Trojan War

The poems of the Epic Cycle are now lost. But what we know about them from ancient evidence is extremely important for our understanding about myth of the Trojan War. The poems of the Epic Cycle share the same mythological tradition with the famous Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and in fact the Epic Cycle is even more representative of the Trojan War tradition than the Homeric poems.

2001, Jonathan S. Burgess, “The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle”, in Paperback, Johns Hopkins University Press, published 2004, page 1

The Greeks and Romans believed that the Trojan War was both a real event and a pivotal point in world history; Herodotus and Thucydides discussed the Trojan War briefly in the opening pages of their respective books, written in the fifth century BCE.

2013, Eric H. Cline, The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, page 1