story of Palamedes."
The Cypria now relates the First gathering of the Greek forces at Aulis, with the story from the Iliad of the serpent and the sparrows, and the prophecy of Calchas. The ships, says the Iliad, "had been gathering but a day or two at Aulis," and the host was at a sacrifice, when a wonderful serpent came forth from the altar and killed eight nestlings of a sparrow, with their mother. Zeus then turned the serpent into a stone. Calchas prophesied, "we shall fight nine years there (αῢθι, at Troy), but take the city in the tenth year."[20]
Such was Homer's opinion, the Greeks were warring in Troyland against Ilios for nine years and more. But the author of the Cypria desired to fill up the nine years before the Iliad opens in some way, and this is how he did it. (Italics mark possible hints from Homer.) Learning from the Odyssey (xi. 519-521) that Eurypylus, a Mysian chief, son of Telephus, came to the aid of Troy after the death of Achilles, he makes the Achaeans land in Teuthrania, and supposing the town to be Troy, they attack it. But Telephus comes to the rescue, and is wounded by Achilles. A storm falls on the fleet, and the ships are scattered. Achilles arrives in Scyros and weds Deidameia. The storm that sends Achilles to marry and beget a son in Scyros was an easy explanation of Achilles' own statement,[21] that he had a son at Scyros.[22]
In the Cypria, Achilles later returns from Scyros to Argos, apparently "Pelasgic Argos," that is, Phthia, to his home. The wounded Telephus, as advised by prophecy, follows Achilles thither, and Achilles' spear, or rust from the spear, in Dictys, heals the wound it had inflicted: by "sympathetic magic," unknown to Homer. Achilles did the healing, because it was prophesied that Telephus would pilot the fleet to Troy; whereas, in Homer, Calchas directs the voyage.
The author of the Cypria, who is filling up his nine imaginary years of the wanderings of the Greeks, now adopts the very stupid device of mustering the scattered fleet at Aulis for the second time. This enables him to please an Ionian audience by introducing their favourite incident, the sacrifice of a princess: Attic traditions harp eternally on this un-Homeric horror. Agamemnon shoots a stag, and boasts himself a better shot than Artemis. The angry goddess sends a tempest unceasing, the ships cannot sail, and Calchas (who dared not do such a thing, Iliad, i. 78, 79) says that a daughter of Agamemnon must be sacrificed, Iphigeneia. This name was, at least in later days, a name of the homicidal Artemis of Tauris, on the north shore of the Euxine. But Tauris, as Mr. Monro justly observes, was not known to Homer. In the Cypria, Artemis substitutes a fawn for Iphigeneia, and carries the maid "to the Tauroi," making her immortal. "This form of the story," the form in the Cypria, "is necessarily later than the Greek settlements on the northern coasts of the Euxine."[23] The connection between Iphigeneia and a Tauric Artemis is thus late, un-Homeric, and Ionian. Homer (Iliad, ix. 145) knows no Iphigeneia, but the daughters of Agamemnon are Chrysothemis, Laodice, and Iphianassa. Even so early a poet as Stesichorus could not account for Iphigeneia as a daughter of Agamemnon. He therefore, says Pausanias, made her a foster-child of Clytaemnestra, a child of Helen by Theseus (who, in Attic myth, captured her), and Helen hands her baby over to the wife of Agamemnon. Euphorion of Chalcis, Alexander of Pleuron, and the people of Argos generally, maintained this theory, and at Argos they showed a temple of Ilithyia, founded by Helen after her safe delivery![24] Tzetzes, the father of nonsense, makes Iphigeneia the daughter of Agamemnon and Chryseis; she is sacrificed, or threatened with sacrifice, during the return from Troy.
However, the Ionian author of the Cypria cannot deny himself an allusion to human sacrifice. Iphigeneia was brought to Aulis, he says, under the pretence that she was to wed Achilles. (See Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis. He may be following the Cypria.) She was tempted by letters forged by Odysseus, says Dictys Cretensis, who may be following the Cypria.