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The Iliad as heroic poetry
was what Demodokos is said to have done and what the poets of the
Homeric epics say they do - to take up the tale 'from some point'. This
stage is well attested in some living traditions (Hatto, Traditions n 275-6),
even to the extent that investigators have induced epics by eliciting the
whole cycle from the singer/or the first time.
A growing cycle is an open-ended string of episodes that draws in attractive
figures and incidents from elsewhere. A classic example is the use of the
murder of Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied to motivate the (historical) destruction
of the Burgundians by a tribe of Huns, a tale that had already attracted
into it, in defiance of history and chronology, such famous names as those of
Theoderic and Attila. The catalogues of heroes who sailed in the Argo,
hunted the Galydonian boar, and fought at Troy are obviously expanded,
some of the intruders, like Telamonian Aias, scarcely disguised, others too
famous to leave out but too brilliant to be in at the kill. When it was
common knowledge that Jason secured the Fleece and Odysseus devised the
Trojan Horse Herakles and Akhilleus could not be allowed to dominate the
final act and usurp their glory; they must either leave or die.
The formation of a connected cycle exposes gaps and raises questions
about the primary material: the birth or origin of the hero, his death
and descendants, how he acquired associates and distinguishing characteristics,
and so on. Is the story of the pursuit of Troilos by Akhilleus an aition
for his epithet 7r68ocs COKUS — or the origin of that description? 8 Kullmann's
careful research into the content of the Trojan cycle (Quellen (i960)) has
shown how much of it predates the Iliad, but it is clear from the description
of the cycle by Proclus that parts of the Cypria, the Nostoi, and especially the
Telegony, as they existed after Homer, are examples of this tendency to
complete the story and arrange it around an outstanding poem or episode. 9
(iii) The hero
'Heroic poetry' is a loose term, and heroes are correspondingly diverse.
Folktales, hero tales, heroic lays, and romances are characterized by the
dominance of certain viewpoints at the expense of, but not to the exclusion
of others. Heroic poetry, in Bowra's classic description, 'works in conditions
determined by special conceptions of manhood and honour. It cannot exist
unless men believe that human beings are in themselves sufficient objects of
interest and that their chief claim is the pursuit of honour through risk'
8 There is a parallel in the invention of a story to explain Cort Nes, 'short-nosed', the
soubriquet of Guillaume d'Orange in Le Couronnement de Louis > an invention because the epithet
is known to be a misunderstanding of Curb JVes, 'hook-nosed' (M. de Riquer, Les Chansons de
gestefrangaises trans. I. Cluzel (Paris 1957) 157-8).
9 The Old French epic with some eighty poems is rich material for the study of cycles; a
useful study is that of de Riquer (n. 8).
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