The Trojan Cycle

Ever heard of an ancient conflict called The Trojan War? Quite a story, really. And then there's Homer's epic The Iliad and The Odyssey, telling the tale in forty-eight books and tens of thousands of lines of dactylic hexameter...all of which focus on less than one year of the decade-long conflict, and the years Odysseus spent lost afterwards.

Something's missing -- namely, the first nine years of the war, the actual end of the war, and associated myths. Surely they weren't just floating about in the Oral Tradition until some ancient tragedians got ahold of them?

As it happens, they weren't. It turns out that the The Iliad and the The Odyssey were not the only epics which pulled together the tales of the Trojan War. In fact, there were eight:

• Cypria
• The Iliad
• Aethiopis
• Little Iliad
• Sack of Ilion (Also known as the Sack of Troy, the Iliupersis, or the Iliou persis)
• Returns (Also known as the Nostoi or the Nosti)
• The Odyssey
• Telegony

We've lost every one of the above except for Homer's epics, but yet we still know of them. References to and quotations from the lost epics have survived in fragments. By an incredible stroke of luck, we have a work titled the Chrestomathy by an unknown Proclus, which actually summarizes the events that take place in each epic.

Thanks to these sources, we know that the epics covered everything from the marriage of Peleus and Thetis to Odysseus's death.

Tropes provided by the Trojan Cycle as a whole:

• Adaptation Distillation: There were likely varying versions of these stories in the Oral Tradition. Writing them down distilled them into the versions remaining today (though variety still exists).
• Badass: So many, Achilles in particular.
• Because Destiny Says So: Comes up a lot.
• The Dead Have Names: Considering what we know of The Iliad and The Odyssey, this was likely true throughout the Trojan Cycle.
• Divine Parentage: A lot of the characters.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: A lot.
• Greek Mythology
• Grey and Gray Morality
• Gotterdammerung: In the sense that the Trojan War pretty much marked the end of an age of demigods and heroes.
• Hero Antagonist: Hector, Penthesilea, Memnon...many Trojan heroes and allies, really.
• Heroic Lineage: Naturally.
• Loads and Loads of Characters
• Narrative Poem: Just like The Iliad and The Odyssey, they're all written in dactylic hexameter. Kinda comes with the territory, being epics.
• Oral Tradition: Where these myths came from.
• Rated "M" for Manly
• Red Shirt: Probably a huge number of figures, Achaeans and Trojans alike.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: The major characters are often royalty: Menelaus, the king of Sparta; Agamemnon, the son of King Atreus; Odysseus, the king of Ithaca; Hector, the prince of Troy; Penthesilea, the queen of the Amazons; Memnon, the king of the Ethiopians; etc.
• The Siege: Naturally.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Troy was a real city and was actually destroyed and rebuilt several times... mainly because it was very rich and its neighbors wanted some Plunder.
• Warrior Prince: Multiple, mainly the sons of Priam and notably Hector, a prince of Troy and its greatest defender.