Quintus Smyrnaeus

• 1. Introduction

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  Quintus Smyrnaeus spent his early youth tending sheep near Smyrna, the city now known as Izmir, and it was there that he began composing poetry. He tells us so himself, in book twelve of his epic, line 310. What he went on to write was a fourteen-book work that picks up precisely where Homer's Iliad leaves off, filling a gap that had sat open for centuries. How does a poet with a disputed biography become the earliest surviving author to cover the fall of Troy? That question sits at the center of everything that follows.

• 2. The Disputed Life

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  Placing Quintus in history is genuinely difficult. Tradition puts him in the latter part of the 4th century AD, but scholars have also argued for dates as early as the 2nd century. The case for the 4th century rests partly on two passages in the poem itself. Translator A. Way points to book six, lines 531 onward, where an illustration drawn from man-and-beast fights in the amphitheatre appears; those fights were suppressed by the emperor Theodosius I, who reigned from 379 to 395 AD. A second passage, in book thirteen around line 335, contains a prophecy whose specific particularity, as scholar Koechly argued, limits it to the middle of the 4th century. Those who push the date earlier point to what they see as influence from the Second Sophistic, a school of Greek orators who flourished in the 1st and 2nd centuries. The debate has never been settled, and Quintus himself offers no dates, only the memory of sheep and a hillside near Smyrna. His son Dorotheus, a Christian poet of the 4th century known for his Greek epic The Vision of Dorotheus, identified himself at the end of his manuscript as "Dorotheus, son of Quintus the poet"; scholars note that no other poet named Quintus is known from the period, and Dorotheus used the same Homeric poetic structure as his father.

• 3. Filling the Epic Gap

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  Homer's Iliad ends with the burial of Hector. The Odyssey picks up with the war already over. Between those two points, an entire chapter of the Trojan War went unnarrated in any surviving text. Quintus set out to bridge that silence. His Posthomerica, whose title means simply "after Homer", opens at the exact moment the Iliad closes, immediately after the Trojans reclaimed Hector's body. The first four books draw on the same territory as the Aethiopis, a lost work by Arctinus of Miletus, telling of the Amazon Penthesileia and the Aethiopian king Memnon, son of the dawn goddess Eos. Both are slain by Achilles. Achilles himself then dies, and the books close with his funeral games. Books five through twelve cover the ground of the Little Iliad, a work attributed to Lesches, carrying the story through the contest between Aias and Odysseus for the armour of Achilles, the suicide of Aias after his defeat, and the construction of the wooden horse. These books likely drew not only from Lesches but also from Greek tragedy; the influence of Sophocles' depiction of Ajax has been noted by scholars. The final books follow Arctinus again, this time his Sack of Troy, narrating the city's capture, the sacrifice of Polyxena at Achilles' grave, and the storm-scattered departure of the Greeks. The archaic Epic Cycle poems on which Quintus relied have themselves been lost. His Posthomerica is therefore the earliest surviving work to cover this period in full.

• 4. Sources and Homeric Style

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  Quintus borrowed his material from the same cyclic poems that Virgil drew upon, and the sources overlap in telling ways. The Aethiopis of Arctinus of Miletus supplies the arc of Penthesileia and Memnon. The Iliupersis, also by Arctinus, covers the destruction of Troy. The Ilias Mikra of Lesches provides the middle books. Quintus was probably acquainted with Virgil's works, which drew on the same pool. Yet the method Quintus applied to this material was distinctively Homeric. His work is closely modeled on Homer in structure, language, and tone, not on the Latin epic tradition Virgil represented. The Second Sophistic argument for an earlier date gains some traction here: critics who see that rhetorical influence in the Posthomerica believe Quintus wrote when that school was still a living force, not a historical memory. The poem sits at a crossroads of sources and influences, old material re-narrated through a deep imitation of the oldest Greek poetic voice.

• 5. Lost and Found

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  For centuries after he wrote it, the Posthomerica disappeared from view. The manuscript that eventually resurfaced was discovered at Otranto, in Calabria, by Cardinal Bessarion in 1450. Because the manuscript came from Calabria, the first printed edition identified the author not as Quintus Smyrnaeus but as Quintus Calabrus, meaning Quintus of Calabria. That editio princeps was published in Venice in 1504 by the printer Aldus Manutius, under the Latin title Quinti Calabri derelictorum ab Homero libri XIV, which translates roughly as the fourteen books of Quintus Calabrus left undone by Homer. The name that stuck came later. In 1577, the editor Lorenz Rhodomann published a new edition that included a Latin translation by Michael Neander, and it was Rhodomann who gave the poet the name by which he is now known: Quintus Smyrnaeus, connecting him to the city he himself named in book twelve.

• 6. Modern Rediscovery

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  Scholarly interest in Quintus grew through the 20th century in steady, documented stages. A. Way produced an English translation that appeared in volume 19 of the Loeb Classical Library in 1913. Francis Vian published a new edition of the Greek text, with partial commentary and a French translation, across three volumes issued by the Bude series in 1963, 1966, and 1969. Frederick Combellack contributed another English translation. Alan James and Kevin Lee produced a detailed commentary focused on book five alone. James also later produced a fresh English translation accompanied by a newly edited text and commentary. That accumulation of scholarly apparatus over the course of the century signals what the ancient manuscript itself could not: that the poet who began composing verse while watching sheep near Smyrna had found, more than a millennium after he wrote, a sustained readership willing to edit, annotate, and translate his fourteen books line by line.