In Book 12 of Quintus Smyrnaeus’Posthomerica(c. third centuryc.e.), the epic poet prepares to list the heroes who entered the Wooden Horse before the sack of Troy. Before he begins, he breaks off to ask for help (Quint. Smyrn. 12.306–13):τούς μοι νῦν καθ᾽ ἕκαστον ἀνειρομένῳ σάφα Μοῦσαιἔσπεθ᾽, ὅσοι κατέβησαν ἔσω πολυχανδέος ἵππου·ὑμεῖς γὰρ πᾶσάν μοι ἐνὶ φρεσὶ θήκατ᾽ ἀοιδήν,πρίν μοι <ἔτ᾽> ἀμφὶ παρειὰ κατασκίδνασθαι ἴουλον,Σμύρνης ἐν δαπέδοισι περικλυτὰ μῆλα νέμοντι    310τρὶς τόσον Ἑρμοῦ ἄπωθεν, ὅσον βοόωντος ἀκοῦσαι,Ἀρτέμιδος περὶ νηὸν Ἐλευθερίῳ ἐνὶ κήπῳ,οὔρεΐ τ’ οὔτε λίην χθαμαλῷ οὔθ᾽ ὑψόθι πολλῷ.Muses, I ask you to tell me precisely, one by one, the names of all who went inside the cavernous horse. For you were the ones who filled my mind with all song even before down was spread across my cheeks, when I was tending my renowned sheep in the land of Smyrna, three times as far as the shouting distance from the Hermus, near Artemis’ temple in the garden of Liberty, on a hill that is neither excessively high nor too low.

This article is the first to consider book 8 of the Palatine Anthology as an integrated collection. Book 8 consists of funerary epigrams of Gregory of Nazianzus. We consider how the book is structured as a coherent collection, what its place in the Palatine Anthology is and, above all, how these underdiscussed poems contribute to the changing discourse of death in fourth-century Christianity. We also look at how the poems contribute to the Byzantine culture in which the Palatine Anthology was put together. The article reveals how Gregory rewrites both the positive values of death in a Christian community and negative descriptions of those who transgress such values.

This chapter offers a reformulation of the quaestio Latina for Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica, centred on the contentious issue of the poem's level of engagement with Vergil's Aeneid. Using a re-reading of two key passages of potential Vergilian intertextuality -Calchas' prophecy about the future glory of Rome , and the invention of the testudo battle formation (PH 11.358-396) -I argue that Quintus' silence with regard to the Aeneid is a sign of deliberate distancing, which sheds light on the broader cultural poetics of his work. By delicately evoking in these episodes not Vergil's Aeneid but rather Homer's Odyssey, Quintus, I suggest, co-opts features of Vergilian epic and reabsorbs them into a Homeric dominant model. Through this process, Greek and Roman poetics, plots, and aetiologies are combined and synchronised, in a positive statement of Quintus' position as a Homerising poet composing under Roman rule.

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THOMAS BIGGS and JESSICA BLUM (EDS), THE EPIC JOURNEY IN GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE (Yale Classical Studies volume 39). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 323. ISBN 9781108498098 (bound); 9781108702898 (paper). £75.00.'Epic space presents a world against which reality can crash.' Thus, this volume begins its ambitious (re)vision of the journey in ancient literature. Originally a conference and colloquium on 'Home', it explores the multivalent movements to or from one's Heimatprobing that crucial space in between points of origin and end. While, as the editors admit, recent scholarship has often forayed into such topics, what distinguishes this project is a capacious denition of its terms. Readers browsing the contents page may be surprised to nd chapters on Tacitus, Xenophon and Lucian; yet the introduction shows how epic is the launchpad, not the limitation of the enquiry. These journeys all perform, rework or transgress the paradigmatic voyage inscribed in Homer, particularly the Odyssey. The result in many ways mimics its polytrophic model. The four parts, each prefaced with a synopsis, bend through time, resisting obvious chronological or geographical sequencing. Part I begins with Egbert Bakker's metallurgical reading of Odysseus' journey as a return from the Gold to the Iron Age. Alexander Loney considers the importance of pompe in the Odyssey, demonstrating how Odysseus' successful conveyance requires him to trust and resist excessive agency, and his benefactors to offer abundant, even self-destructive generosity. Jessica Blum moves to a poem which is simultaneously a predecessor and heir to Homer. Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica, she argues, articulates a profound dualityof timeframes, generic models and meanings. As epic players in an imperial world, the heroes' dependence on a Homeric martial script often leads them astray, and anticipates their tragedy just outside of the poem.Part II focuses on the intersections between love, relationships and home. Silvia Montiglio, in what for me was one of the nest chapters, examines the parallels and differences between the journeying couples in Apollonius and Heliodorus. Whereas Chariclea and Theagenes succeed in their novelistic prioritisation of love over home, once Medea leaves withor for -Jason, she is always already homeless. Emily Baragwanath considers the domestic politics of Xenophon's Anabasis, in a more positive reading of the journey's success. Alison Keith provides the rst discussion of the Aeneid. Complementing her work on the epic landscape as a contrast between mobile males and grounded women, Keith looks at instances where Vergil almost breaks from this mould. Through Dido, Andromache and the other Trojan women, Vergil 'repeatedly sounds out the possibility of female participation in the epic voyage' (144), only to draw back from ultimately letting them in. This chapter was another highlight of the volume, and I found Keith's readings articulate, pithy and moving.Part III considers movement in the Roman world. Staying with th...