It would be depressingly easy, and not very instructive, to document the neglect of ‘later’ Greek poetry in books that claim to offer accessible introductions to ancient literature; that it is still possible to do so from books written very recently, when the whole notion of ‘the classical canon’ has come under increasingly strenuous examination and the study of ‘later antiquity’ has properly come into its own, might seem more depressing still, though it also sheds light on how the academy views its task of disseminating trends in research more broadly. In any case, any such catalogue of neglect would be widely (and perhaps rightly) regarded as a rhetorical move of self-justification of a kind very familiar in academic discourse; after all, it took years of voluminous writing about the ancient novel before scholars in that field abandoned the ritual complaint about the ‘neglect’ of this literature (the torch has perhaps been handed on to the study of early Christian narrative).

Quintus' Posthomerica in fourteen books covers events from the Trojan saga that take place between the funeral of Hector, which marks the end of the Iliad, and the homeward journey of the victorious Greeks after the sack of Troy. Various hints in the text help us place the epic within the Roman Empire but do not allow much scope for further speculation on a more specific date. Relative chronology with other hexameter poets in the Roman period sets the composition of the Posthomerica in the third century, which saw a floruit of mythological poetry. For material shared between Quintus' Posthomerica and Oppian's Halieutica, which is placed between 177 and 180 CE, it is generally agreed that Quintus is drawing on Oppian, and the end of the second century is thus a plausible terminus post quern for the Posthomerica. Key to establishing a terminus ante quern for this epic is Triphiodorus' epyllion on the Sack of Troy, which is now dated to the late third century: scholarly opinion is divided about the direction of the borrowing between the two poets, but if Triphiodorus is drawing on Quintus, which seems to be more likely, then the Posthomerica can be placed before the end of the third century.

AbstractThis paper explores how Quintus of Smyrna engages with the Homeric poems and the subsequent epic tradition. The paper discusses two scenes from Quintus’ Posthomerica dealing with the dynamics of speech between individuals and a collective body; the first of these scenes (Posthomerica 6.5–95) is primarily indebted to a scene in Iliad 2, and the second one (Posthomerica 1.403–475) has intriguing parallels in Apollonius’ Argonautica and Vergil’s Aeneid. The overall aim of the paper is to illustrate Quintus’ dialogue with multiple models throughout the epic tradition and to draw attention to the way he shapes these models according to his own poetics.

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