ished in the first Olympiad (776 B.C.).
He set himself to finish the tale of Troy, which, so far as events were
concerned, had been left half-told by Homer, by tracing the course of
events after the close of the "Iliad". The "Aethiopis" thus included the
coming of the Amazon Penthesilea to help the Trojans after the fall of
Hector and her death, the similar arrival and fall of the Aethiopian
Memnon, the death of Achilles under the arrow of Paris, and the dispute
between Odysseus and Aias for the arms of Achilles. The "Sack of Ilium"
[1113] as analysed by Proclus was very similar to Vergil's version in
"Aeneid" ii, comprising the episodes of the wooden horse, of Laocoon, of
Sinon, the return of the Achaeans from Tenedos, the actual Sack of Troy,
the division of spoils and the burning of the city.

Lesches or Lescheos (as Pausanias calls him) of Pyrrha or Mitylene is
dated at about 660 B.C. In his "Little Iliad" he undertook to elaborate
the "Sack" as related by Arctinus. His work included the adjudgment of
the arms of Achilles to Odysseus, the madness of Aias, the bringing
of Philoctetes from Lemnos and his cure, the coming to the war of
Neoptolemus who slays Eurypylus, son of Telephus, the making of the
wooden horse, the spying of Odysseus and his theft, along with Diomedes,
of the Palladium: the analysis concludes with the admission of the
wooden horse into Troy by the Trojans. It is known, however (Aristotle,
"Poetics", xxiii; Pausanias, x, 25-27), that the "Little Iliad" also
contained a description of the sack of Troy. It is probable that this
and other superfluous incidents disappeared after the Alexandrian
arrangement of the poems in the Cycle, either as the result of some
later recension, or merely through disuse. Or Proclus may have thought
it unnecessary to give the accounts by Lesches and Arctinus of the same
incident.

The "Cyprian Lays", ascribed to Stasinus of Cyprus [1114] (but also to
Hegesinus of Salamis) was designed to do for the events preceding the
action of the "Iliad" what Arctinus had done for the later phases of the
Trojan War. The "Cypria" begins with the first causes of the war, the
purpose of Zeus to relieve the overburdened earth, the apple of
discord, the rape of Helen. Then follow the incidents connected with the
gathering of the Achaeans and their ultimate landing in Troy; and the
story of the war is detailed up to the quarrel between Achilles and
Agamemnon with which the "Iliad" begins.