Before the Franchise: How the Ancient Greeks Invented the Expanded Universe

April 20th, 2026

Written By: Connor Upton

This article originally appeared in the InTheAtticZine Newsletter. More writing like this, plus fiction, games coverage, and the full zine, is available to download free over there.

When we think of a sprawling Expanded Universe, our minds usually drift to longboxes stuffed with crossover comic events, or a shared sci-fi galaxy where every character gets a name and home planet just to flesh out the spaces between blockbuster movies. We love the intricate architecture of these worlds, and audiences crave a reality where every background character has a detailed origin story, every magical artifact has a lineage, and every major event has a prequel to set the stage.

We tend to treat this kind of collaborative, interconnected worldbuilding as a modern invention, a byproduct of cinematic universes and multimedia franchises. But the truth is, the blueprint for the shared universe is over 3,000 years old. If you look back at the foundation of Western literature you will find a sprawling, eight-part, multi-author franchise known as the Epic Cycle. The ancient Greeks not only invented the epic; they invented the spin-off, the midquel, the legacy sequel, and the tie-in lore drops.

To get a full scope of this time-tested blueprint, we have to look at how we consume the story of the Trojan War today. For centuries, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey have been treated as the ultimate pillars of ancient storytelling. They are revered as untouchable, standalone texts. But to an ancient Greek audience, handing them just the Iliad would be like handing someone only The Empire Strikes Back and pretending the rest of the saga doesn't exist.

The Iliad actually only covers a few short weeks in the tenth year of a decade-long war. It begins in media res and ends before the war is actually won. The famous Trojan Horse? The death of Achilles? The reason the war started in the first place? None of that is in the Iliad. Those crucial plot points were handled by the rest of the Expanded Universe. The Epic Cycle was a massive, serialized saga consisting of eight epic poems, designed so that each installment picked up exactly where the previous one left off. Different poets "penned" different eras of the timeline, creating a shared storytelling sandbox.

This was a meticulously plotted continuity. It allowed audiences to zoom in on any corner of the map, follow any supporting character, and find a compelling narrative that fed back into the main event. Building a functional, immersive fantasy world, whether you are plotting out the cavern systems and city-states of a massive text-based RPG, or drafting a multi-book prose epic, requires architectural intent. It has been clear for over three millennia that stories need some foundation of lore to make the world feel lived-in.

Homer was a master of psychology and character. He zoomed in on the human condition: the grief of Priam, the devastating rage of Achilles. But it was the other poets of the Epic Cycle who did the heavy lifting of the worldbuilding. They were the ones who established the hard rules of the universe, the origins of the magical armor, and the cinematic boss fights.

Take the Aethiopis, the immediate sequel to the Iliad. In this poem, the world expands dramatically. We are introduced to Penthesilea, a terrifying warrior-queen of the Amazons, and Memnon, the King of the Ethiopians whose armor was forged by the gods. Those are akin to modern day cinematic set-pieces, and were designed to push the world's greatest hero, Achilles, to his absolute limit before his inevitable, tragic death at the hands of Paris.

Or look at the prequel, the Cypria. It didn't just say "the Greeks and Trojans went to war." It built a complex backstory involving a divine wedding, a snubbed Goddess of Strife, a golden apple inscribed with the words "To the Fairest," and a cosmic beauty pageant that resulted in the abduction of Helen. This is the exact same mechanical worldbuilding we see in modern cinematic universes. The Epic Cycle gave the audience the deep lore, the high-stakes action, and the "what happened next" that fans of any great shared universe naturally crave.

But if this Expanded Universe was so foundational, why do we only have Homer's two poems left today? The answer lies in the ancient version of franchise fatigue and critical snobbery. Tragically, six of the eight poems in the Epic Cycle are completely lost to history. We only know their plots because later scholars wrote summaries, and because ancient vase painters obsessively depicted scenes from them.

The loss of these texts came down to a ruthless quality filter. In the ancient world, copying a scroll by hand was an incredibly expensive, time-consuming process. Scribes had to prioritize. Critics, most notably Aristotle, championed Homer as a singular, untouchable genius. Aristotle argued that Homer's tight focus on a single theme (Achilles' rage) made the Iliad high art, while he dismissed the other Cycle poems as bloated, episodic, and overly reliant on cramming in as many plot points as possible.

In other words, the ancient critics viewed the rest of the Epic Cycle in a similar way some modern critics view later MCU films: entertaining for the lore, but not "prestige" viewing. Because of this bias, fewer and fewer copies of the Aethiopis and the Little Iliad were commissioned. If you only had the time and funds to commission a copy of Avengers: Infinity War vs. Thor 4, which one do you think would have more attention? Which copies would remain culturally impactful after thousands of years?

This is how over centuries, the numbers game caught up with them. The scrolls rotted, burned, or were lost to time. Imagine having the core story, but losing the prequel that explains the whole conflict. However, even though the physical texts vanished, the idea of the Epic Cycle survived.

The concept that a fictional world is bigger than a single protagonist, and that a narrative can be endlessly expanded by different creators, sent a ripple through the history of storytelling. The Epic Cycle's framework paved the way for the sprawling, multi-authored mythos of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It is the spiritual ancestor of J.R.R. Tolkien's exhaustive appendices in The Lord of the Rings, which established that Middle-earth existed long before Frodo and would continue long after him.

Today, the shared universe is the dominant model for blockbuster storytelling. But every time a studio announces a new spin-off series, every time a new author steps in to write a novel in an established sci-fi universe, and every time we debate the intricacies of franchise canon, we are participating in a 3,000-year-old tradition.

The scrolls of the Cypria and the Aethiopis may be dust, but the expanded universe they built conquered the world.

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