Quintus was a poet who lived at Smyrna some four hundred years after Christ. His work, in fourteen books, is a bold and generally underrated attempt in Homer's style to complete the story of Troy from
In a revision of his 2008 doctoral dissertation at the University of Edinburgh, Maciver (Greek, U. of Leeds) looks at the Imperial Greek hexameter poem by fourth-century writer Quintus of Smyrna as a
Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica, the only long mythological epic to survive in Greek from the period between Apollonius’ Argonautica (3rd century BC) and Nonnus’ Dionysiaca (5th century AD), fills in
This book contains a selection of pagan Greek poetic texts ranging in date from the first to the sixth century AD. It makes easily accessible for the first time work by poets such as Quintus Smyrnaeus, Nonnus, Musaeus and Babrius hitherto neglected in Classical syllabuses. Genres represented include epic, epyllion, didactic, epigram, lyric and the verse fable. There is a brief general introduction, and in addition each section of detailed commentary is prefaced by a discussion of literary aspects of the poems and of their wider contexts. The book is intended primarily for undergraduate and graduate students of Greek, but will be of interest also to Classical scholars.
