The Iliad and Odyssey Are Just Episodes 2 and 7. Here's the Other 6.

[00:00:00]Somewhere around 700 BC, a blind Greek guy wrote the most successful franchise in human history. Eight movies, two survived, six did not. We watched Iliad.

[00:00:13]We watched Odyssey. Everybody quotes them. Everybody studies them.

[00:00:18]Everybody's third cousin has a tattoo of a wine dark sea. And almost nobody knows they're not even the beginning or the end of the story. They're episode two and episode 7 out of eight. Somewhere between then and now, six entire epic poems, fulllength complete works sitting right next to the Iliad and Odyssey in every ancient library just stopped existing. Nobody burned them in some dramatic bonfire. Nobody banned them.

[00:00:48]They just stopped getting copied one generation at a time until there was nothing left to copy. This is why 75% of the biggest story in the ancient world quietly got deleted from existence. And the two parts that survived weren't even picked because they were the best ones.

[00:01:04]Here's the real answer before we get into it. The Iliad and Odyssey didn't survive because they were the greatest hits. They survived because a few hundred generations of scribes kept handcopying exactly those two poems for over a thousand years and quietly stopped bothering with the other six.

[00:01:22]Survival wasn't about quality. It wasn't about how good the story was. It was about who got copied over and over long enough to outlast fires, floods, empires collapsing, and libraries closing down.

[00:01:38]Keep that in mind because by the end of this, you're going to realize the six poems we lost had way more insane stuff happening in them than the two we kept.

[00:01:47]Let's back up. The Trojan War, as the Greeks told it, wasn't one story. It was eight. Historians call it the epic cycle. A set of long poems that stitched together covered the entire war. From the moment some guy handed a golden apple to the wrong goddess, all the way to Adysius's own death years after he got home. Only two of the eight made it to us complete. You know both of them already. Poem one, the Cypria.

[00:02:16]This is the prequel nobody asked for but everybody needed. It covers the judgment of Paris. Three goddesses bribe a random shepherd prince to pick who's the hottest. He picks the one who bribed him with the most beautiful woman in the world who happens to already be married to a Greek king. That's the whole inciting incident for a 10-year war. One bad hookup decision. Then Helen gets taken to Troy. The Greek kings all get guilt tripped into an oath they swore years earlier. and an entire fleet gets built to go get her back. There's even a scene where Achilles's mom disguises him as a girl and hides him on an island to keep him out of the war. And it does not work. Gone. Fully gone. All we have are a few scattered quotes and a summary written centuries later by a guy named Proas. Basically, the ancient world's Wikipedia stub for a poem nobody bothered recopying.

[00:03:07]Poem two, the Iliad survived.

[00:03:12]This is the one everyone's forced to read in ninth grade and it covers about 4 weeks 9 years into the siege. Achilles is mad because his commander took the war prize he was given. So he sits out the fighting completely. Without him, the Greeks start losing badly. His best friend, Petetrois, borrows his armor to save the day, dies for it, and Achilles loses his mind, storms back into the war, kills Hector, and drags his body around the walls of Troy behind a chariot out of pure grief and rage.

[00:03:44]That's it. That's the entire Iliad.

[00:03:48]Notice something. It doesn't cover the fall of Troy. The horse isn't in it.

[00:03:53]Achilles doesn't even die in it. That's not this movie. That's a sequel we don't have.

[00:03:59]Poem three, the Ethiopus.

[00:04:02]Achilles keeps fighting after the Iliad ends. An army of Amazon shows up to help Troy, led by their queen, Pentholea, and Achilles kills her, too.

[00:04:13]Then an Ethiopian king named Menon, son of the Dawn goddess herself, shows up with reinforcements, and Achilles kills him as well in a fight so dramatic the gods themselves argue over the outcome up on Olympus. And then immediately after, Paris shoots Achilles with an arrow to the one spot his mother forgot to dip in the river sticks when she was making him invincible as a baby. Yes.

[00:04:41]The single most famous death scene in Western mythology, the actual Achilles heel moment, is not in the Iliad. It's in the sequel Nobody Kept. Gone. A handful of lines quoted by later Grimarians trying to explain a word. And that's the entire surviving record. Poem 4 and 5: The Little ID and the sack of Troy or Ilia.

[00:05:02]This is the part with the actual highlights everybody thinks they know.

[00:05:06]After Achilles dies, there's a contest over who gets his armor. Odysius wins it over another Greek hero named Ajax, who takes the loss so badly he kills himself. Then Adysius and his crew sneak into Troy to steal a sacred statue. Then the big one, the Trojan horse gets built, wheeled inside the city walls, and at night, the Greek soldiers hiding inside climb out and burn Troy to the ground, killing or enslaving basically everyone in it. Sit with that for a second.

[00:05:36]Everything you picture when somebody says Trojan War, the wooden horse, soldiers hidden inside it, the city burning, none of that is in the Iliad or the Odyssey. It's all from these two poems we don't have. We're running the most famous war in mythology entirely on secondhand summaries and vibes. Poem 6, the notoy, the returns. This one covers every other Greek hero's trip home after 10 years of war. And spoiler, most of it goes badly. Agamemnon, the guy who led the entire war, gets home and is murdered in his own bathtub by his wife and her boyfriend. Menaaus, Helen's actual husband, gets blown off course and spends years wandering around Egypt.

[00:06:19]Some heroes get shipwrecked by an angry sea god who's furious about how the Greeks treated Troy's temples. It's an entire ensemble cast of return journeys running parallel to Adysius's, and every single one of them is gone. Poem 7: The Odyssey survived.

[00:06:36]Odysius's 10-year detour home. The Cyclops. Cersei turning his crew into pigs. A trip into the actual underworld.

[00:06:44]Sila and Caribbdus. And then once he finally gets home, over 100 suitors camped out in his house for years, eating his food and trying to marry his wife. We already covered the full version of this one on the channel.

[00:06:58]Point is, this is one guy's return story out of an entire fleet's worth of return stories that all happened at the same time. We happen to keep his to poem 8, the tleggony, the one nobody talks about because it's easily the weirdest.

[00:07:15]Remember Cersei, the witch who turned Adysius's men into pigs and kept him around for a year? Turns out he had a kid with her. That kid, Taggonus, grows up, sails out looking for the father he's never met, gets shipwrecked on Odysius's own island without realizing it, raids the place for supplies, and ends up in a fight with Odysius himself, who doesn't recognize his own son either. Tleggonus kills him with a spear tipped in stingray venom. Neither of them knows what just happened until it's too late. The hero of the entire Odyssey dies in a random beach fight with a son he never met in a poem almost nobody has read in 2,000 years. Gone completely. We know the ending of Adysius's actual life from a two paragraph summary written by someone else centuries after the original was already gone. So here's the whole saga back to back. Apple, Helen, war gone. Nine years of siege.

[00:08:23]Achilles's rage survived. Achilles dies.

[00:08:27]Gone. Armor drama. The horse. The city burns. Gone. Everyone else sails home.

[00:08:33]Gone. Odysius sails home. Survived.

[00:08:37]Odysius dies by his own kid. Gone. Two out of eight. That's a 25% survival rate for one of the most important stories of civilization ever told. So why did only these two make it?

[00:08:49]Not because they're the best written.

[00:08:50]Ancient critics argued the other poems had wilder, weirder material. Not because of the plot. The missing six have the horse, the death of Achilles.

[00:09:00]Actual assassinations.

[00:09:02]It's because the Iliad and Odyssey got attached to one brand name, Homer. Once Greek schools decided Homer was the guy to study, scribes spent a thousand years of handcopying budget on exactly those two poems. Papyrus rots. Scrolls get lost in fires, floods, and library closures. If nobody's actively recopying your poem every generation, it eventually just runs out of copies and disappears. The other six weren't reliably tied to a famous name. So, nobody prioritized saving them. They quietly lost the copying lottery generation after generation until the last scroll fell apart and that was it.

[00:09:41]Here's the actual takeaway, and it applies to a lot more than Bronze Age poetry. What survives history usually isn't the best version. It's whatever kept getting copied by whoever was in charge of copying things. Same story with lost films, discontinued video games, bands that never got remastered.

[00:09:59]Quality has nothing to do with it.

[00:10:01]Attention does. So next time someone says The Trojan War, remember you've only ever heard two out of eight episodes, and you didn't even get to pick which two. Oh, and by the way, if you haven't watched Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, go watch it. It's absolute cinema. If you want more random interesting stuff like this, subscribe.

[00:10:21]We cover all kinds of topics on this channel, not just ancient history.