The Cypria, as Bernabé prints it, opens with Zeus's plan. There was a time when countless tribes of men wandered always over the earth and weighed down the breadth of the heavy-breasted land. Zeus saw, pitied, and in his dense wits resolved to lighten the all-feeding earth of men: he fanned the great strife of the Ilian war, so that death might empty the weight. The heroes were slain at Troy, and the will of Zeus was being fulfilled.
Other fragments give Aphrodite's clothes dyed with the flowers of the earth; Castor mortal and Polydeuces immortal; Helen born of Nemesis and Zeus. Bernabé prints the poem in the first volume of Greek Epic Poets.
The surviving text is pre-Iliadic hexameter, the opening movement of the epic Cycle rather than a bare title.
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