Unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, the cyclic epics survive only in fragments and summaries from Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period.
The Epic Cycle was the distillation in literary form of an oral tradition that had developed during the Greek Dark Age, which was based in part on localised hero cults.
In modern scholarship, the study of the historical and literary relationship between the Homeric epics and the rest of the cycle is called Neoanalysis.
[4] Most knowledge of the Cyclic epics comes from a broken summary of them which serves as part of the preface to the famous 10th century Iliad manuscript known as Venetus A.
[citation needed] The tales told in the Cycle are recounted by other ancient sources,[7] notably Virgil's Aeneid (book 2), which recounts the sack of Troy from a Trojan perspective, and Ovid's Metamorphoses (books 13–14), which describes the Greeks' landing at Troy (from the Cypria) and the judgment of Achilles' arms (Little Iliad).
The death of Agamemnon and the vengeance taken by his son Orestes (the Nostoi) are the subjects of later Greek tragedy, especially Aeschylus's Oresteian trilogy.
For the last line of the Iliad, ὣς οἵ γ᾽ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο.In this way they performed the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses.an alternative reading is preserved which is designed to lead directly into the Aethiopis: ὣς οἵ γ' ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος· ἦλθε δ' Ἀμαζών, Ἄρηος θυγάτηρ μεγαλήτορος ἀνδροφόνοιο.In this way they performed the funeral of Hector; then the Amazon Penthesileia came, daughter of great-hearted man-slaughtering Ares.
For example, the Greek warrior who killed Hector's son Astyanax in the fall of Troy is Neoptolemus according to the Little Iliad; according to the Iliou persis, it is Odysseus.