It has already been stated in a former chapter, that in the early commencements of prose-writing, Hekatæus, Pherekydês, and other logographers, made it their business to extract from the ancient fables something like a continuous narrative, chronologically arranged. It was upon a principle somewhat analogous that the Alexandrine literati, about the second century before the Christian era,[222] arranged the multitude of old epic poets into a series founded on the supposed order of time in the events narrated,—beginning with the intermarriage of Uranus and Gæa, and the Theogony,—and concluding with the death of Odysseus by the hands of his son Telegonus. This collection passed by the name of the Epic Cycle, and the poets, whose compositions were embodied in it, were termed Cyclic poets. Doubtless, the epical treasures of the Alexandrine library were larger than had ever before been brought together and submitted to men both of learning and leisure: so that multiplication of such compositions in the same museum rendered it advisable to establish some fixed order of perusal, and to copy them in one corrected and uniform edition.[223] It pleased the critics to determine precedence, neither by antiquity nor by excellence of the compositions themselves, but by the supposed sequence of narrative, so that the whole taken together constituted a readable aggregate of epical antiquity. [222] Perhaps Zenodotus, the superintendent of the Alexandrine library under Ptolemy Philadelphus, in the third century B. C.: there is a Scholion on Plautus, published not many years ago by Osann, and since more fully by Ritschl,—“Cæcius in commento Comœdiarum Aristophanis in Pluto,—Alexander Ætolus, et Lycophron Chalcidensis, et Zenodotus Ephesius, impulsu regis Ptolemæi, Philadelphi cognomento, artis poetices libros in unum collegerunt et in ordinem redegerunt. Alexander tragœdias, Lycophron comœdias, Zenodotus vero Homeri poemata et reliquorum illustrium poetarum.” See Lange, Ueber die Kyklischen Dichter, p. 56 (Mainz. 1837); Welcker, Der Epische Kyklus, p. 8; Ritschl, Die Alexandrinischen Bibliotheken, p. 3 (Breslau, 1838). Lange disputes the sufficiency of this passage as proof that Zenodotus was the framer of the Epic Cycle: his grounds are, however, unsatisfactory to me. [223] That there existed a cyclic copy or edition of the Odyssey (ἡ κυκλικὴ) is proved by two passages in the Scholia (xvi. 195; xvii. 25), with Boeckh’s remark in Buttmann’s edition: this was the Odyssey copied or edited along with the other poems of the cycle.