Gregory Nagy formalized his theory of how epics develop in his evolutionary model (I provided a brief synopsis of it in my essay, Homer and the Written Word), and Jonathan Burgess offered up an “arboreal” simile when he said if the Trojan War legend were a tree, the Iliad and Odyssey would be “a couple of small branches” while the Cyclic poems would be “somewhere in the trunk.” (The Cyclic poems are the six lost works that complete the legend.) Inspired by them, I came up with a “hydraulic” model for the legend’s evolution, based on the idea of rivers and deltas, which I’m introducing here. Keep reading…
