The Little Iliad is a lost epic poem from ancient Greece, composed around the 7th century BCE. It was part of a collection known as the Epic Cycle, which aimed to tell the entire story of the Trojan War. The poem is anonymous; ancient sources later suggested several possible authors, but modern scholars consider these attributions unreliable.

The work itself does not survive intact. Our knowledge of it comes from fragments and a detailed prose summary written by a later scholar named Proclus. According to this summary, the Little Iliad was four books long. It narrated events from the contest for the armor of the dead hero Achilles, which led to the suicide of Ajax, up to the fall of Troy by the famous wooden horse and its immediate aftermath.

The poem’s historical importance is significant. It provided the main narrative bridge between other epics in the Cycle, creating a continuous story of the war. Although the original text is lost, its plot was immensely influential. It established the canonical versions of many myths that were later adapted by major Greek playwrights like Sophocles and Euripides, and by Roman poets including Virgil in the Aeneid. The existence of the Little Iliad illustrates that Homer’s famous poems were part of a much larger and thriving tradition of epic storytelling in archaic Greece.