This book is the third of Malcolm Davies’ commentaries on the cyclic epics; the earlier two are: The Theban Epics (Washington 2015) and The Aethiopis (Washington 2016) (the present volume is also available Open Access at https://chs.harvard.edu/read/davies-malcolm-the-cypria/). It is the fullest treatment of the Cypria among the recent books about the epic cycle (in addition to recent works cited below, see also M. Fantuzzi and C.C. Tsagalis (eds), The Epic Cycle and Its Ancient Reception: A Companion (Cambridge 2015) and B. Sammons, Device and Composition in the Greek Epic Cycle (Oxford 2017)). It prints all fragments and testimonia in ancient Greek and English, with an extensive critical apparatus for each fragment, and is richly supplemented by other Graeco-Roman texts and by discussion of visual art. It is a brilliant book written in a jaunty and entertaining style that vindicates Davies’ contention that there is ‘still room’ (vii) for commentaries that treat individual lost epics in the wake of Martin West’s The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics (Oxford 2013). As we would expect from Davies’ previous research, the commentary offers excellent consideration of shared Greek-Near Eastern poetic motifs and the folk-tale background of the Cypria.
This work is more Analytic and less Oralist than other recent work on the cycle, even West’s. Davies attempts to reconstruct a single, uniform poem by Stasinus that postdates and depends upon the Iliad, following West with a date of 580–550 BC (8). The fragments and testimonia of the Cypria present thorny problems of interpretation because they contain contradictory details. In addressing these, Davies resorts primarily to criticism of the text and the manuscript tradition of Proclus and others, and does not generally permit discussion or citation of ideas on multiformity with respect to the Cypria.
The notion of multiformity relates to the Cypria in two ways. Following Gregory Nagy’s evolutional model of Homeric poetry (Homer the Classic (Washington 2008), 7–9), we can imagine a relatively fluid period of performance and textualization extending from the period of the Cypria’s supposed composition through the later fifth century when we have our earliest testimony in Herodotus, resulting in some contradictory testimony about the content of the poem. This presupposes another kind of multiformity, which imagines that epics covering the same ground as the Cypria, Cypria-style epics (for which see K. Solez, ‘Travelling with Helen’, in J. Burgess, J.L. Ready and C.C. Tsagalis (eds), Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic, Vol. 3 (Leiden and Boston 2019), 67–87), exist already in the pre-Homeric epic tradition. Knowledge of the content of these poems as they were performed through the Archaic and Classical periods could have contaminated the reports of ancient authors on the content of the Cypria, thus resulting in contradictions. Multiformity poses a threat to Davies’ literary-critical approach to the cyclic epics, allowing the critic the easiest of escapes from difficult problems, but most scholars accept this possibility as a cogent explanation of the Cypria’s difficulties. West states that there was more than one version of the Cypria being read or performed in Herodotus’ time (The Epic Cycle (Oxford 2013), 92), and the idea is considered in all the key scholarship on the poem.
Davies’ perspective on this issue has various results for the commentary. He dismisses suggestions which presuppose multiformity by saying that only those who have a ‘morbid fear of a post-Iliadic Cypria’ support arguments about its drawing on non-Iliadic traditions (186). He states that nobody doubts that Herodotus (F12, 105–11) preserves the version of the one and only Cypria (107–08). He attributes details that likely belong to the mythological tradition, such as the Teuthranian expedition, to singular authorial invention in the Cypria (137).
Nevertheless, sometimes Davies reluctantly allows for the existence of pre-Homeric Cypria-style epics and multiforms of Stasinus’ Cypria. When discussing the testimony of Σ AD on Iliad 1.5 (F1) where Zeus consults with Momos instead of Themis, as in the Cypria, he says that the Momos-version belongs ‘to the fuller tradition [that] is not our business and is anyway unknowable’ (20). When discussing F2 on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis he allows that a pre-Homeric song on this subject is the source for both Iliad 24.58–63 and the tradition ‘enshrined’ in a particular ‘version of the Cypria’ (42). Moreover, he allows exactly one interpolation to the Iliad from the Cypria: the catalogue of Trojan allies at Iliad 2.816–77 is interpolated from a passage near the end of the Cypria (187–88).
These observations on Davies’ reluctance and inconsistency in considering multiformity do not constitute a major flaw in the work; they are simply the only flaw worth discussing here. Davies’ volume is one of the indispensable books for working on the first stages of the Trojan War myths and the epics that contain them.
