Table Of ContentQuintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica
Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica
Writing Homer Under Rome
Edited by Silvio Bär, Emma Greensmith
and Leyla Ozbek
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Contents
List of Contributors viii
1 Introduction: Going to Rome, Returning to Troy 1
Silvio Bär, Emma Greensmith and Leyla Ozbek
Part I: Contexts and Poetics
2 Temporality and Temper: Time, Narrative and Heroism in
Quintus of Smyrna 17
Simon Goldhill
3 Poetry, Performance and Quintus’ Posthomerica 38
Katerina Carvounis
4 A-Sexual Epic? Consummation and Closure in the Posthomerica 57
Emma Greensmith
5 Images of Life and Death: Visualising the Heroic Body in
Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica 75
A. Sophie Schoess
Part II: Religion, Gods and Destiny
6 A Non-Homeric Fate in Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica?
Representation, Function, Problems 97
Calum A. Maciver
vi contents
7 Disempowering the Gods 118
Katia Barbaresco
8 Animal and Human Sacrifice in Quintus of Smyrna 138
Jan N. Bremmer
Part III: Between Narratology and Lexicology
9 A Narratological Study of the Role of the Fates in the Posthomerica 161
Eirini Argyrouli
10 Wielding Words: Neoptolemus as a Speaker of Words
in Quintus’ Posthomerica 175
Tine Scheijnen
11 Stepping out of Place: σχέτλιος in Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica 194
Jordan Maly-Preuss
12 Renewing Homer with Homer: The Use of Epithets in
Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica 214
Alessia Ferreccio
13 Polychronic Intertextuality in Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica 229
Vincent Tomasso
Part IV: The Struggle with the Literary Past
14 The Dissolution of Troy: Homeric Narratology in the Posthomerica 247
Fran Middleton
15 ‘Why So Serious?’ The Ambivalence of Joy and Laughter in
the Iliad, Odyssey and Posthomerica 267
Arnold Bärtschi
16 Reshaping the Nature of Heroes: Heracles, Philoctetes and
the Bow in Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica 287
Leyla Ozbek
17 Quintus and the Epic Cycle 298
Giampiero Scafoglio
Part V: Re-Readings and Re-Workings
18 Philological Editor and Protestant Pedagogue: How Lorenz Rhodoman
(1545‒1606) Worked on the Posthomerica of Quintus Smyrnaeus 321
Thomas Gärtner
contents vii
19 Too Homeric to Be True: John Tzetzes’ Reception of Quintus
of Smyrna and the Importance of Plausibility 351
Valeria F. Lovato
20 A Postmodern Quintus? Theories of Fan Fiction and the Posthomerica 373
Stephan Renker
Bibliography 386
Index of Passages Cited 420
General Index 429
Contributors
Eirini Argyrouli studied Classics at the National and Kapodistrian Univer-
sity of Athens and at the University of Amsterdam. She is an independent
researcher and she is interested in narratology, late antique epic and lyric
poetry.
Silvio Bär is Professor of Classics at the University of Oslo. His research
areas and interests include Greek hexameter poetry (especially of the imperial
period), tragedy, lyric, the novel, mythology, rhetoric, the Second Sophistic,
intertextuality, transtextuality, diachronic narratology, and the reception of
antiquity in English literature and popular culture. He has published widely on
Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica, on the genre ‘epyllion’, and on the character
of Herakles in Greek epic and beyond.
Katia Barbaresco is a PhD student in Ancient Heritage Studies at the Ca’
Foscari University of Venice. She spent part of her academic education in the
UK (2017 at the University of Reading, 2019–20 at King’s College London).
Her PhD project is a commentary to the third logos of Quintus Smyrnaeus’
Posthomerica, with a focus on the death and funeral of Achilles. Her main
research area of interest lies in Greek epic poetry from its oral origins to the
imperial poems. She is a member of the Aletheia research group of Ca’ Foscari
and collaborates with Classici Contro.
Arnold Bärtschi obtained his BA at the University of Basel (2012), his MA
(2014) as well as his PhD (2018) at the Ruhr University Bochum with a disser-
tation on ‘Titanen, Giganten und Riesen im antiken Epos’ (published 2019).
He was a research assistant of Prof. Dr Manuel Baumbach (2014–19) and cur-
rently works as ‘Studienrat’ and operational director of Classical Philology
list of contributors ix
at the Ruhr University Bochum (since 2019). His main research includes
epic poetry, adaption of literary theory in Classical Philology and reception
of antiquity in modern media, especially in comics. He is a member of the
‘Gesellschaft für Comicforschung’.
Jan N. Bremmer is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University
of Groningen. His recent books include Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient
World (2014), Maidens, Magic and Martyrs in Early Christianity (2017), The World
of Greek Religion and Mythology (2019), Greek Religion (20212), Becoming a Man
in Ancient Greece and Rome: Myths and Rituals of Initiation (2021) and, as co-
editor, Marginality, Media, and Mutations of Religious Authority in the History of
Christianity (2019), The Protevangelium of James (2020) and The Apostles Peter,
Paul, John, Thomas and Philip with Their Companions in Late Antiquity (2021).
Katerina Carvounis is Assistant Professor in Ancient Greek Literature at the
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and was previously a British
Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge,
and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. Her main research
interests include the Greek epic tradition and later Greek poetry, and she has
published widely in these areas. Among her recent publications is A Commen-
tary on Quintus of Smyrna, Posthomerica 14 (Oxford University Press).
Alessia Ferreccio is a PhD in Greek and Latin Philology and secondary
school teacher of Ancient Greek and Latin. She has worked on Greek lexicog-
raphy and ancient Greek scholarship and grammar (Montanari’s GI. Dizionario
Greco-Italiano, Words in Progress and LGGA-Lexicon of Greek Grammarians of
Antiquity projects). Her main research interests concern late Greek epic, espe-
cially Quintus of Smyrna. She published Commento al II libro dei Posthomerica di
Quinto Smirneo (2014) and Gli epiteti degli dèi nei Posthomerica di Quinto Smirneo
(2018). She is on the editorial board of the Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione
Classica and of Trends in Classics: Journal of Classical Studies.
Thomas Gärtner is Außerplanmäßiger Professor of Classics and Medieval
Latin at the University of Cologne and has worked as a lecturer at several
German universities. His research interests focus on Latin poetry of all peri-
ods from the Augustan Age onward, as well as Neo-Ancient Greek from the
Humanist period, especially Lorenz Rhodoman and Michael Neander’s school
of poets in Ilfeld.
Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, For-
eign Secretary of the British Academy and a Fellow of King’s College, Cam-
bridge. He has published very widely on Greek literature and culture. His
books have been translated into ten languages and won three international
prizes. His most recent books are Preposterous Poetics: The Politics and Aesthetics
x list of contributors
of Form in Late Antiquity and The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and
the Literature of Late Antiquity, both published by Cambridge University Press.
Emma Greensmith is Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literature
at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St John’s College. She specialises in
imperial Greek literature, and is particularly interested in epic, poetics and reli-
gion. Her recent book, The Resurrection of Homer in Imperial Greek Epic: Quintus
Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica and the Poetics of Impersonation (2020) offers a new reading
of the role of epic and the reception of Homer in Greco-Roman culture. She has
also written recent articles on Nonnus, Gregory of Nazianzus and the Sibylline
Oracles, and is editing a new Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Epic.
Valeria F. Lovato is a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow
at the Centre for Medieval Literature (University of Southern Denmark), with
a project on Isaac Comnenus Porphyrogenitus. Her research also encompasses
the reception of Homeric epics in Byzantium and in Renaissance Europe,
a topic on which she has published extensively. Her current book projects
include an edited volume on Isaac Comnenus and a monograph investigating
the interplay between classicising learning and self-fashioning in John Tzetzes
and Eustathios of Thessalonike.
Calum A. Maciver is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Edin-
burgh. He has published on Greek and Latin poetry of the imperial period, as
well as the Greek novel and Lucian.
Jordan Maly-Preuss is a DPhil student in Classical Languages and Literature
at the University of Oxford (Merton College). She is an alumna of the Ertegun
Graduate Scholarship Programme in the Humanities and currently holds a
Stonehouse Foundation/Faculty of Classics scholarship. Her present research
focuses on the diachronic development of ancient Greek epic poetics, with
a special interest in classical, Hellenistic and late antique reanalyses of archaic
formular idioms.
Fran Middleton is a specialist in poetry of the high and later Roman Empire.
Leyla Ozbek is Research Fellow of Greek Language and Literature at the
Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. She studied as an undergraduate at the Scuola
Normale Superiore and at the University of Pisa, working on fragmentary plays
of Sophocles. She obtained her PhD in Classics at the Scuola Normale with a
dissertation on Quintus’ Posthomerica Book 9, now forthcoming for publication.
She has been an annual visiting scholar at University College London and at the
University of Zurich. In 2015–16 she was Research Associate at the Univer-
sity of Cambridge on the AHRC-funded project ‘Greek Epic of the Roman
Empire: A Cultural History’. Her research interests are Greek epic and culture
