The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle

Rating:
Summary: Hostage to Milieu
Review: Truly, here is a very exciting book. The author clearly, in three long chapters (with appendices) discusses the Trojan War in the evidence of the Epic Cycle and its relation to the Homeric poems. The author has brought together philology, history, archaeology and good sense here. He shares bright arguments and suggestions in these pages that provoke thought for those interested specifically in the poems of Homer or in epic generally. Far from stealing the sparkle of the Homeric poems, this book provides the best discussion I have read of the variant threads of the stories of the Trojan War current in the age of the oral composition of the Iliad and Odyssey. It seemed so improbable that such magnificent, encyclopedic poems would stridently bound from the dark, poetic silence of the early Greek Mediterranean. Burgess shows that they didn't and that already at the time of the composition of the Homeric poems there existed a bounty of versions of the Trojan War that bore no direct relation to the poems of Homer as we know them. I recommend this timely book (timely, for it seems there is enough research to be thoroughly convincing, to me,) to teachers of Homer, early Greek culture and epic.