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Are we to believe that one set of late Ionian poets they who added to and altered the Iliad were true to tradition, while another contemporary set of Ionian poets, the Cyclics authors of new Epics on Homeric themes are known to have quite lost touch with the Homeric taste, religion, and ritual?
The Cyclics introduce Helen as daughter of Nemesis, and describe the flight of Nemesis from Zeus in various animal forms, a Marchen of a sort not popular with Homer; an Ionic Marchen, Mr. Leaf would say. There is nothing like this in the Iliad and Odyssey. They call the son of Achilles, not Neoptolemus, as Homer does, but Pyrrhus.
The poem is so early that it is prior to hero worship and ancestor worship; or it might be more judicious to say that the poem is of an age that did not, officially, practise ancestor worship, whatever may have occurred in folk-custom. The Homeric age is one which had outgrown ancestor and hero worship, and had not, like the age of the Cyclics, relapsed into it.
Possibly parts of his work may be textually derived from the Cyclics, but the topic is very obscure. In Quintus, Paris, after encountering evil omens on his way, makes a long speech, imploring the pardon of the deserted OEnone. She replies, not with the Tennysonian brevity; she sends him back to the helpless arms of her rival, Helen. Paris dies on the hills; never did Helen see him returning.
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