The Greeks, the storm abating, sail to Tenedos, where Philoctetes is bitten by a snake and carried away to howl in Lemnos. This might be taken from Iliad, ii. 718-725. At Troy on landing, the Greeks lose Protesilaus, slain by Hector. Here again the Iliad may supply the fact, not naming Hector. The author of the Cypria has now, we see, filled up his empty nine years by various expedients and delays. He next tells of the embassy to ask for the return of Helen and the stolen property; the embassy he could get from Iliad, iii. 204-207: a subsequent fight at the wall of Troy from Iliad, vi. 435-439, where it is described briefly by Andromache.
At what precise period the Greek commissariat took the form of three girls with fairy gifts, who produced corn, wine, and oil, is uncertain; but the incident was in the Cypria, on the authority of Pherecydes.[25]
The Cypria says that Aphrodite contrived an interview between Helen and Achilles, Thetis was chaperon, and that Achilles restrained the Greeks, who wished to go home. That Achilles sacked Lyrnessus and Pedasus, and sent Lykaon captive to Lemnos, was to be read in the Iliad (xx. 92, xxi. 55 ff.), where also the story of Briseis and Chryseis, given in the Cypria, was to be found. But not in the Iliad was Palamedes, with his murder by Odysseus and Diomede, whence, in the Cypria, came the will of Zeus to sunder Achilles from the Achaean host.[26]
We now perceive how much of his material the Ionian author of the Cypria could obtain from out Homer. We note the marks of non-Achaeanism and lateness, and of Ionian geographical knowledge, in the reference to Tauris; in the Attic Nemesis; in the per-sonifications of moral qualities; in the intended human sacrifice; in the Märchen; in the telling of the tale of Theseus and Ariadne; in the hero-worship; and in the introduction of the Nauplian anti—Odyssean Palamedes. The lateness of the poem declares itself also in the naming of the Peloponnesus. The use of very childish Märchen is un-Homeric: Homer uses Märchen to better purpose. (See "Homer and the Saga.")
Perhaps few who have had the patience to read through this tedious analysis of the vast and wandering metrical pseudo-chronicle, the Cypria, with its marks of bad taste, Ionicism, and lateness, will maintain that, in character, it is on a level with our Homer, or is in age contemporary with his society.
Weary as is the task, we must in conscience expose the similar lateness and Ionic character of the other Cyclic poems on the Trojan affairs.
The authorship of the Aethiopis was attributed to Arctinus of Miletus. Tradition called him "Homer's pupil."[27] As condensed in the summary of Proclus, the Aethiopis was a mere doppelgänger of the Iliad. Taking up the tale after Hector's death, and under the shadow of Hector's prophecy of the doom of Achilles, "in the day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo slay thee in the Scaean gate,"[28] the Aethiopis fills out the story.
The Amazon, Penthesilea, comes to aid Troy, and is slain by Achilles, who is stirred by pity for the beauty of his victim. For this Thersites taunts him, and he slays the wretch: so he needs purification, in accordance with Ionian ideas.
The Aethiopis went on to mark the usual distinction between the Homeric and Ionian epic. Diomede took up the blood-feud for Thersites, and, in Homeric law, Achilles must have paid the blood-wyte, or gone into exile, or "tholed the feud." Even the Scholiast[29] knew that this was the Homeric (as it was the Icelandic) law. But the Ionian makes Achilles sail to Lesbos, to sacrifice to Apollo, Artemis, and Leto, and be purified (in pig's blood probably) by Odysseus.