Formular Mutation and the Oral Character of the Cyclic Thebaid

Abstract

The disparate and fragmentary states of Cyclic poems make quantitative studies of their features impossible. However, qualitative methods exist for comparing the mobility of their formular language to that of known oral-derived epic. The common noun-epithet formulaic expressions in surviving fragments of the Cyclic Thebaid, when they do not appear verbatim in Homeric poetry, only vary along lines well-established in early epic tradition, not in other ways. This suggests a position for the Thebaid within the development of epic relatively close to that of the Homeric poems and not from a later stage either of literacy or of self-consciously archaizing orality.