Nostalgias for Homer in Greek Literature of the Roman Empire (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies) [1 ed.] 9781032456560, 9781032456577, 9781003378082, 1032456566

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Nostalgias for Homer in Greek Literature of the Roman Empire

This book investigates how versions of Trojan War narratives written in Greek in the first through fifth centuries c.e. created nostalgias for audiences. In ancient education, the Iliad and the Odyssey were used as models through which students learned Greek language and literature. This, combined with the ruling elite’s financial encouragement of re-creations of Greek literature of the past, created a culture of nostalgia. This book explores the different responses to this climate, particularly in the case of the third-century c.e. poet Quintus of Smyrna’s epic Posthomerica. Positioning itself as a sequel to the Iliad and a prequel to the Odyssey, the Posthomerica is unique in its middle-of-the-road response to nostalgia for Homer’s epics. This book contrasts Quintus’ poem with other responses to nostalgia for Homeric narratives in Greek literature of the Roman Empire. Some works contradict pivotal events of the Iliad and Odyssey, such as the first-century orator Dio Chrysostom’s Trojan Speech, which claims that the Trojan hero Hector did not in fact die, contrary to the Iliad’s account. Others re-created Homeric narratives but did not contradict them, improvising some elements and adding others. Quintus strikes a compromise in his epic, re-imagining Homeric narratives by introducing new characters and scenarios, while at the same time retaining the Iliad and Odyssey’s aesthetics. Nostalgias for Homer in Greek Literature of the Roman Empire is of interest to students and scholars working on Homeric reception and the Greek literature of the Roman Empire, as well as those interested in classical literature and reception more broadly. Vincent Tomasso is an associate professor of Classical Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He has published articles on Homeric epic, imperial poetry, and reception studies. His wide-ranging interests appear throughout his work, from ancient Greek and Latin literature to their reception in modern art.

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Nostalgias for Homer in Greek Literature of the Roman Empire Vincent Tomasso

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Vincent Tomasso The right of Vincent Tomasso to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-45656-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-45657-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-37808-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003378082 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Tables Acknowledgements Authors, Titles, and Editions Introduction

vi vii viii 1

1

Receptions in the Classroom

14

2

Popular Receptions

36

3

Sources

58

4

Word Choices

81

5

Roman Ruptures

98

Epilogue

120

Bibliography Index Locorum Subject Index

124 137 141

Tables

2.1 2.2 2.3 4.1

Comparative data for P.Oxy XLII 3001 and the Iliad Comparative data for Libanius and the Iliad Depictions of Patroclus in the Posthomerica Comparative data for Cerealius’ hapax legomena

48 49 51 84

Acknowledgements

The debts I have accrued in bringing this book into the light have been many. Thanks are not sufficient for what Lauren Caldwell has done for me and this project. She has exchanged ideas with me, listened patiently to my blathering about sequels ancient and modern, advised me at critical junctures, and kept me motivated during difficult times and a meandering process. Colleagues at Ripon and Trinity College were an important part of the gestation. I am particularly indebted to Eddie Lowry, Jr. whose advise and encouragement about all things Quintus kept me going. Friends read parts of the manuscript and interacted with me about my ideas, particularly Mike Heyes, whose wit and friendship sustained me. A meeting of MACTe (Massachusetts and Connecticut junior Classical Studies faculty) helped me shape my proposal, and the feedback of colleagues in that convivial setting was inspirational. Silvio Bär convened a much-needed workshop on Quintus in London in 2013. I developed ideas and delivered a paper that did not make it into this book, but the excitement about Quintus generated there by fellow Quintus scholars convinced me to continue down the path of imperial epic. The support of my family, who encouraged me as I climbed my own Posthomeric mountain, has been a constant support for me. For the willingness of Richard Martin and Susan Stephens to assist me in bring this project to fruition, including their support in the earliest stages of my work on Quintus, I am grateful. Thanks to the readers of this manuscript for the press for their many good questions and suggestions and to my indefatigable editor, Marcia Adams, and copyeditor for their perspicacity and keen eyes. All errors remain my own. And now: on with the show!

Authors, Titles, and Editions

The following is a list of the authors, titles, and editions of the Greek and Latin texts used in this book. Titles are the same as those given in Oxford Classical Dictionary entries (fourth edition, 2012, edited by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth) or follow another precedent in scholarship, cited in footnotes the first time the text is discussed. Century numbers are distinguished as “b.c.e.” in the case of dates Before the Common Era. “c.e.” century numbers in the Common Era appear without the “c.e.” designation. Quintus’ epic is abbreviated PH except in the “Introduction” and “Epilogue.” Author of Work and Title(s)

Edition

Aelius Aristides Embassy to Achilles anonymous Aethiopis Apollodorus Library Areius cento Athenaeus Deipnosophistae Dio Chrysostom Oration 11 Oration 32 Dictys Journal of the Trojan War Dares On the Destruction of Troy Eudocia Homeric Centos Herodotus Histories Hesiod Theogony Works and Days Shield of Heracles

Dindorf 1829 Bernabé 1987 Wagner 1894 Bernand 1960: 112 Kaibel 1887–1890 von Armin 1893–1896 Eisenhut 1958 Meister 1991 Ludwich 1897 Wilson 2015 West 1966 Solmsen 1970 Solmsen 1970

Authors, Titles, and Editions ix Author of Work and Title(s)

Edition

Homer Iliad Odyssey Irenaeus Against Heresies Libanius Progymnasmata Lucian The Rooster Menander Rhetor Nestor of Laranda Metamorphoses Nonnus Dionysiaca Oppian Halieutica Ovid Metamorphoses Pausanias Description of Greece Petronius Satyricon Philostratus Heroicus Life of Apollonius of Tyana Lives of the Sophists Photius Chrestomathia Plato Laws Ptolemy the Quail New History Quintus Posthomerica Suda scholia —on the Iliad —on Clement of Alexandria’s Protrepticus —on Oppian’s Halieutica Stesichorus Strabo Triphiodorus Capture of Troy

Allen 1931 Harvey 1857 Foerster 1915 Harmon 1913–1936 Russell and Wilson 1981 Beckby 1965–1968 Keydell 1959 Mair 1928 Tarrant 2004 Spiro 1903 Schmeling 2020 de Lannoy 1977 Kayser 1870–1 Kayser 1870–1 Henry 1959–1977 Burnet 1907 Henry 1959–1977 Vian 1963–1969 Adler 1928–1935 Erbse 1969–1988 and Heyne 1834 (distinguished in the notes) Stählin and Treu 1972 Bussemaker 1849 Page 1962 Meineke 1877 Mair 1928

Introduction

Iliadic and Posthomeric Niobes Hundreds of years after the composition of the Homeric epics, an otherwise unknown author named Quintus penned a sequel to the Iliad and a prequel to the Odyssey. Detailing the events of the Trojan War after the burial of Hector but before the departure of the Achaeans back to Greece after their successful campaign against Troy, this epic, titled the Posthomerica, at one point recounts the death of a Trojan warrior on the battlefield at the hands of an Achaean warrior, an event that occurs all-too-frequently in Homer’s Iliad. Such events often lead the narrator of the Iliad to muse on the parents of the victim, as the Posthomeric narrator does here Δρησαῖον δ’ ἐδάμασσεν ἀρηίφιλος Πολυποίτης τὸν τέκε δῖα Νέαιρα περίφρονι Θειοδάμαντι μιχθεῖσ’ ἐν λεχέεσσιν ὑπαὶ Σιπύλῳ νιφόεντι, ἧχι θεοὶ Νιόβην λᾶαν θέσαν, ἧς ἔτι δάκρυ πουλὺ μάλα στυφελῆς καταλείβεται ὑψόθε πέτρης, καί οἱ συστοναχοῦσι ῥοαὶ πολυηχέος Ἕρμου καὶ κορυφαὶ Σιπύλου περιμήκεες ὧν καθύπερθεν ἐχθρὴ μηλονόμοισιν ἀεὶ περιπέπτατ’ ὀμίχλη· ἣ δὲ πέλει μέγα θαῦμα παρεσσυμένοισι βροτοῖσιν, οὕνεκ’ ἔοικε γυναικὶ πολυστόνῳ ἥ τ’ ἐπὶ λυγρῷ πένθεϊ μυρομένη μάλα μυρία δάκρυα χεύει· καὶ τὸ μὲν ἀτρεκέως φῂς ἔμμεναι, ὁππότ’ ἄρ’ αὐτὴν τηλόθεν ἀθρήσειας· ἐπὴν δέ οἱ ἐγγὺς ἵκηαι, φαίνεται αἰπήεσσα πέτρη Σιπύλοιό τ’ ἀπορρώξ. Ἀλλ’ ἣ μὲν μακάρων ὀλοὸν χόλον ἐκτελέουσα μύρεται ἐν πέτρῃσιν ἔτ’ ἀχνυμένῃ εἰκυῖα. (Posthomerica 1.291–3061) Loved by Ares, Polypoetes killed Dresaeus, whom the divine Neaira bore for the prudent Theiodamas, having mixed with him in their bed beneath snowy Sipylus, where the gods turned Niobe to stone. Her many tears still slip down from DOI: 10.4324/9781003378082-1

2 Introduction below the very rough rock, and lamenting with her are the streams of the loudsounding Hermus and Sipylus’ very tall peaks, above which a mist, hateful to shepherds, continually spreads around. It is a great wonder to mortals who hurry past, because it looks like a very mournful woman who cries countless tears, lamenting her grievous pain. You would say that this is it exactly, were you to observe her from afar; but come close, and it appears to be a lofty rock and a cliff on Sipylus. Among the rocks she laments, fulfilling a destructive anger for the blessed ones, like one still grieving.2 This passage refers to and builds on a reference to Niobe in Homer’s Iliad. In the Homeric poem, Achilles has just agreed to take the Trojan king Priam’s ransom for his son’s corpse, whom Achilles killed in a battle before the walls of Troy a few books earlier. To persuade Priam to break bread with him, the murderer of his child, the Homeric Achilles recounts how Niobe was turned into stone because she was grieving so much for her deceased children, just as Priam laments the death of his son in Achilles’ quarters: νῦν δὲ μνησώμεθα δόρπου. καὶ γάρ τ’ ἠΰκομος Νιόβη ἐμνήσατο σίτου, τῇ περ δώδεκα παῖδες ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ὄλοντο ἓξ μὲν θυγατέρες, ἓξ δ’ υἱέες ἡβώοντες. τοὺς μὲν Ἀπόλλων πέφνεν ἀπ’ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο χωόμενος Νιόβῃ, τὰς δ’ Ἄρτεμις ἰοχέαιρα, οὕνεκ’ ἄρα Λητοῖ ἰσάσκετο καλλιπαρῄῳ· φῆ δοιὼ τεκέειν, ἣ δ’ αὐτὴ γείνατο πολλούς· τὼ δ’ ἄρα καὶ δοιώ περ ἐόντ’ ἀπὸ πάντας ὄλεσσαν. οἳ μὲν ἄρ’ ἐννῆμαρ κέατ’ ἐν φόνῳ, οὐδέ τις ἦεν κατθάψαι, λαοὺς δὲ λίθους ποίησε Κρονίων· τοὺς δ’ ἄρα τῇ δεκάτῃ θάψαν θεοὶ Οὐρανίωνες. ἣ δ’ ἄρα σίτου μνήσατ’, ἐπεὶ κάμε δάκρυ χέουσα. νῦν δέ που ἐν πέτρῃσιν ἐν οὔρεσιν οἰοπόλοισιν ἐν Σιπύλῳ, ὅθι φασὶ θεάων ἔμμεναι εὐνὰς νυμφάων, αἵ τ’ ἀμφ’ Ἀχελώϊον ἐρρώσαντο, ἔνθα λίθος περ ἐοῦσα θεῶν ἐκ κήδεα πέσσει. (Iliad 24.601–617) But now let us remember food. Yes, for even the fair-haired Niobe remembered food, though her twelve children were killed in the palace, six young daughters and sons. Apollo killed the sons with his silver bow because he was angry with Niobe, and Artemis arrow-pourer killed the daughters, because Niobe kept making herself equal to lovely cheeked Leto. She said that Leto had given birth to two, while she herself had given birth to many. So even though they were two, they killed all of Niobe’s children. They lay in gore for nine days, and there was no one to bury them, for Zeus turned the populace to stone. On the tenth day the gods, descendants of Ouranos, buried them. At that point she remembered food,

Introduction 3 since she was worn out with weeping. At this moment, though she is stone, she dwells on her sorrows brought by the gods among the rocks of the lonely mountain of Sipylus, where they say are beds of divine nymphs who dance around Achelous. The parallels and divergences between these two passages are emblematic of the relationship that Quintus constructs between his poem, which was composed in the Roman Empire of the third century c.e., and the Homeric epics, which were composed centuries earlier. The first thing that strikes audiences is the similarity of these two passages on the levels of content, diction, and meter. That feeling of similarity is subsequently complicated by content and word choices. Whereas the Homeric Achilles centers on the reason that Niobe was lamenting, the death of her children in ten lines, the Posthomeric narrator focuses on the details of the queen’s petrification in eleven lines. Quintus expects his audience to know the Homeric Achilles’ story about Niobe in order to recognize the shift he makes between the lament portion of the narrative and the metamorphosis portion in his expansion of a small part of Homer’s poetry. The occasion for this narrative is also different: whereas the Homeric Achilles recounts the Theban queen’s story as an inducement for Priam to break bread with him after he has ransomed his son’s body, the Posthomeric narrator recalls Niobe because a battlefield victim, who is unrelated to her, unlike the victims in the Iliad’s version, hails from the region where her stone form still weeps.3 This expansion reveals how Quintus carefully demarcates his relationship to the Homeric poems by bringing in his own and his audience’s contemporary moment. The Homeric Achilles gives a barebones description of the stone Niobe, saying only that her petrified form is near where nymphs dance. Even though none of the words in these two passages is the same, most of the words Quintus utilizes appear in either or both of the Homeric poems. For instance, the adverb καθύπερθεν, “above,” appears a total of 23 times in Homeric verses. Other words appear in Homer but not in the form that Quintus uses them. An example is the feminine participle μιχθεῖσ’, “having mixed,” which appears only as a masculine participle μιχθεὶς in the Iliad. Quintus has combined the Iliadic Achilles’ Niobe with a description of mist swirling above her petrified form, adapting a simile comparing the marching of Achaean and Trojan soldiers to obscuring mountain mists in Iliad 3.4 In both passages the mist is a problem for shepherds, and here Quintus’ lexical choice subtly highlights his difference from his Homeric hypotext, a term coined by Gérard Genette to describe an intertextual relationship between an earlier text and a later one:5 at Posthomerica 1.98 the substantive adjective μηλονόμοισιν, “tenders of herds,” is different from the Iliad’s noun ποιμέσιν. Quintus uses Homeric hapax legomena, that is, words that appear one time in the Iliad or Odyssey, like the adjectives πολυηχέος, “loud sounding” (Il. 4.422 and Posthomerica 1.296), and αἰπήεσσα, “lofty” (Il. 21.87 and PH 1.304), in addition to words that do not appear at all in the Homeric epics (the adjective στυφελῆς, “rough,” at 1.195) and/or only in the Posthomerica (the participle συστοναχοῦσι, “lamenting together with,” at 1.196).6

4

Introduction

Quintus’ approach to Niobe emulates Homeric style and content, a mode that in this book will be called “Homericizing.” When he refers to a passage from the Iliad, he uses words that appear in the Homeric lexicon, and he employs the dactylic hexameter of Homer. But Quintus also goes beyond this emulation by building on the Iliadic Achilles’ paranarrative about Niobe, adding dimensions and details that are not developed in the Homeric epic. The details that he adds are parallel of another author writing in Greek about one hundred years earlier, the travel writer Pausanias. In the Iliad, the most important part of Achilles’ version of Niobe’s story is the queen’s realization that she must eat (line 613, “At that point she remembered food”), since he is trying to convince Priam to eat after his own son’s death. Quintus, by contrast, does not use her story as a persuasive paradigm. The most important part of his version is what Nicholas Kauffman has called the “touristic.”7 The Homeric Achilles and Priam were also able to visit the petrified Theban queen, as indicated by the present tense of the verb φασὶ in line 615, though the narrator does not expand on that aspect. Pausanias, on the other hand, focuses his version on precisely this in his description of the decorations on a tripod: Ἀπόλλων δὲ ἐν αὐτῷ καὶ Ἄρτεμις τοὺς παῖδάς εἰσιν ἀναιροῦντες τοὺς Νιόβης. ταύτην τὴν Νιόβην καὶ αὐτὸς εἶδον ἀνελθὼν ἐς τὸν Σίπυλον τὸ ὄρος· ἡ δὲ πλησίον μὲν πέτρα καὶ κρημνός ἐστιν οὐδὲν παρόντι σχῆμα παρεχόμενος γυναικὸς οὔτε ἄλλως οὔτε πενθούσης· εἰ δέ γε πορρωτέρω γένοιο, δεδακρυμένην δόξεις ὁρᾶν καὶ κατηφῆ γυναῖκα. (Pausanias 1.21.3) On it Apollo and Artemis are killing Niobe’s children. I myself saw this Niobe when I visited Sipylus. There is a rock and a spring nearby that do not at all look like a woman, much less one in grief, to the passerby. But should you be further away, you will think that you are looking at a woman who is in tears and downcast. Pausanias’ version of the Niobe narrative parallels the end of the Iliadic Achilles’ version, but he adds the detail that he himself had seen the rock formation. Quintus’ narrator combines those two texts by both including the entire Homeric narrative that Pausanias shortens and echoing Pausanias’ first-hand account of the presentday Niobe. This aspect is present in the Iliad, but Quintus expands it to reflect his present better. The Homeric texture that Quintus weaves throughout his epic is intentionally ruptured at moments like this one. Superficially, the Posthomerica gives the audience the impression that Quintus is continuing the Trojan war narrative where the Iliad stops and the Odyssey begins, but, as was true of the Niobe passage, it is complicated. This nuanced relationship to Homeric poetry is the subject of this book, which uses Quintus’ poem as a lens to examine other texts written in Greek in the first through fifth centuries c.e. that together constitute the wide variety of responses to narrative receptions of Homer that were produced in the Roman Empire.

Introduction 5 Imperial Nostalgias for Homer That Quintus looks back to the Niobe passage in the Iliad, reproduces some elements of it, and adds other angles draws our attention to the nuances of his and, indeed, all receptions’, relationship with Homer. It participates in what Pavlos Avlamis has identified as the nostalgic discourse in imperial Greece.8 These nostalgias are responses to their composers’ and their audiences’ emotional state, produced by the particular historical and cultural circumstances of Greek cultures in the Roman Empire. In the late seventeenth century, Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer coined the term “nostalgia,” a neologism from the ancient Greek words νόστος (“return”) and ἄλγος (“pain”),9 to have a state that he observed in military personnel. Hofer recorded that Swiss troops who were deployed to regions far from their homes desired to return to the countryside of their youths in an effort to experience the “simplicity” of life before adulthood. The fact that a name for this condition was first recognized in 1688 has resulted in an association of “nostalgia” with the seventeenth century and beyond. Hofer’s pathologizing characterization of “nostalgia” has dominated the cultural discourse, to the degree that nostalgia is still conceptualized as a characteristic of modern societies.10 Take, for instance, the argument of literary critic Frederic Jameson about what he calls “nostalgia films,” like American Graffiti, directed by George Lucas in 1973. That film, which follows several characters as they navigate the end of their high school careers in 1962, allowed its audiences to escape their present through its evocation of a time long since past, the United States of the early 1960s, before the trauma of the Vietnam War.11 In an invocation of the pathologizing definition of nostalgia, Jameson laments that intertextuality is used by such films “as the operator of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ and pseudohistorical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history.”12 This view pervaded the subsequent discourse on film sequels, so much so that they have been understood as a defining feature of film as contrasted with Aristotle’s notion of a unitary original.13 The irony of such a critique is that what film scholars Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer call textual “multiplicities” have been a constant feature of human cultures.14 Take, for instance, the Epic Cycle. Committed to writing at some point in the Archaic period, the five epics collected into the Epic Cycle featured narratives about the Trojan War. These epics were composed independently of the Homeric poems;15 that is, they were not intended to capitalize on what are called, in both Literary and Film studies, “charismatic originals.”16 As Ingrid Holmberg notes, however, the perception by Quintus’ time was the Iliad and Odyssey were the charismatic originals and that the Epic Cycle poems were textual multiplicities, as demonstrated by a scholiast’s comment that “poets are called ‘cyclic’ who composed poems in a cycle either earlier or later than the Iliad out of the Homeric poems themselves” (κυκλικοὶ δὲ καλοῦνται ποιηταὶ οἱ τὰ κύκλῳ τῆς Ἰλιάδος ἢ τὰ πρῶτα ἢ τὰ μεταγενέστερα [ἐξ] αὐτῶν τῶν Ὁμηρικῶν συγγράψαντες).17 The Posthomerica promotes this understanding of the relationship between Homer and the Epic Cycle, acknowledging that it and its audiences are aware of Homer’s epics

6

Introduction

as prior to Quintus, a subject I return to in Chapter 5.18 The relationship between Quintus and the Epic Cycle – whether he had access to those poems, whether, in other words, he was consciously remaking them or whether they were no longer extant by the third century – is a complex matter and not addressed in this book.19 Instead, Quintus’ relationship with Homer is the primary focus, and, in the tradition of analogizing the Iliad and Odyssey to performances by Balkan guslars by Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord, because the Posthomerica relates to the Iliad and Odyssey as a textual multiplicity in a fashion similar to modern cinematic texts, this book frequently analogizes them, with the acknowledgement that there are vast economic and social differences between the two. Jameson’s critique of films of the late twentieth century is similar to the condemnations of the literature of the so-called “Second Sophistic,” roughly the first through fourth centuries, by nineteenth- and twentieth-century classicists.20 The literary output of that era, particularly by the sophists, was considered to be mired in a regressive nostalgia for the literature of the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e. in that it focused on material from the past. For instance, the second-century sophist Polemo looked back several centuries to the battle of Marathon in 490 b.c.e.21 This feature also holds true of all cultural categories, including poetry like the Posthomerica. Such views discount the importance that “imitation” (Greek: mimesis) played in this period, as brought out by Tim Whitmarsh’s landmark analysis of imperial Greek oratory.22 Whitmarsh emphasizes the creativity that imitation could and did produce in this period. Mimesis was the principal way that ancient Greeks of all periods went about, as James Porter puts it, “negotiating with the past,”23 but in the imperial period, mimesis had even greater import. Atticism is an ideal example of the manfestations of this larger emphasis. In the movement known as Atticism, for instance, imperial speakers and writers imitated (and policed one another’s usage of) the Attic dialect of writers of fifth- and fourth-century b.c.e. Athens, a phenomenon discussed in greater detail in the fourth chapter. This mimesis was an inbuilt nostalgia, a feature of most periods of ancient Greece,24 but in the case of Greek-speaking regions being incorporated into the Roman Empire, mimesis took a greater share of the cultural discourse than ever before. A major reason for this was the Romans’ elevation of Greek language and culture. The resulting widespread acclamation of all things Hellenic resulted in financial awards and prestige positions for individuals whom those in power felt best exemplified the preservation and promulgation of Greek letters. A prominent manifestation of this was the chairs of rhetoric established by the Roman emperors in the first and second centuries.25 The material culture equivalent was what Susan Alcock has identified as “itinerant temples,”26 edifices built in the pre-Roman past of Greece that were moved from their original locations to more prominent ones. One of these cases involved a fifth-century b.c.e. temple to Ares, which was taken apart block by block from a rural location and put back together, with additions from other temples, in the center of Athens in the first century c.e. One reason for doing this was to attract imperial attention to Athens, which was rewarded by, for instance, the economic favor of the emperor Hadrian in the early second century.27

Introduction 7 A dimension entirely aside from philhellenism has also been identified by Alcock: whatever their ostensible motivations (e.g., appeals to philhellenism), the Roman emperors’ moving of temples was probably caused by considerations of the cult of the imperial family.28 For Greeks, however, the end result of Roman promulgation of the Greek past was nostalgia. One of the responses to these rewards was an emphasis on education in Greek language and literature. Students hoped that by learning to express themselves in Greek, elites would reward them financially. They learned the basics of reading and writing ancient Greek by imitating model texts, particularly the Homeric poems, in the closest imaginable way, copying them word for word. Once they had mastered the fundamentals, pupils continued to imitate those same models, but rather than copying them verbatim, they were instructed to re-phrase and transform them in progymnasmata, “exercises.” They did this by studying the works of, and then producing speeches based on, historical authors. While elites practiced a philhellenism that motivated individuals to learn Greek and express themselves through the canonical past, Greek authors had varied reactions to this vogue for nostalgia. One of these responses was a desire to return to Greece before Alexander of Macedon and then Rome compelled them to join their empires and so alter their identities. Identified by Ewen Bowie in 1970, this type of nostalgia was one of the only ways that writers in Greek could “strike back” against the Roman Empire. Ewen Bowie investigates one strand of this response in Greek authors ignoring Rome. One of his primary examples is the first-century mythographer Apollodorus, who avoids the episode of the Homeric hero Aeneas fleeing Troy. This desire to return to a long-vanished Greece has also been identified the second-century travel writer Pausanias and the first-century literary critic Longinus by James Porter.29 This was only one response to a nostalgic culture, though, and, as Whitmarsh has pointed out, responses in sophists’ oratory ranged from longing for a pre-Roman Greece, to ambivalence about the empire, to praising Rome. In his epic, Quintus, as we will see in Chapter 5, does not entirely avoid Rome. Indeed, Rome does make several appearances in the Posthomerica, even though Quintus could have side-stepped his contemporary world entirely, much as Apollodorus did. Ewen Bowie argued that this kind of nostalgia that deliberately avoids Rome is as a reaction to Greece’s lack of political power in the Roman Empire.30 Because this kind of nostalgia turns a blind eye to the present, to the contemporary realities of Greek-speaking regions as parts of the Roman Empire, these aspects of nostalgia have been negatively appraised as “escapist nostalgia.”31 This is ideological, a desire to escape the harsh realities of the present moment into an idealized past. In his examination of the nuances of mimesis, Whitmarsh is careful to argue that imitation is not the same thing as nostalgia: “mimēsis . . . was not simply a nostalgic attempt to ignore the evident disparities between past and present in the hope of creating a deluded, imaginary continuity with the past.”32 This book agrees with Whitmarsh’s assessment that mimesis and nostalgia are not the same phenomenon, but it departs from his negative valuation of nostalgia. Mimesis is the technique

8

Introduction

practiced in Greek education, whereas nostalgia is an emotion that can result in progressive action, the maintenance of a status quo, a regressive return to the past, or a mixture of all of these. Around the same time that Whitmarsh encouraged a re-evaluation of imperial Greek mimesis, scholars in other fields were re-evaluating nostalgia. In her analysis of eastern European texts from the second half of the twentieth century, Svetlana Boym drew a picture of an ambivalent nostalgia, with one type leading some to positive, progressive change and another leading to negative, regressive stasis.33 Social scientists have similarly investigated nostalgia as an emotional state instead of as a medical condition. For instance, Clay Routledge argued that nostalgia is not a disease but rather a method that humans employ to cope with the present.34 Imperial Greek texts present a continuum of responses to nostalgias for Homer. One set of responses are what Glen Bowersock has called “Homeric revisionism,”35 a categorization that has been widely adopted, as, for instance, in Lawrence Kim’s important study of the phenomenon in prose.36 Such texts depart from Homeric aesthetics and narratives in their contradictions of the Iliad and Odyssey. A paradigmatic instance of this is the first-century Dio Chrysostom’s Oration 11 (also called Trojan Speech), which relates the events of the Trojan War and diverges considerably from the Homeric versions. Several of the events that happen in the Iliad also happen in Dio’s speech, but in many cases their outcomes are different, the most obvious one being that the Trojans, not the Achaeans, won the war. This text will be investigated in Chapter 3, but for the purposes of this introduction, that the Trojan Speech has the Trojans winning the war suffices to show its difference from the Posthomerica’s Homericizing. In addition to this contradiction of Homer, Dio also wrote Oration 61 (also called Chryseïs), in which the sophist speaks to one of his students about Chryseïs, the daughter of a priest of Apollo who infamously kickstarts the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon in Book 1 of the Iliad. Instead of denying Chryseïs’ role in the Homeric epic, Dio fills a narrative gap. Homer’s Chryseïs is silent, but Dio gives her a voice, depicting Chryseïs’ thoughts and motivations. Far from being a passive victim of the machinations of the men around her, this Chryseïs manages the emotions and actions of Agamemnon so that he returns her to her father and home. Oration 61 embodies a different strategy, that of addition, which does not contradict Homeric poetry. This strategy of addition appears both in the student exercises of Chapter 1 as well as in Quintus’ epic.37 That the same author wrote Trojan Speech and Chryseïs indicates that different kinds of strategies co-existed in works by the same author. All of Homer’s receptions, including the speeches just considered, are responses to nostalgia. Homer was a cornerstone of Greek identity, and, as Froma Zeitlin remarks of the “traffic in Homer” in the imperial period: “Between these extremes of sacralization and denigration, veneration and satire, the single guiding thread is the irreducible signficance of Homer for the assertion of Hellenic affiliation.”38 In other words, whichever postion it has on the continuum, any given reception of Homer is responding to nostalgia for the Homeric poems. Quintus’ particular response is at once to immerse his audience in a νόστος, “homecoming,” to the Homeric poems and to call into question the very notion

Introduction 9 of that homecoming. Quintus situates his Posthomerica as a direct sequel to the Iliad and prequel to the Odyssey, picking up the action “where we left off” with the funeral of Hector and ending before narrating Odysseus’ delayed nostos.39 Quintus chooses to craft a poem whose narratives do not contradict the Iliad or Odyssey’s narratives, as demonstrated by the Niobe passage analyzed previously. He does re-write Homer on some occasions, adding to his narrative universe but not contradicting it. In this way, the nostalgia spoken of in this book is textual, the desire to return to a narrative universe as manifested in a text or texts. It is not primarily historical or political, as in our current moment we tend to speak (negatively) about nostalgia for a vanished past, like Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” or the bid for Brexit in the U.K.40 A Question of Audiences Audiences for receptions of Homer in the imperial period were diverse. The Homeric poems flourished in every corner of the ancient world, from quotations by Roman emperors to a graffiti artist in a latrine.41 The majority of surviving evidence for imperial Homeromania is elite, particularly receptions by those educated in classrooms. The itinerant speakers called sophists are responsible for some of the most well-known and -cited receptions in this period, and they themselves, in addition to their audiences, were the pepaideumenoi, “those who have been educated.” This group consisted of the sophists, the sophists’ students, and individuals who had engaged in some education.42 That term carried with it a connotation of eliteness, as Rebecca Preston points out, and assumes that the individuals who enrolled in education had the financial wherewithal to do so.43 There are important exceptions, as not all of the pepaideumenoi came from a wealthy background.44 Just as today, a person with wealth did not necessarily become educated, while a person without wealth sometimes got their tuition reduced or paid outright. The satirist Lucian is an example of someone who had been a student but for whatever reason did not become a sophist. Another, humbler example is an estate manager in the second century, who quotes from Iliad Book 2 in a letter.45 It is often argued that Quintus’ audience were these pepaideumenoi. This view stems from the argument that Quintus was a sophist or at least sophist-adjacent.46 There is no direct evidence that Quintus was a sophist, which a note to that effect in the Byzantine encyclopedia the Suda or the third-century Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists would provide; if he were sophist-adjacent in the mold of a Lucian, there would be no evidence at all. Elements of sophistic rhetoric that Silvio Bär has interpreted in the judgment of Achilles’ arms have been attributed not to the fact that Quintus was a sophist or even to his embeddedness in Second Sophistic culture but to Homeric poetry by Calum Maciver.47 The complexity of Quintus’ word choices, as explored in Chapter 4, suggests a similar conclusion, for only audience members as steeped in Homer as the pepaideumenoi would be able to recognize such changes in the Homericizing texture of Quintus’ epic. An argument against Quintus’ audience consisting solely of the pepaideumenoi is that receptions of Homer are not confined to texts authored by sophists. The

10

Introduction

imperial “novels” Diary of the Trojan War by Dictys and History of the Trojan War by Dares adopt attitudes to the Homeric poems that are strikingly similar to sophistic oratory in their contradictions of Homer. Intertextual links also associate Dictys and Dares with other imperial receptions, as Francis Vian and E. B. Aitken and J. K. B. Maclean have shown.48 Whatever genre these texts belong to – a question considered in greater depth in Chapter 3 – they are not sophistic productions, and so they are for a different audience than the pepaideumenoi. If their audiences were similar to those of novels, their audiences would at minimum have to be able to read, as Susan Stephens notes, and so perhaps they were a sub-set of the pepaideumenoi.49 Some have argued that Quintus performed in non-elite venues.50 As will be investigated in Chapter 2, the Posthomerica shares several reception strategies with these performers and with compositions that developed from their reception practices. Non-elite receptions leave fewer traces in the imperial record than elite ones do, which makes them harder to study, but from few extant examples we can conclude that Quintus adopted many of their strategies. As examined in Chapter 2, such non-elite receptions included Homeric performance in public venues by the like of the rhapsodes and the dramatic actors the Homeristai, along with poetry that developed from these reception strategies, called centos. Unlike elite receptions, which tended to contradict Homeric narratives, non-elite receptions embraced them, adding to and adapting them for their audiences. These two types of reception engendered different kinds of nostalgia for the Iliad and Odyssey. Whereas the elite pepaideumenoi fixated on the Homer they had been experienced in the classroom, non-elites had more flexible views of the Homeric epics, not tied to textual instantiations. The Posthomerica speaks to both of these nostalgias, incorporating strategies from the elite and non-elite into its verses. If educated individuals could appreciate the insertion of a word that was used in prose, then others valued Quintus’ temporal disturbances in which the imperial world seeped through the Homeric one. The entire audience was aware on some level that Quintus was rupturing an idealized past, even if they were not able to pinpoint the “friction.”51 The Contents of This Book The chapters of this book detail the Posthomerica’s position on the continuum through various strategies that Quintus uses in response to these two types of nostalgia for Homeric narratives. These same strategies appear in other imperial Greek receptions of Homer, and a comparison of them with the Posthomerica illuminates their positions on the continuum as well. The first chapter lays half the foundation for this book’s arguments by locating one source of nostalgia for Homer in education. The authors analyzed throughout this book had formative experiences with the Iliad and Odyssey through various activities in the classroom. To instruct their pupils in the Greek language and literature, teachers assigned students a range of exercises with the Homeric epics as models. Students copied passages from the Iliad and/or Odyssey to master basics of grammar, then wrote short compositions based on passages

Introduction 11 from those poems, with the aim of composing full-fledged speeches responding to the Homeric epics. After students left the classroom, they developed a nostalgia for the texts of the Homeric poems as they had encountered them in their student years. This nostalgia was premised on the stability of the Iliad and Odyssey’s textual forms in the imperial period, in the sense that editors had already pruned them of multiforms and plus verses. The nostalgia that these educated individuals had for Homer was thus a desire to return to these stable texts, in contrast to the many receptions of Homer in public venues. The first chapter’s discussions of the narrative strategies in classroom assignments are applied to non-elite receptions in the following chapter. Texts considered in this chapter include centos like the one cited by the second-century Christian apologist Irenaeus that re-arrange Homeric verses to tell the story of Heracles’ labor to retrieve Cerberus from the underworld. Also considered are texts that reuse entire lines from the Iliad and/or Odyssey with a handful of inventions, such as a papyrus from the second century that has been plausibly linked with the Homeristai. Comparisons between the narrative strategies of these compositions and the Posthomerica demonstrate that there are important differences as well as similarities. Both of these modes share a desire to reformulate Homeric poetry. One does so by re-using lines from the Iliad and/or Odyssey more or less exactly in order to elaborate on a popular passage or to re-tell a narrative from Homeric poetry in more detail. The other accomplishes the same by avoiding re-deploying Homeric verses and instead re-mixing them, creating plausibly Homeric lines that are in reality completely new. The following chapter examines how imperial receptions dealt with an issue that was particularly pressing in the book-centric Roman Empire: the source from which authors derived the raw material that they shaped into narratives. This topic was especially important in narratives that contradicted Homer because they needed a “more authoritative” source than the Iliad and Odyssey’s Muses. Sources that reinforced the authors’ contradictions in Homer were eyewitnesses who had experienced the Trojan War for themselves, including accounts allegedly written by the Achaean warriors Menelaus and Dictys, as well as by the Trojan warrior Dares, and stemming from consultations with the ghosts of deceased veterans like Achilles and Protesilaus. By contrast, Quintus parallels his Homeric hypotexts in his invocation of the Muses, but he complicates this traditional gesture by calling on the goddesses near the end of his poem rather than the beginning. Furthermore, Posthomeric depictions of the Muses partake of both the Homeric and the Hesiodic traditions, which add another layer to Quintus’ Homeric intertexts. Quintus’ language choices as a strategy of Homeric narrative reception are the subject of the fourth chapter. For every ten words in the Posthomerica, eight can be found in the Iliad or Odyssey or both, and the remaining two words appear in Greek texts that postdate the Homeric epics. For instance, a word like the verb δαμάζω, “to overcome,” appears 154 times in the Posthomerica and 173 times in the Iliad and Odyssey combined, and this frequency gives the audience the impression that

12

Introduction

they are re-entering the narratives of Homeric epics. By contrast, the adjective μελάμβροτος, “belonging to a black-skinned mortal,” broke them out of their Homeric reverie, as this word is not in the Homeric vocabulary, appearing only in the fourth century b.c.e. and afterwards. The final chapter analyzes instances in the Posthomerica that interrupt the narrative world of the rest of the epic, breaks in space and time where the audience is made aware of their contemporary moment. Although so-called “anachronisms” within the Iliad and Odyssey had been the subject of intense debate in scholarly circles for several centuries by the time of the Roman Empire, the issue became even more prominent in imperial receptions of Homeric narratives, since juxtaposing the narrative world of the Homeric epics with the world of the audience several centuries later was even more jarring. Other imperial receptions that contradict Homer revel in anachronisms rather than avoiding them – indeed, anachronisms are an important part of their appeal to their audiences. In sophistic oratory, for instance, the present moment is emphasized as superior to the Homeric moment through its access to information that provides a truer picture. Because Quintus wants to immerse his audience in the Homeric world, we expect him to want to avoid anachronisms. However, the Posthomerica contains a number of anachronisms, such as a simile that compares the dire situation of two Achaean warriors to individuals being killed by animals in an arena and a prophecy that links Aeneas explicitly to Rome. These moments that remind the third-century audience of their own world are not passing “mistakes” but rather a conscious part of Quintus’ construction his relationship to the Iliad and Odyssey. The Posthomerica neither erases the imperial present nor foregrounds it, and through this, Quintus allows his audience to see their present in the Homeric past without subsuming one in the other. This is the aim of his entire poetic project: to channel the Homeric epics and simultaneously bring them into the world of the Roman Empire. Notes 1 Editions of Greek and Latin texts referenced more than once in this book are listed in the frontmatter or else in the relevant endnote. 2 English translations of Greek and Latin are my own unless otherwise indicated. 3 Vian 1963–1969: 24 n. 2 provides two other reasons: the deceased warrior is one of Niobe’s children, and Quintus was familiar with the area from personal experience. 4 Εὖτ’ ὄρεος κορυφῇσι Νότος κατέχευεν ὀμίχλην ποιμέσιν οὔ τι φίλην, “when the South Wind spreads down on the peaks of a mountain a mist that is not at all friendly for shepherds” (Il. 3.10–11). 5 Genette 1997: 5. 6 On such neologisms, see Greensmith 2020: 103–107. 7 Kauffman 2018: 638. 8 Avlamis 2019: 160 n. 33. 9 Kathleen Riley notes that Odysseus uses the words νόστος and ἄλγος in Odyssey Book 5 to describe an emotional state, not a medical condition (Riley 2021: 10–12). 10 Keightley and Pickering 2012: 115. 11 Jameson 1991: 19–21. 12 Jameson 1991: 20.

Introduction 13 13 For this kind of thinking, see Leitch 2010: 52: “twentieth-century technologies . . . favor indefinitely continuing episodic stories over self-contained Aristotelian actions.” 14 Klein and Palmer 2016: 1. See also Holmberg’s characterization, from the perspective of classical studies, of the Epic Cycle poems as “remnants of the living oral tradition, and to accept the inherent multiplicity, rather than insisting upon determining one true version” (1998: 28). 15 Holmberg 1998. See also Burgess 2001: 172. 16 Berliner 2001: 109 (film) and Budra and Schellenberg 1998b: 14 (literature and film). 17 Holmberg 1998: 20. Scholium 22.22 (on pp. 305–306) on Clement of Alexandria’s Protrepticus 2.30. 18 On conscious belatedness in the Posthomerica, see the pioneering work of Schmitz 2007 and Maciver 2012a: 7–38. 19 For an even-handed review of this contentious subject, see Bär and Baumbach 2015. 20 Whitmarsh 2005: 6–8 traces such criticisms to discourses of nationalism. 21 See Anderson 1993: 62–63 on Polemo and the comment of Greensmith 2020: 60 that this is “imaginative supplementation.” 22 Whitmarsh 2001. 23 Porter 2003: 91. 24 Kim 2010b: 468. Even Jameson 1998: 99 acknowledges that “repetition in earlier times [was] a vital instinct.” 25 For specifics, see Bowie 2012. 26 Alcock 1993: 191–195. 27 See Boatwright 2000: 144–157. 28 Alcock 1993: 195. 29 Porter 2003. 30 Bowie 1970: 3–4. 31 Jolowicz 2021: 8. 32 Whitmarsh 2001: 88. 33 Boym 2001. 34 Routledge 2016: 8. 35 Bowersock 1994: 11. 36 Kim 2010. 37 Kim 2008 is devoted to analyzing Chryseïs. 38 Zeitlin 2001: 202. 39 On the connection of PH 1 to Iliad 24, see the Chapter 3 section “Quintus’ Non-Proem,” and on the connection of PH 14 to Odyssey 1, see Carvounis 2019: lxvii. 40 See Tomasso 2018: 40 and Riley 2021: 16–18. 41 On Roman emperors’ quotations, see Heslin 2023. On the latrine verses, see Hunter 2018: 10–12. 42 Webb 2006: 38. 43 Preston 2001: 90. 44 Cribiore 1996b: 3 et passim. 45 Cribiore 2001: 179. 46 Baumbach and Bär 2007b: 13. Korenjak 2003 analogizes sophist performances to oral performances of the Homeric epics. 47 Bär 2010: 289, Maciver 2012a: 17–18, and Maciver 2012b. From a different angle, Knudsen 2014’s argument that elements of rhetoric originate in the Homeric epics supports Maciver’s position. 48 Vian 1959a: 108–109 and Aitken and Maclean 2001: xx. 49 Stephens 1994. 50 Proponents of this view include Appel 1994: 9–12 (Quintus performed at festivals in Asia Minor) and Cantilena 2001: 56 (Quintus performed in Rome). 51 Vera Dika uses the same word “ruptures” to describe the 1971 film Grease’s relationship with an idealized 1950s American past (Dika 2003: 123).

1

Receptions in the Classroom

Introduction Near the beginning of Lucian’s dialogue The Rooster, the eponymous interlocutor makes fun of his human owner for not knowing the name of Achilles’ horse in the Iliad. A rooster who can speak must feel some kinship with a horse that can do the same. All of Lucian’s kidding aside, the bird does make an important connection between education and Homer: Σύ μοι δοκεῖς, ὦ Μίκυλλε, κομιδῇ ἀπαίδευτος εἶναι μηδὲ ἀνεγνωκέναι τὰ Ὁμήρου ποιήματα, “Micyllus, I think you’re quite uneducated and that you haven’t read Homer’s poems.”1 The rooster’s adjective ἀπαίδευτος, “uneducated,” indicates that his owner Micyllus did not receive an education, of which the Homeric poems were the centerpiece. This pinpointing of the Iliad and Odyssey as central to the experience of education had been true for many years before Lucian wrote his dialogue in the second century. Indeed, the Homeric poems had been synonymous with ancient Greek education from the origins of classroom practice in the fifth century b.c.e., but their centrality became especially pronounced in the imperial period. This was in part due to the increased visibility of a Greek identity acquired through an education, as Lawrence Kim has shown.2 This is attested by the popularity of the Iliad and Odyssey among extant papyri (over one thousand by Raffaella Cribiore’s count)3 as well as by the subjects of student exercises and the frequent references to and engagement with the Homeric poems in the work of former students. Throughout their educational careers, students were assigned Homer as a model, from copying out verses for learning the alphabet to composing speeches for Homeric characters. Former students continually re-visited the classroom’s obsession with Homer by quoting his epics, as in a third-century letter by an estate manager,4 and by parodying them, as in a fourth-century poem scrawled in, of all places, a latrine!5 Such a parody of Homer parallels the reception of Homer in other imperial works, such as the first-century Dio Chrysostom’s Trojan Oration, in which Dio had the temerity to allege that Homer mixed things up when he portrayed Achilles killing Hector – a central point, if not the central point, of the Iliad’s narrative. Like the latrine poem, Dio’s speech reflects a pervasive, albeit indirect, love for Homer, a love engendered by the authors’ classroom experiences. Ancient education produced DOI: 10.4324/9781003378082-2

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individuals whose works run the gamut of the Homeric reception continuum. This chapter investigates the origins of these diverse responses to nostalgia engendered by classrooms. Imperial students’ experiences of the Iliad and the Odyssey differed from those of earlier students. Those epics had always been central to schoolroom practice, but their textual instantiations had been more fluid in previous eras. The Homeric poems became what Gregory Nagy has called “scripture” in the sense that the reception of their texts had become uniform, with the fluidity of multiforms having been removed by the work of Hellenistic scholars.6 This stable Iliad and Odyssey formed the basis for pedagogical exercises that made the students who undertook them into active readers or, as Stephan Renker put it in his interpretation of the PH, Henry Jenkins’ fan writers.7 Though Jenkins defines modern fans as active readers, the opposite of the passive readers created by school (and thus outside the power dynamics of producers and consumers that characterize capitalist societies),8 educators in the Roman Empire did encourage their students to imitate Homer’s poems in their own voices. The standardization of the exercises assigned to students reinforced the textual stability of the Homeric epics – though this is not to deny the considerable variation in style in so many of the extant exercises. As early as the first century, Theon discussed a series of fourteen types of exercises, and this series remained more or less the same in rhetorical handbooks written in subsequent centuries of the Roman Empire.9 This means that students produced similar exercises,10 and they formed what Stanley Fish has called an interpretive community, a group of individuals who not only reads but also writes similarly.11 This parallels Teresa Morgan’s characterization of ancient education as a “medium” that produced active readers of “the cultural material and the ethical precepts which had been imposed on them in the earlier stages of education.”12 Regardless of whether these pupils went on to use their educations beyond the classroom,13 their experiences of Homer were remarkably uniform. These students’ engagements with the Iliad and Odyssey produced what Richard Hunter has called “cultural nostalgia,”14 a desire to return to the Homeric epics as encountered in the schoolroom, as opposed to other kinds of nostalgia, like the ideological variety discussed in the introduction. Cultural nostalgia took on various forms, from the “gentle parody” of Hunter’s Dio Chrysostom to close engagements by students. The aim of education was to form students into skilled public speakers through written exercises called progymnasmata (singular: progymnasma). The centrality of progymnasmata to the system of education is explained by the fifth-century teacher Nicolaus: ἕκαστος τοίνυν μέρος τι ταύτης τῆς τέχνης παραλαμβάνων τοῖς μετ’ αὐτὸν παρεδίδου καὶ οὕτω κατὰ βραχὺ εἰς διαιρέσεις τινὰς καὶ μεθόδους. . . . διὸ καὶ παρῆλθεν ἡ τῶν προγυμνασμάτων χρεία· οὐ γὰρ πρὸς τὸ ὅλον ἐν αὐτοῖς, ἀλλὰ πρὸς ἕκαστον τῶν μερῶν ἰδίᾳ γυμναζόμεθα. (Progymnasmata 2.1–10)15

16 Receptions in the Classroom So each person, inheriting some part of this art [rhetoric], used to transmit it to their students and so it progressed little by little into certain divisions and means [of treating subject matter]. For this reason the need for exercises came about. In them we practice not toward the whole but toward each of the parts. The importance of Homer’s epics for these progymnasmata, not to mention for the whole of Greek education, cannot be understated. Students began their education by mastering the fundamentals of the Greek language by learning the alphabet, syllables, and handwriting. Such rudimentary skills were acquired by copying out passages from canonical Greek texts, most prominent among which were the Iliad and the Odyssey.16 Examples include a papyrus that contains several lines from Iliad Book 6, a wooden tablet that has the opening lines of Book 9 of the Iliad with a few verses repeated, and an ostracon with the first line of the Iliad written four times.17 Students first attained basic literacy by copying a text exactly, and then they continued to develop these reading and writing abilities by explaining those same texts. This development of imitation was achieved through a type of progymnasma called an ethopoea (plural: ethopoeae), or “character making.” In them, students responded to a question posed by their teacher about an assigned text. The same pupil who copied several lines from Iliad Book 6 might be asked further about a character who has an important role in that part of the Homeric epic, Τίνας ἂν εἴποι λόγους Ἀνδρομάχη ἐπὶ Ἕκτορι;, “What words would Andromache say over Hector[’s corpse]?”18 The optative mood of the verb εἴποι indicates that students were expected to invent the words of Hector’s spouse, as opposed to reproducing her speech in Iliad Book 24 lines 725–745, as they did when they were learning the alphabet and syntax. The ultimate goal of such an ethopoea exercise was for students to create their own style by imitating Homer’s style.19 While many of these seem to have only been read by teachers, others were included in collections of poetry,20 implying that audiences for ethopoeae and the PH overlapped. It is in this connection that we now turn to the specifics of how authors of ethopoeae imitated the Homeric poems. This chapter will investigate three strategies that students used to imitate, but not copy, the Iliad and Odyssey: they re-worded, they added, and they expanded. Another type of progymnasma, the anaskeuē, “refutation,” prompted students to do the opposite of ethopoeae: reject Homeric poetry outright. Both of these kinds of exercises were themselves receptions of Homer and informed other receptions of Homer by individuals who had undertaken an education. Sophists, like the aforementioned Dio, are obvious examples, but so too are writers whose backgrounds are more obscure, like Lucian, who began this chapter, and Quintus. Quintus’ Education Did the author of the PH receive an education at all, and if so, how much? No ancient writer says anything about it, aside from the Posthomeric narrator himself in Book 12, where he pinpoints the Muses as the sources of his “education”: and since the intratextual “autobiography” of PH Book 12 depicts him as a shepherd

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with an informal education courtesy of the Muses, we cannot be sure about his educational background. ὑμεῖς γὰρ πᾶσάν μοι ἐνὶ φρεσὶ θήκατ’ ἀοιδήν, πρίν μοι ἀμφὶ παρειὰ κατασκίδνασθαι ἴουλον, Σμύρνης ἐν δαπέδοισι περικλυτὰ μῆλα νέμοντι (PH 12.308–310) For you put every song in my chest, Before hair spread down around my cheeks, As I was pasturing my very glorious herds in the plains of Smyrna. This passage is discussed in greater detail in this book’s third chapter, but in the present discussion about Quintus’ education it is not helpful. This “autobiographical” passage is an intertextual pose, as Calum Maciver has argued, rather than a genuine document of Quintus’ educational experience.21 Apart from this pretense of non-traditional education, Quintus could read and write, as demonstrated by Arie Hoekstra.22 He points out that the poet makes rare Homeric phrases into formulas and crafts brand new ones, and this, combined with the complex intertextuality on display in the PH, suggests that Quintus had at least some education. Manuel Baumbach and Silvio Bär have argued that he in fact availed himself of all that he could, the “‘university’ stage of education”23 in which students composed and delivered fully fledged speeches. In their view, Quintus was a sophist who chose to write an epic.24 Earlier Martin Korenjak made a similar argument using different evidence, similarities between Homeric rhapsodes and sophistic rhetoric,25 as did Włodzimierz Appel, who speculated that the PH was composed to be performed at musical competitions.26 In support of their speculations, Baumbach and Bär cite the first/second-century Scopelianus, a sophist who wrote and delivered speeches typical of sophists’ outputs as well as an epic.27 On the other hand, there is no indication that Quintus composed speeches, and the Suda entry about the third-century Pisander demonstrates that imperial poets could also write in prose (ἄλλα καταλογάδην) without necessarily being sophists.28 Pisander’s case suggests a middle ground, that Quintus completed his education through the “university stage” but did not become a sophist, as Appel has suggested.29 An example of this sort of individual is the second-century Lucian, whose writings include prose (like The Rooster quoted at the start of this chapter) as well as poetry (like the first line of an epic at True Stories 2.47), but none of his works is a speech like a sophist would write.30 The third-century Triphiodorus composed a short epic Capture of Troy that receives Homeric narrative in ways similar to Quintus, developing his 691-line poem from Demodocus’ performance in Odyssey Book 8, as Richard Hunter has argued.31 The Suda alleges that Triphiodorus was a γραμματικός, a “grammar teacher,”32 “in charge of teaching language and literature, the study of Homer, the poets, and, beginning in the first century A.D., grammar.”33 This, taken with Laura Miguélez Cavero’s connections of several elements of Capture of Troy to progymnasmata,34 suggests

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that Triphiodorus’ reception strategies were identical to those that he taught in the schoolroom. Miguélez Cavero has done the same with another imperial poet, the fifth-century Nonnus,35 and Gianfranco Agosti has further pointed out that the Dionysiaca was used in schools.36 All of this is highly suggestive, but it unfortunately reveals nothing definitive about Quintus’ education. While we cannot know whether Quintus was a sophist or whether he was a teacher, we can at least say that he undertook some education and that therefore he was trained to receive the Homeric epics in similar way as the students in the exercises examined next. Classroom Reception Strategy #1: Re-Wording An example of an ethopoea is P.Oxy, XLIII 3002, which is a re-wording of Athena’s speech to Achilles in the first book of the Iliad: ἦλθον ἐγὼ παύσουσα τὸ σὸν μένος, αἴ κε πίθηαι, οὐρανόθεν· πρὸ δέ μ’ ἧκε θεὰ λευκώλενος Ἥρη ἄμφω ὁμῶς θυμῷ φιλέουσά τε κηδομένη τε· ἀλλ’ ἄγε λῆγ’ ἔριδος, μηδὲ ξίφος ἕλκεο χειρί· ἀλλ’ ἤτοι ἔπεσιν μὲν ὀνείδισον ὡς ἔσεταί περ· ὧδε γὰρ ἐξερέω, τὸ δὲ καὶ τετελεσμένον ἔσται· καί ποτέ τοι τρὶς τόσσα παρέσσεται ἀγλαὰ δῶρα ὕβριος εἵνεκα τῆσδε· σὺ δ’ ἴσχεο, πείθεο δ’ ἡμῖν. (Iliad 1.207–214) I came from the sky to persuade you to stop your anger. White-armed Hera sent me, since she cherishes and cares for you both in her heart. Come, cease fighting, and do not draw your sword with your hand. Instead, abuse him with words, telling him just how it will be; because I will declare it in this way, and it will be fulfilled. At some point three times as many shining gifts will be yours because of his arrogance. Hold firm and obey us. εἰ μὲν ἐπὶ Τρώεσσι κορύσσεο χεῖρας, Ἀχιλλεῦ καὶ ξίφος ἀστυφέλικτον ἐρυσσάμενος κοτέεκες, προφρονέως κεν ἔγωγε συνείρυσα φάσγανον αὐτή· εἰ δὲ τεοῖς Δαναοῖς θωρήσσεαι, οὐκέτ’ Ἀθήνη πείθεται οὐδ’ Ἥρη βασιλήιος· ἴσχεο θᾶσσον, ἴσχεο καὶ μῆνιν πολυπήμονα παῦσον, Ἀχιλλεῦ· μηκέτι δ’ ἀργυρέης ἐπιμάσσεο χείρεσι κώπης, μιμέτω ἐν κολεῶι σέο φάγανον· οὐκ ἐπ’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἀνδροφόνον σε πατὴρ μενεδήιος ἔτρεαφε Πηλεύς, οὔ σε Θέτις προέηκε θεὰ βασιλῆι φονῆα· μᾶλλον δυσμενέεσσι κορύσσεο, μὴ Δαναοῖσιν σοῖς ἑτάροις Πριάμῳ δὲ καὶ υἱάσι πέμψον [uncertain]· μήνιδος ἀργαλέης πλῆσον μένος, εὔτε νοήσῃς

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Ἕκτορα καὶ Τρώων κρατερὸν στρατόν· οὐκ ἐπ’ Ἀχαιοὺς φάσγανον ἐν κλισίηισιν ἐθήξαο· θυμὸν ἀχεύεις σοῖς ἑτάροις; ἐπέεσσι κορύσσεο· ἀντὶ δ’ ἀκωκῆς καὶ ξιφέων μύθοισιν ἐριδμαίνουσιν ἑταῖροι, δυσμενέας κτείνουσιν ὀρινομένους περὶ χαλκῶι· φείδεό μοι βασιλῆος, ἵνα Τροιήν ἀλαπάξηι σὺν σοὶ μαρνάμενος καὶ ὑποδρήσσων σέθεν ἀλκῆι· μῆνιν ἀποσκέδασον πολυπήμονα, μή σέ τις ἀνὴρ Αἰακίδην βαρύμηνιν ἐν ὀψιγόνοισιν ἀείσῃ· οὐχ ἑτάροις κρατερόν σε γέρων ἐδιδάξατο Χείρων, ἀλκήεντα δ’ ἔτευξεν . . . [uncertain] ἠθείηισι θεῆις ἐπιπείθετο· σοὶ δέ κεν αὐτὸς λισσόμενος καὶ δῶρα πόροι βασιλεὺς Ἀγαμέμνων. (P.Oxy. XLII 3002)37 Achilles, if you were arming your hands against the Trojans and drawing your undisturbed sword in anger, I myself would have willingly drawn my sword with you too. But if you are arming yourself against your Danaäns, neither Athena nor royal Hera is persuaded any longer. Stand firm rather quickly – stand firm, and cease from your wrath that causes many pains, Achilles. No longer grasp the silver hilt; let your sword remain in its scabbard. Your stout father Peleus did not raise you to be a murderer of Achaeans, nor did the divine Thetis send you to murder a king. Instead, arm yourself against the enemy, not against the Danaäns, your companions, but send [lacuna] to Priam and his sons. Fill your spirit with grievous wrath when you perceive Hector and the strong army of Trojans. You did not sharpen your sword in your hut against the Achaeans. Do you grieve in your heart against your companions? Arm yourself with words. Instead of a point and swords, companions quarrel with words [and] kill the enemy in fear of bronze. Spare the king for me in order that he may overpower Troy, go into battle by your side, and serve your defensive strength. Dismiss your wrath that causes many pains for fear that someone might sing of you to future audiences as an Aeacid with deep wrath. The old Chiron did not teach you to be strong for your comrades, but he made [you?] courageous . . . [uncertain] Obey elder goddesses; if you do, king Agamemnon himself would beg you and give you gifts besides. The editor of this papyrus dated it to the fourth century and speculated that the student composer simultaneously kept an eye on the Homeric source but also used post-Homeric words.38 In their re-wording of the Homeric Athena’s persuasion of Achilles to abandon his desire to kill Agamemnon, the student inflated the eight lines of the Iliad’s goddess to 26 lines, adding to what she says about Hera’s concern for the Achaeans and the gifts Achilles will receive if he complies and the shame that Peleus, Thetis, and Chiron would feel. The resulting “chaotic and profuse” speech has been attributed to the student’s ineptitude and to their desire to humanize Athena;39 a third possibility is that the student’s teacher assigned a re-wording

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of the Homeric Athena’s speech in order to teach an important reception strategy. Indeed, this exercise is similar to another exercise, the paraphrase, as argued by Peter Parsons, José-Antonio Fernández Delgado, and Jesús Ureña Bracero.40 Of this exercise’s words, most appear in the Homeric lexicon, but seven do not. These post-Homeric words challenge the audience’s perception that the Iliad and Odyssey are confined to the past. As we will see in the analysis of Quintus’ word choices in Chapter 4, these are not mistakes but rather part of a reception strategy. Line 2’s ἀστυφέλικτον is the first instance of this. That adjective means “undisturbed,” and it modifies Achilles’ sword, his ξίφος, which is the same word the Iliadic Athena employs (line 210), though she does not modify it with an adjective. ἀστυφέλικτον is not attested before the fourth century b.c.e. and becomes popular in Greek literature of the Roman Empire, with appearances in two other ethopoeae as well as ten times in pagan imperial epics.41 The ethopoea’s Athena describes Achilles’ anger twice with the adjective πολυπήμονα, “causing many pains” (lines 6 and 21); though it does not appear in Homeric vocabulary, that adjective does have an archaic Greek epic flavor, as it appears twice in the Homeric Hymns. This is also true of line 24’s ἀλκήεντα, “courageous,” an adjective modifying a word or words that have dropped out of the papyrus (probably σε to parallel the content of the previous line). It is deployed to describe Athena in the Homeric Hymn to Athena, and it is popular in pagan imperial epics.42 Similarly, the adjective βαρύμηνιν in line 22 appears first in the sixth century b.c.e. and enjoys nineteen appearances in the Dionysiaca.43 A few words, like the participle ὑποδρήσσων, “serving” (line 20), appear in a slightly different form in Homeric verses; furthermore, the form employed by this student appears once in another ethopoea and sixteen times in pagan imperial epics,44 demonstrating that this word was updated for the needs of imperial Greek writers. This re-wording strategy for interfacing with the Homeric poems is also apparent throughout Quintus’ epic. Indeed, the epic as a whole does this consistently, but there are several instances where this technique intersects with an analepsis – that is, a backward glance – to the Iliad or a prolepsis – that is, a forward glance – to the Odyssey. As Thomas Schmitz observes, this occurs frequently in Quintus’ epic to remind the audience of the PH’s position within the epic tradition.45 In Posthomeric analepses, “new details are added, other aspects are omitted, or emphases are skewed.”46 After his murder of the Trojan ally Penthesilea in Book 1, the Posthomeric Achilles boasts to another Trojan ally, the Aethiopian Memnon, in a typical Homeric flyting.47 Ὦ Μέμνον, πῇ νῦν σε κακαὶ φρένες ἐξορόθυναν ἐλθέμεν ἀντί’ ἐμεῖο καὶ ἐς μόθον ἰσοφαρίζειν; Ὃς σέο φέρτερός εἰμι βίῃ γενεῇ τε φυῇ τε, Ζηνὸς ὑπερθύμοιο λαχὼν ἀριδείκετον αἷμα καὶ σθεναροῦ Νηρῆος, ὃς εἰναλίας τέκε κούρας Νηρεΐδας, τὰς δή ῥα θεοὶ τίουσ’ ἐν Ὀλύμπῳ, πασάων δὲ μάλιστα Θέτιν κλυτὰ μητιόωσαν,

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οὕνεκά που Διόνυσον ἑοῖς ὑπέδεκτο μελάθροις, ὁππότε δειμαίνεσκε βίην ὀλοοῖο Λυκούργου, ἠδὲ καὶ ὡς Ἥφαιστον ἐύφρονα χαλκεοτέχνην δέξατο οἷσι δόμοισιν ἀπ’ Οὐλύμποιο πεσόντα, αὐτόν τ’ Ἀργικέραυνον ὅπως ὑπελύσατο δεσμῶν· τῶν μιμνησκόμενοι πανδερκέες Οὐρανίωνες μητέρ’ ἐμὴν τίουσι Θέτιν ζαθέῳ ἐν Ὀλύμπῳ. Γνώσῃ δ’ ὡς θεός ἐστιν, ἐπὴν δόρυ χάλκεον εἴσω ἐς τεὸν ἧπαρ ἵκηται ἐμῇ βεβλημένον ἀλκῇ· (PH 2.431–446) Memnon, how has your evil heart excited you now to go against me and to contend in battle? I, who am better than you in strength, birth, and frame, with noble Zeus’ distinguished blood and Nereus’, whose daughters, the Nereids, live in the sea and whom the gods honor on Olympus, especially Thetis, whom they regard as glorious because, I suppose, she received Dionysus under her roof when he feared the might of destructive Lycurgus and also when she received the merry smith Hephaestus in her house when he fell from Olympus, and how she released the wielder of thunderbolts himself from bonds. Remembering these things, the all-seeing dwellers of the sky honor my mother Thetis on holy Olympus. You will know that she is a goddess when a bronze spear, thrown by my prowess, hits your liver! This passage is an analepsis of two distinct moments in the Iliad: a Book 1 exhortation by Achilles to his mother and the Achaean Diomedes’ “insulting” “taunts” of the Trojan ally Glaucus in Book 6:48 πολλάκι γάρ σεο πατρὸς ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ἄκουσα εὐχομένης ὅτ’ ἔφησθα κελαινεφέϊ Κρονίωνι οἴη ἐν ἀθανάτοισιν ἀεικέα λοιγὸν ἀμῦναι, ὁππότε μιν ξυνδῆσαι Ὀλύμπιοι ἤθελον ἄλλοι Ἥρη τ’ ἠδὲ Ποσειδάων καὶ Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη· ἀλλὰ σὺ τόν γ’ ἐλθοῦσα θεὰ ὑπελύσαο δεσμῶν, ὦχ’ ἑκατόγχειρον καλέσασ’ ἐς μακρὸν Ὄλυμπον, ὃν Βριάρεων καλέουσι θεοί, ἄνδρες δέ τε πάντες Αἰγαίων’, ὃ γὰρ αὖτε βίην οὗ πατρὸς ἀμείνων· ὅς ῥα παρὰ Κρονίωνι καθέζετο κύδεϊ γαίων· τὸν καὶ ὑπέδεισαν μάκαρες θεοὶ οὐδ’ ἔτ’ ἔδησαν. (Iliad 1.396–406) Many times in the halls of your father I heard you praying when you said that you alone among the immortals warded off baneful ruin from the black-cloud son of Cronus, when other Olympians – Hera, Poseidon, and Pallas Athena – wanted to bind him. But you went to him, released him from his bonds, and quickly called a Hundred-Hander, whom gods call Briareus and all mortals call

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Receptions in the Classroom Aigaion, to great Olympus, for his strength is even greater than his father’s. Beside the son of Cronus he sat, glorying in his splendor. The blessed gods were afraid of him and did not bind Zeus. . . . Διώνυσος δὲ φοβηθεὶς δύσεθ’ ἁλὸς κατὰ κῦμα, Θέτις δ’ ὑπεδέξατο κόλπῳ δειδιότα· κρατερὸς γὰρ ἔχε τρόμος ἀνδρὸς ὁμοκλῇ. (Iliad 6.135–137) In fear Dionysus plunged below the sea’s wave, and Thetis received him in his fear on her bosom, for he was gripped by an overpowering fear from the shout of the mortal.

Both Quintus and the student stick to the Homeric lexicon, imparting a postHomeric flavor with only a handful words. The verb that Quintus uses in line 431, ἐξορόθυναν, appears only in Athenaeus’ quotation of a line from the Epic Cycle poem Cypria, and δειμαίνεσκε appears first in the Homeric Hymns as a nonfrequentative, with the frequentative being a Posthomeric neologism. The noun χαλκεοτέχνη appears only once outside of Quintus’ epic, in an epigram in the Palatine Anthology, and the adjective πανδερκέες is used by several imperial prose texts. Yet Quintus’ version of the re-wording strategy differs from P.Oxy. XLII 3002’s close imitation of the Iliad by mixing not one but two analepses into the context of a post-Iliad event. An analogy to the re-wording strategy appears in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark. In a climactic moment, the protagonist, Indiana Jones, pursues a convoy of his enemies who have just stolen the object that Jones also wants, the Ark of the Covenant. Jones rides a horse to catch up with the truck that carries the Ark and leaps from a horse onto the side of it. This sequence mirrors one from Chapter 11, “Right of Way,” of the 1937 serial Zorro Rides Again.49 In that scene, the protagonist Zorro also leaps from his horse to a truck, and it was a still from this scene that inspired George Lucas, who is credited with the initial idea for Raiders and receives a “story by” credit in the finished film. Lucas wanted to include a version of the Zorro scene in Raiders, but he and his collaborators changed it: whereas the truck in Raiders carries the object that both Jones and his enemies want to possess, in the serial the truck is being driven not by the enemy, but by a third party, who becomes an ally, helping Zorro catch up with a train that is carrying a company’s payroll, an object that both Zorro and his enemies want to possess. In this way, Raiders “re-words” one of its many hypotexts, using its predecessor’s image, but in service of a different narrative with different aims. Much as Quintus chose one flyting episode from several available to him in the Iliad, Lucas and his compatriots chose to emulate the Chapter 11 sequence instead of a sequence in Chapter 9, “Tunnel of Terror,” in which Zorro similarly jumps from his racing steed onto a train. Lucas was inspired by Zorro Rides Again not in school but by a childhood viewing at his local movie theater.50 Nevertheless,

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both he and the students composing progymnasmata were at a formative stage of human development when they encountered the texts they would later engage with again as adults. Classroom Reception Strategy #2: Addition Another strategy used by students and Quintus was to add material that fit into the narrative universe of the Homeric poems but, unlike the ethopoea analyzed in the previous section, did not already appear in either of those poems. This strategy is employed by a poem from the Palatine Anthology that adds a scene not mentioned by, but which fits plausibly into, the Odyssey. That poem, AP 9.474, is being included in this chapter’s discussion of school exercises because it is rooted in schoolroom practice. The ethopoea discussed in the previous section is the only thing written on a single sheet of papyrus, as Parsons notes,51 indicating that it was not intended for preservation, whereas AP 9.474 appears in an edited collection of poems that was meant to be circulated. AP 9.474 is part of a series of similar, ethopoeae-like compositions that appear in the Palatine Anthology, and so perhaps these poems were collected and anthologized because some individual, or individuals, felt that they represented particularly outstanding examples from the classroom. It is also possible that these poems were authored by former pupils as a literary pastime.52 This is a difficult issue, since distinguishing progymnasmata from extra-curricular compositions is often nearly impossible, due to the similarities between students’ and professionals’ handwriting.53 In either case, AP 9.474 is the product of the classroom’s receptions strategies of Homeric narratives. The scene in question is a blessing by the divine sea nymph Eidothea of Helen. Though the Homeric Helen never encounters Eidothea, her husband Menelaus does encounter the nymph in Egypt. Seeking advice from Eidothea is crucial for Menelaus, because he and his crewmates have been stranded for nearly a month, unable to sail back to their home due to their becalmed fleet. Eidothea takes pity on Menelaus, advising him that he must consult her prophetic father Proteus but that doing so will not be easy, since he is stingy and must be coerced into revealing what he knows. She provides Menelaus and his crew with disguises, instructing him to wait for Proteus in ambush, then to wrestle him, and then, once he is subdued, how to question him. The Odyssey does not explicitly state that Helen was also in Egypt, but the narrator suggests that she was in the descriptions of several gifts she received from Egyptians, including a basket (Od. 4.126–127) and a drug (4.228–229).54 So in addition to meeting Menelaus, in the Homeric narrative universe a meeting between Eidothea and Helen is plausible. This could have happened offscreen, before Menelaus meets the nymph, after she leaves their first meeting, after their second meeting (Od. 4.425–435), or while Menelaus and his crew eat dinner on the shore after their successful interview with Proteus, sacrifice to the gods, make a tomb for Agamemnon, and sail away from Egypt (4.571–584). Whatever the case, the following poem imagines this interaction:

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Receptions in the Classroom Οἰκτίρω σὸν κάλλος, ἐπεὶ Διός ἐσσι γενέθλη· εἰσορόω γὰρ ἄγαλμα διοτρεφές· ἀτρεκέως δὲ Τρωσί τε καὶ Δαναοῖσι μάχη δεκέτηρος ἐτύχθης. ποῦ Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο, τεοῦ γενετῆρος, ἀρωγαί; ἔμπης δ’ ἔρχεο θᾶσσον, ἀπήμονα νόστον ἑλοῦσα Εἰδοθέης ἰότητι, κακῆς ἐπὶ νῶτα θαλάσσης. (AP 9.474) I pity your beauty, since you are Zeus’ stock. For I am looking at a Zeus-nourished glory. You certainly caused a ten-year war between the Trojans and Danaäns! Where is the help of aegis-bearing Zeus, your father? Nevertheless, go rather quickly and, by Eidothea’s will, seize a safe journey on the evil sea’s back.

Because the this meeting is not mentioned or depicted in the Homeric epic, scholars like W. R. Paton and Jesús Ureña Bracero have argued that the source of AP 9.474 was Euripides’ fourth-century b.c.e. play Helen, in which the Helen of the Iliad is an eidolon, an image created by the gods, while the “real” Helen is whisked off by Hermes to Egypt.55 This eidōlon tradition, of which Euripides’ play was a part, inspired a strand of imperial Homeric reception called “revisionism,” explored further in the third chapter. The important point here is that AP 9.474 does not have to be referring to Euripides’ Helen, since there is no contradiction of the Homeric Odyssey’s narrative. This is mirrored by AP 9.474’s diction: only the adjective δεκέτηρος in line 3 and the noun γενετῆρος in line 4 are not in the Homeric lexicon. Both words appear in imperial texts and therefore evoke post-Homer-ness, as we saw in the diction of P.Oxy. XLII 3002. Out of the 39 words of this poem, including archaisms like the double sigma in line 1’s verb ἐσσι, the genitive singular ending -οιο in line 5, and the uncontracted verbs εἰσορόω in line 2 and ἔρχεο in line 5, the author chose to include only two words that do not appear in either the Iliad or the Odyssey. The PH similarly stages scenes between characters that appear in the Iliad and/ or Odyssey but do not interact in Homeric verses. This strategy is more difficult to discern in the PH because Quintus’ characters generally recall the Iliad and Odyssey more or less precisely. A much-noted instance is when the Posthomeric narrator declares that Achilles “dragged Hector around the city” (ἀμφείρυσσε πόληι, 1.12), echoed by Andromache’s declaration that “swift-footed horses were dragging [him] around the city” (at 1.112, ἀμφὶ πόληα ποδώκεες εἴρυον ἵπποι) and by a singer who relates “how he dragged Hector around his native land’s walls” (Ἕκτορά θ’ ὡς εἴρυσσεν ἑῆς περὶ τείχεα πάτρης, 14.133). In the standard edition of the PH, Francis Vian remarks that this detail is “pas homérique.” That this version appears in other entries in the Trojan War tradition, including the fourth-century b.c.e. tragedy Andromache by Euripides,56 has for some implied that Quintus’ intertexts include fifth- and fourth-century b.c.e. Greek drama, and this in turn has also implied they are intertexts for progymnasmata as well – recall the arguments about a dramatic source for AP 9.474. But as with that poem’s meeting between Eidothea and Helen,

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the Posthomeric depiction of Hector’s body being dragged around the city is not a contradiction of the Homeric version. In their monomachia in Book 22 of the Iliad, Hector and Achilles run ἄστυ πέρι Πριάμοιο, “around Priam’s city” (230), passing several landmarks “always out of the range of the wall” (τείχεος αἰὲν ὑπὲκ, 146). Hector stays on the inside track, hoping to lure his enemy into the range of the weapons of his comrades stationed on the wall, but he is unsuccessful. The combatants remain in sight of those on the wall through the end of their duel, so that Hector’s mother Hecuba can “see her child” (παῖδ’ ἐσιδοῦσα, 407) when Achilles is fastening his corpse to his chariot, and Hector’s wife Andromache “saw him being dragged in front of the city” (τὸν δὲ νόησεν/ἑλκόμενον πρόσθεν πόλιος, 463–4). Bär notes that the Iliad presents its audience with the sequence of Achilles dragging the body in front of the walls, then to the Achaeans’ camp, and last around Patroclus’ tomb.57 But this sequence does not make it impossible for the Posthomeric version to be true as well. In the nearly one hundred lines that Priam, Hecuba, and Andromache lament Hector at the end of Book 22, Achilles could have dragged the corpse around the city in an attempt to make the grief of Hector’s loved ones that much worse. In contrast to Alan James’ comment that this demonstrates a willingness to “depart from Homeric authority,”58 Quintus in this moment “challenges the reader’s knowledge of the Iliad”59 by offering his audience a different, though complementary, angle on the Iliad. The plausibility of the addition strategy is paralleled in cinematic terms by deleted scenes. Deleted scenes are footage shot for a film but then discarded for reasons of overall runtime, narrative “clarity,” or changes in the plot.60 These scenes are often a selling point of home media releases, which include deleted scenes as part of what Jonathan Gray calls their “nostalgic layering” – that is, their ability to allow the audience to imagine that directors are asserting artistic control over the films that they create.61 In the context of this book, Gray’s phrase has a different meaning: the PH’s “deleted scenes” evoke nostalgia in the audience through their ability to allow Homer to be re-experienced in new ways. Take, for instance, a deleted scene from the 1983 film Return of the Jedi that was included on that film’s release in the Blu-Ray format in 2011.62 The protagonist Luke Skywalker tests his new weapon, a lightsaber with a green blade (his, blue-bladed lightsaber was lost in a battle with his father in the previous film, 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back). This green lightsaber first appears in the theatrical cut when Luke uses it in battle, approximately thirty-three minutes into the film, whereas had the deleted scene appeared in the theatrical cut, it would have showcased the green lightsaber at the five-minute mark. This scene is then clearly plausible from the standpoint of the narrative mechanics of the film, as it was not cut for reasons of clarity or alterations to the plot. Indeed, as the notes on the Blu-Ray disc remark, this scene was almost included in the theatrical cut, as indicated by the finished musical score, sound, and visual effects, but it was eventually removed, probably for reasons of shaving down the film’s runtime and because the narrative information is a bit redundant. The audience sees Luke

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wielding a green lightsaber in battle and assumes that he acquired it somehow or other. Classroom Reception Strategy #3: Expansion AP 9.474’s Eidothea-Helen exchange does not happen in the PH, and so the application of its addition strategy to Quintus’ epic is difficult to judge. By contrast, there is an exact parallel for an ethopoea that expands Homeric narrative to include a speech by the main character of the Iliad after his death. The episode in question takes place after the Achaeans have plundered Troy and are preparing to sail back to Greece. According to a summary of the epic that narrated this event, the Iliou Persis, the Achaeans inexplicably Πολυξένην σφαγιάζουσιν ἐπὶ τὸν τοῦ Ἀχιλλέως τάφον, “sacrifice Polyxena over Achilles’ grave.”63 Perhaps their reasoning for human sacrifice was absent from the Iliou Persis as well, and the Homeric epics are no help on this point, as neither of them depict this episode. Euripides’ fifth-century b.c.e. play Hecuba, however, does provide a rationale: ἐν γὰρ Ἀχαιῶν πλήρει ξυνόδωι λέγεται δόξαι σὴν παῖδ’ Ἀχιλεῖ σφάγιον θέσθαι. τύμβου δ’ ἐπιβὰς οἶσθ’ ὅτε χρυσέοις ἐφάνη σὺν ὅπλοις, τὰς ποντοπόρους δ’ ἔσχε σχεδίας λαίφη προτόνοις ἐπερειδομένας, τάδε θωύσσων· Ποῖ δή, Δαναοί, τὸν ἐμὸν τύμβον στέλλεσθ’ ἀγέραστον ἀφέντες; (Hecuba 107–115)64 Among the full assembly of Achaeans it is said that they resolved to make your child a sacrifice to Achilles. You know that when he appeared in his golden equipment Stepping on his tomb, he held back the seafaring Ships, their sails tied down with ropes, shouting The following: ‘Where, Danaäns, Are you preparing to go, leaving my tomb without a prize?’ These lines are spoken by the chorus leader, who relates to the Trojan queen Hecuba that the ghost of Achilles is holding back the Achaean fleet from returning to Greece in anger over being denied a final prize and that the Greeks have decided that the answer to this problem is to sacrifice Polyxena at his grave. A fifth- or sixth-century ethopoea is seven-line version of this reasoning:

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Τί βλοσυροῦ κυανωπὸν ὕδωρ ἐπιβαίνετε [πόν]του βύσσινα κολπώσαντες ἐφ’ ὁλκάσι χίλια λαίφη; τί πλόον ἐντύνεσθε ταχεῖς ἐπὶ πάτρια τείχη μηδὲ γέρας νείμαντες ἐς ἀσπίσι πολλὰ καμόντος εἰς ἀρετήν; ποῖον γὰρ ἀτείρεα μόχθον ἀνύσσας οὐκ ἔτλην; ποῖον δὲ δι’ Ἄρεος ἄνδρα κατά[ντη] [ο]ὐ νυχ[ίαν] Πλούτωνος ἐς ἄκριτον [ἤ]λασα μοῖραν; (Heitsch #XXXVIII = 1964: 125) Why do you embark on the bristling sea’s dark water, bellying countless linen sails on your vessels? Why do you prepare to sail swiftly to your ancestral walls and not assign a prize for the excellence of one who toiled much for his fellow warriors? What sort of unyielding battle-din did I not dare destroy? What sort of man, killed in battle, did I not drag down to the undiscriminating, gloomy fate of Pluto? A greater proportion of the words used by this student are non-Homeric than in the previous two examples: of the forty-eight words, eight do not appear in the Homeric lexicon. Its content is not in the Iliad or the Odyssey, or even mentioned in either of those poems. For that reason and because a rationale does not appear in Proclus’ summary of the Iliou Persis, along with this exercise’s explanation of Achilles’ anger at the Achaeans being similar to that of Euripides’ Achilles, some associate this ethopoea with Euripides’ play.65 But the Hecuba is the first appearance of this particular version in the texts that we have, and so it does not necessarily follow that any subsequent text that has Achilles holding the Greeks back until Polyxena is sacrificed at his tomb must be following Euripides’ version. It is ultimately not knowable whether this exercise’s primary intertext was Euripides or something else; what matters here is that Homeric narrative is not contradicted. In the PH Quintus gives a similar motivation for the slaughter of Polyxena, but whereas Hecuba’s chorus leader tells Hecuba in viva voce, Achilles tells his son Neoptolemus in a dream: Καὶ Ἀργείοισιν ἔνισπε, Ἀτρείδῃ δὲ μάλιστ’ Ἀγαμέμνονι· εἴ γέ τι θυμῷ μέμνηνθ’ ὅσσ’ ἐμόγησα περὶ Πριάμοιο πόληα ἠδ’ ὅσα ληισάμην πρὶν Τρώιον οὖδας ἱκέσθαι, τῶ μοι νῦν ποτὶ τύμβον ἐελδομένῳ περ ἀγόντων ληίδος ἐκ Πριάμοιο Πολυξείνην εὔπεπλον, ὄφρα θοῶς ῥέξωσιν, ἐπεί σφισι χώομαι ἔμπης μᾶλλον ἔτ’ ἢ τὸ πάρος Βρισηίδος· ἀμφὶ δ’ ἄρ’ οἶδμα κινήσω πόντοιο, βαλῶ δ’ ἐπὶ χείματι χεῖμα, ὄφρα καταφθινύθοντες ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ἑῇσι μίμνωσ’ ἐνθάδε πολλὸν ἐπὶ χρόνον, εἰς ὅ κ’ ἔμοιγε

28 Receptions in the Classroom λοιβὰς ἀμφιχέωνται ἐελδόμενοι μέγα νόστου· αὐτὴν δ’, εἴ κ’ ἐθέλωσιν, ἐπὴν ἀπὸ θυμὸν ἕλωνται, κούρην ταρχύσασθαι ἀπόπροθεν οὔ τι μεγαίρω. (PH 14.209–222) Tell the Argives, especially Atreus’ son Agamemnon: if they remember in their hearts at all how much I toiled around Priam’s city and how much I plundered before arriving at Troy’s doorstep, let them now lead lovely dressed Polyxena to my tomb, since I really desire it, out of the plunder of Priam’s city, to offer her quickly, since I am even angrier at them than with Briseïs before. I will cause the sea to heave and throw storm on storm, so they remain here for a long time, wasting away for their recklessness, until they pour libations to me, in their great desire to return home. Not at all do I begrudge them burying her far away (if they want to) after they kill her. A similarity between this passage and the ethopoea is that in both cases the speaker is Achilles, as opposed to Euripides’ play. A sample ethopoea by the fourth-century sophist and teacher Libanius has yet another speaker for the content of this episode: Polyxena herself.66 Neither Euripides’ chorus leader nor Libanius’ Polyxena are characters in the Homeric poems, whereas Heitsch #XXXVIII and PH employ the Homeric character par excellence, Achilles, in their channeling of Homeric tradition. At PH 14.216 Achilles threatens that if the Greeks do not sacrifice Polyxena over his tomb, he will be even angrier than he was when Agamemnon took Briseïs in the Iliad. His anger is the result of his shame over being “the only Argive without a prize” (οἶος Ἀργείων ἀγέραστος, 1.118–119), and Euripides’ chorus leader describes Achilles with the same adjective in line 115. Even though Quintus’ version does not include ἀγέραστος, the Posthomeric Achilles recalls his anger “before” (πάρος in line 216 – that is, in the Iliad) and describes Polyxena as being taken ληίδος ἐκ Πριάμοιο, “from the plunder of Priam[’s city].” The noun ληίς appears four times in the Iliad and never in Euripides’ plays, and though Homer never applies it to Briseïs specifically, his Agamemnon’s description of the plunder (ληΐδ’, 9.138) of cities the Achaeans had captured includes her implicitly among the “Trojan women” (Τρωϊάδας δὲ γυναῖκας, 9.139). Quintus thus does not directly quote Homer, but he goes further than the ethopoea in incorporating Homeric poetry into his composition. Whereas the ethopoea writer is using Homeric poetry as a model with the ultimate goal of shaping his own style, Quintus is deliberately drawing his audience’s attention back to the Homeric Iliad. Neither the ethopoea nor the PH contradict the Iliad or the Odyssey, as other imperial receptions do, when they have Achilles desiring Polyxena in life. Dictys and Dares depict Achilles falling in love with Polyxena, but they also parallel Quintus and Heitsch #XXXVIII in having Neoptolemus sacrificing her (Dictys III.2 and V.13 and Dares XXVII and XLIII). Similarly, Philostratus’ Polyxena reciprocates

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Achilles’ love for her by committing suicide (Life of Apollonius of Tyana 4.16). These three receptions are rather implausible in the context of Homeric narrative, since Achilles’ love of Polyxena (much less the princess herself) is not mentioned in the Iliad and Odyssey, and her sacrifice is motivated by Achilles’ desire for a prize. A Sophist Ethopoea As Gianfranco Agosti and others have argued, the skills ethopoeae taught could be incorporated into poetry long after schooling ended, as the previously-considered AP 9.474 demonstrates. Much as epithets, formulas, and type scenes were building blocks for Homeric bards, ethopoeae, and the reception strategies required to write them, were building blocks not only for poetry but also for prose, as shown by a speech composed by the sophist Aelius Aristides. In the second century, Aristides undertook a successful career as a public speaker, producing orations that were delivered on a variety of occasions in different settings, including a plea to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius for funds to assist the city of Smyrna in recovering from a devasting earthquake. In addition to his speeches about contemporary Rome, about Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e., and other subjects, he also composed a prose version of an ethopoea based on an episode of the Iliad.67 In his Πρεσβευτικὸς πρὸς Ἀχιλλέα, Embassy to Achilles (also called Oration 52), Aristides writes the sorts of things an ambassador might say to the recalcitrant Achilles of Iliad 9. This imagined ambassador makes arguments that complement but do not contradict those of the Homeric Odysseus, Phoenix, and Ajax. In this way, his work is modelled on the ethopoea exercise; it “rhetoricizes Homer” as Stephen Sansom notes,68 and in so doing, Aristides, per Lawrence Kim, “transstyl[es]” the progymnasma from verse into prose.69 In his Embassy to Achilles, Aristides is thinking back to the ethopoeae that he had been assigned as a student, something that had developed his rhetorical skills, and casting it into a form of a typical sophistic oration. This new relationship to something Aristides had done earlier in his life is made manifest in comparing Embassy to Achilles to a student ethopoea on the same subject. In P.Heid. inv. G. 1271, a papyrus from the sixth century,70 the writer similarly adapts the Homeric Phoenix’s appeal to Peleus’ son: Φοῖνιξ ἐν τῆι πρεσβείαι προτρεόμενος Ἀχιλλέα παύσασθαι τῆς ὀργῆς οὔ σε μόθους ἐδίδαξεν ἐνὶ σκοπέλοις ποτὲ Χείρων; πῶς δὴ νῦν δεδάηκας ἐριδμαίνειν περὶ νύμφης; ὦ τέκος, αἰσχύνεις κρατερὸν γένος Αἰακιδάων δηθύνων ἀπάνευθε μόθων χάριν Ἀφρογενείης. τέκνον ἐμόν, τέο μέχρις ἐνὶ κλισίηισι θαμίζεις; οἴχεο καὶ χραίσμησον ἀπολλυμένοισιν Ἀχαιοῖς. (P.Heid. inv. G. 127171)

30

Receptions in the Classroom title: Phoenix in the embassy trying to persuade Achilles to stop being angry Did Chiron never teach you the sounds of battle among the rocks? How did you learn to quarrel about a young woman? Child, you shame the strong family of the Aeacids by loitering away from the fight thanks to the foam-born one. My child, how long will you frequent your hut? Go defend the Achaeans being destroyed.

The vast temporal gulf between this papyrus and Aristides’ Embassy to Achilles is one obstacle to comparing them, but, as we noted previously, education remained fairly constant in the ancient world.72 The author of the papyrus verses might be a student or a professional poet,73 but the similarities between P.Heid. inv. G. 1271 and progymnasmata examined elsewhere and in this chapter, along with the probability that Aristides himself in his student days was assigned progymnasmata that shaped his reception of Homer, will make a comparison between P.Heid. inv. G. 1271 and Embassy to Achilles fruitful. Whereas the title of P.Heid. inv. G. 1271 indicates that its author is re-imagining Phoenix’s Iliadic speech, Aristides does not specify an ambassador’s name; indeed, his oration incorporates points made by several ambassadors in the Iliad.74 Aristides’ oration demonstrates a different strategy for receiving Homer in its creation of a non-Homeric character, whereas the author of the Heidelberg papyrus redeploys a pre-existing character.75 In this, the latter parallels the student composer of P.Oxy. XLII 3002, explored previously in this chapter, employing the re-wording strategy by condensing 170 lines of Iliad 9 into six verses. Aristides deploys all three classroom reception strategies discussed in this chapter, re-wording, adding, and expanding his Iliad 9 hypotext from nearly six pages to sixteen.76 An example of this is Aristides’ transformation of the Homeric narrator’s description of how the ambassadors find Achilles: σὺ δ’ ἐν τῇ σκηνῇ μενεῖς ᾄδων πρὸς λύραν; πότερον τὰ ἑτέρων ᾄδων μενεῖς; ἀλλ’ ἄμεινον ἑτέροις τὰ σαυτοῦ παρασχεῖν ᾄδειν ἐπὶ χρηστῷ τινι. ἀλλὰ τὴν μῆνιν νὴ Δί’ ἣν μηνίεις ταύτην ὑμνήσεις ὥσπερ θεόν; δέδοικα μὴ τῶν Ἀχαιῶν ᾄδῃς ἐπιταφίους, οὕτως ἀωρὶ τοῦ παντὸς χρόνου μελῳδῶν (Embassy to Achilles Jebb pages 433 line 28-page 434 line 1)77 Will you hang back in your tent singing on the lyre? Will you remain here, singing about other peoples’ deeds? It is better for your successful deeds to give a song to someone else. By Zeus, will you harp like a god on this wrath that you have? I fear that you are singing dirges for the Achaeans, since you are singing in this way at the wrong time. τὸν δ’ εὗρον φρένα τερπόμενον φόρμιγγι λιγείῃ/ . . ./. . . ἄειδε δ’ ἄρα κλέα ἀνδρῶν (Iliad 9.186–189)

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They found him delighting his heart with a slender lyre . . . and he was singing about mortals’ fames Aristides augments his version by collating the Homeric ambassadors’ speeches with Homeric narratives that do not appear in their rhetoric, such as Chryses’ retrieval of his daughter, along with narratives that do not appear in Homeric poetry, such as Odysseus’ discovery of Achilles on the island of Scyrus.78 These nods to the Homeric hypotext and additions of Homer-adjacent material put Embassy to Achilles in a similar category as Quintus’ epic,79 in that they receive Homer through methods learned in classrooms. Additionally, Aristides’ oration shows us that sophists produced receptions of Homer that did not contradict the Iliad and/or Odyssey, as well as receptions that did, like Dio’s Trojan Speech. Anaskeuai and Classroom Receptions of Homer Aristides’ Embassy of Achilles recalls that the aim of the progymnasmata was to learn the fundamentals of producing persuasive rhetoric. The three ethopoeae considered above, as well as other extant examples, do not contradict Homeric narratives, and this seems to have been typical of that type of exercise. How, then, do we account for the movement from ethopoeae’s non-contradictions of Homer to the contradictions of Philostratus, Dictys, and Dares? Another kind of exercise called anaskeuē (plural: anaskeuai), “refutation,” did encourage students to criticize Homeric narratives. Not as many of this kind of exercise is extant, but there are examples composed by in the fourth century by the sophist and teacher Libanius. The title of his Progymnasma 5, Ὅτι οὐκ εἰκὸς τὸν Χρύσην εἰς τὸν ναύσταθμον ἐλθεῖν τῶν Ἑλλήνων, “That it is improbable that Chryses goes to the Greeks’ ships,”80 denies an important event of the Iliad, critical because without Chryses’ failed ransom, Achilles and Agamemnon would not fight. This exercise recalls Dio’s Trojan Speech, which also refutes fundamental narrative elements of the Homeric Iliad. They both begin in a similar way, with the first section of Dio’s speech asserting that humanity prefers lies to truth: τὸ μὲν γὰρ ἀληθὲς πικρόν ἐστι καὶ ἀηδὲς τοῖς ἀνοήτοις, τὸ δὲ ψεῦδος γλυκὺ καὶ προσηνές, “For on the one hand the truth is bitter and unpleasant to the ignorant, but on the other hand lies are sweet and pleasant” (sections 1–2).81 Homer, who τὰ χαλεπώτατα ψευσάμενον (section 4), “lied terribly,” exemplifies the second part of Dio’s formulation, while the sophist is, of course, telling the truth. Libanius similarly laments the lies told by poets, calling out Homer specifically for ψευδῆ διώκων, “pursuing lies” (section 2), in his depiction of Chryses seeking the return of his daughter. In his methodical rejection of the plausibility of Homer’s narrative, Libanius argues against the logic of the Homeric Chryses going to the Achaean camp on the Trojan beach. Like the authors of ethopoeae, he uses Homer to interpret Homer, arguing that Chryses’ advanced age and fear would have prevented him from approaching the Greek warriors (section 3), that Chryseïs’s vaunted status among her captors would have assuaged him (section 4),82 that the Achaeans did not

32 Receptions in the Classroom respect their enemy’s sacred institutions (section 5), that Chryses’ approach of the Greek soldiers would only work in a democracy (sections 6–7), that Agamemnon would not have ignored Chryses for fear of a rebellion by the Achaeans (section 8), that Chryses would have been a pacifist because he was a priest (section 11), and that Apollo would not have punished the Achaeans (section 12). Conclusion This chapter has surveyed the reception strategies of school exercises in comparison with the PH. These progymnasmata encouraged conservative views of Homeric poetry in that students were tasked with re-wording, adding to, and expanding a scene from the Iliad or Odyssey. Yet the schoolroom could also instruct students to contradict the Homeric epics through exercises like anaskeuai. Whether noncontradictory, contradictory, or both, the reception strategies of schooling created nostalgia for the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey, which had become stable in the imperial period. The intertextual modalities created by these years of schooling are what Svetlana Boym would term “restorative nostalgia,” in particular “the return to origins.”83 That classroom exercises and literature composed by adults are connected has been persuasively argued before by Agosti and Miguélez Cavero, and this chapter has extended their arguments to Quintus.84 My observations in this chapter further the latter’s contention that the shared features in imperial literature should be traced to a common curriculum rather than a single author. Due to students taking on various roles in society in adulthood, these common features are apparent in the reception practices of all imperial texts, not just those in verse. The purpose of these exercises was to develop the skills in rhetoric, whether or not students chose to apply those skills to composing speeches. Exercises were not the only source of students’ development, though; as Ruth Webb argues, students were shaped by imitation of various sources, including their teachers themselves and performances by adult speakers.85 For instance, Dio Chrysostom’s revisionist Trojan Speech was delivered to the “men of Ilium” (ἄνδρες Ἰλιεῖς, section 4), and so that oration might have shaped the attitudes of that audience towards the contradiction of Homeric narratives. This is not to say that pupils who undertook education (or even part of it) received Homer only in non-contradictory ways, while those who completed their education penned only contradictory takes, as Embassy to Achilles shows. In this continuum of relationships to Homeric narrative, Quintus’ reception is positioned between, to take examples discussed in this chapter, Dio’s Trojan Speech, P.Oxy. XLII 3002, AP 9.474, and Heitsch #XXXVIII. Quintus does not re-word scenes from the Iliad or the Odyssey as in P.Oxy. XLII 3002’s rewording of the Achilles-Athena exchange in Iliad Book 1; instead, he applies Homeric diction to non-Homeric narratives. He adds to the Homeric, as in AP 9.474’s meeting between Eidothea and Helen. He expands the narratives that Homer tells. In all of this, Quintus takes on Homer and avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of, on the

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one hand, cleaving too close to the Homeric epics but also not, on the other hand, contradicting them. In this, the PH mirrors the schoolroom’s reception strategies. The next chapter examines another aspect of Homeric receptions, those produced by individuals outside of the classroom for popular audiences. Notes 1 The Rooster section 2 lines 8–9. I have adopted the title that Kim 2010b uses. Edition: Harmon 1913–1936. 2 Kim 2010b: 7. 3 Cribiore 2001: 194. 4 Cribiore 2001: 179; see Collins 2008: 227–228. That this estate manager is able to read and write implies that he had at least some education (see Webb 2017: 142). 5 Hunter 2018: 10–12. 6 Nagy 2004: 27. 7 Renker 2022 and Jenkins 2013. 8 Jenkins 2013: 24. 9 Kennedy 2003: xiii indicates which exercises ancient handbook authors discuss. 10 Morgan 1998: 3–4 and Cribiore 2001: 8. 11 Fish 1980: 14: “Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading but for writing texts.” 12 Morgan 1998: 198. Note Morgan’s characterization of the ancient pupil as active, which parallels Jenkins’ definition of modern fans. 13 See Morgan 1998: 197. 14 Hunter 2018: 25. 15 Edition: Felten 1913. Similar statements are made by other educators in the Roman Empire, such as the first-century Aelius Theon (οὐδὲ οἷς προσῆκόν ἐστιν ἐγγυμνασάμενοι, ἐπὶ τὰς δικανικὰς καὶ δημηγορικὰς ἵενται ὑποθέσεις, page 59, lines 8–10 of his Progymnasmata edition: Spengel 1854) and commentators on the fourth-century Aphthonius (Χρησιμεύει δὲ ἡμῖν εἰς τὰ κατὰ τὴν ῥητορικὴν εἴδη καὶ μέρη, ἔτι δὲ καὶ εἰς τὰ τοῦ πολιτικοῦ λόγου μέρη, vol. 14 p. 75 of Prolegomena in progymnasmata; edition: Rabe 1931) (see also Kennedy 2003: x), which testifies to the relative stability of this theory about education in the Roman Empire. 16 Cribiore 2001: 226 and 2009: 329. 17 Cribiore provides further details in her catalogue in 1996b 204 (#132), 220 (#199), and 213 (#168). 18 This prompt is preserved for us in one of the fourth-century sophist Libanius’ sample exercises, Progymnasmata 11.2 (Edition: Foerster 1915). Whether this exercise was actually authored by Libanius has been disputed (on which see Kennedy 2003: xxiii–xxv), but the important point for my argument here is that this prompt is a good representative of ancient educational practice. See also the other prompts for ethopoeae, similarly worded, at Fournet 1992: 255. 19 See also Webb 2006: 36–37. 20 Miguélez Cavero 2008: 104 and 340 outlines the difficulties of distinguishing school texts from professional compositions. 21 Maciver 2012b: 33–38. James and Lee 2000: 4 advance a literal interpretation that Quintus was a teacher whose “flocks” (μῆλα in line 309) were the students whom he taught. 22 Hoekstra 1965: 16–17. 23 Morgan 1998: 193. 24 Baumbach and Bär 2007a: 12. 25 Korenjak 2003. 26 Appel 1994: 9–13.

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27 Baumbach and Bär 2007a: 13 n. 61 are skeptical, arguing instead that Quintus was a sophist who performed his epic in a sophist venue. Bär 2010 fleshes out that argument with parallels between sophistic culture and the PH, particularly the speeches of Odysseus and Ajax in PH 5. Contra Maciver 2012a, who argues that those same features also appear in Homeric poetry. Appel’s and Baumbach and Bär’s arguments are at least partly due to widespread acceptance of the idea that rhetoric heavily influenced poetry of the Roman Empire, on which see Agosti 2012: 373–374. 28 Suda entry pi 1466. 29 Appel 1994: 9–13. 30 On the hybridity of Lucian’s output, see ní Mheallaigh: 2014: 13. 31 Hunter 2012. Miguélez Cavero 2008: 329 makes a similar point; in her view, students were tasked with identifying and highlighting features of ethopoeae that already occurred in Homeric poetry. See further comments on the connections between Triphiodorus and ethopoeae at Miguélez Cavero 2013: 37. 32 Suda entry tau 1111. 33 Cribiore 1996b: 13. 34 Miguélez Cavero 2008: 264–270 and 327–330. 35 Miguélez Cavero 2008: 264–270. See also the bibliography listed at Agosti 2012: 371 and 374. 36 Agosti 2012: 376 with further references. 37 Edition: Parsons 1974. I have reproduced Parsons’ editio princeps, accepting all of his readings and emendations. 38 Parsons 1974: 13. 39 Quote and “ineptitude”: Miguélez Cavero 2008: 156–157. Humanizes Athena: Potter 2004: 192–193. 40 Parsons 1974: 13, Delgado 1994: 302, and Ureña Bracero 1999: 325. 41 Ethopoeae: Heitsch #XVII (=1964: 60) line 14 and Heitsch #XXVI (=1964: 86) (line 11). Imperial epics: once in Oppian’s Halieutica and eight times in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca. 42 Once in Dionysius Perigetes’ Description of the World, four times in pseudo-Oppian’s Cyngetica, once in Quintus, twice by Manetho and Triphiodorus, and six times in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca. 43 This adjective also appears in Triphiodorus’ Capture of Troy line 639, in the narrator’s description of Achilles. 44 Heitsch #XXVI (=1964: 86). Imperial epics: once by Quintus, twice by Manetho, and a whopping thirteen times by Nonnus. 45 Schmitz 2007: 77. 46 Greensmith 2020: 191. 47 See Maciver 2012b on flyting in the PH as one of the ways that Quintus signals his relationship with Homer. 48 Kirk 1990: 172 and 176. 49 Rinzler 2008: 17 and 20–21. 50 Lucas says “the serial matinees I loved as a kid . . . I wondered why they didn’t make movies like that anymore. I still wanted to see them” (Rinzler 2008: 17). Lucas’ contemporary and director of Raiders Steven Spielberg gets more specific about his childhood experiences with serials at a local arthouse theater that showed serials on weekends, which, mutatis mutandis, was similar to Lucas’ childhood experiences. 51 Parsons 1974: 12. 52 Wifstrand 1933: 170 and Miguélez Cavero 2008: 324 and 340, with further bibliography. More generally, see Morgan 1998: 201–203. 53 Cribiore 2009: 325. 54 Helen’s presence in Egypt in the Homeric version is also assumed by Gantz 1993: 663–664. 55 Paton 1917: 263 n. 1 and Ureña Bracero 1999: 329.

Receptions in the Classroom 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

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Vian 1963–1969: 12. n1. Bär 2009: 158–159. James 2004: 269. Scheijnen 2018: 8. Horton 2020: 94 gives these criteria specifically for deleted scenes from the Star Wars films. Gray 2010: 101. The deleted scene in question appears on disc eight, which is the second bonus disc in The Complete Saga set. Proclus, Chrestomathy lines 273–274. Edition: Severyns 1963. Edition: Diggle 1984. Ureña Bracero 1999: 332 and Miguélez Cavero 2008: 324. Progymnasmata 11.16. In this way Aristides’ speech exemplifies Robert Penella’s statement that “The progymnasmata moved the student from study under the grammarian to the composition of declamations” (2015: 164). Sansome 2021: 281. Kim 2010b: 18. Dating: Fournet 1992: 258. Edition: De Stefani 2014: 42. On which, see notes 10 and 15 above. For the first position, see the previous comments about distinguishing student from professional compositions. The second position is taken by Miguélez Cavero 2008: 340. Behr 1986: 1 and 499. For a detailed analysis of how Aristides’ work adapts Phoenix’s rhetoric, see Sansome 2021. Behr 1986: 1 and 500 notes several parallels with Phoenix’s speech specifically. I have derived these numbers from the pages in Allen’s 1931 edition of the Iliad and Dindorf’s 1829 edition of the Embassy to Achilles. The number of pages in this comparison is a gross over-simplification, since Aristides’ ambassador collates material from a variety of places in the Iliad, not just Phoenix’s speech, and he does not use certain aspects of Phoenix’s speech, like the Meleager paradeigma. Jebb page 433 lines 28–32-page 434 line 1. On these points, see Sansome 2021: 289–292. See also Kim 2010: 18. Edition: Foerster 1915. Edition: von Arnim 1893–6. This idea is the main subject of another of Dio’s speeches, Oration 61, further evidence that the progymnasmata taught skills that were deployed in fully developed oratory. Boym 2001: XVIII. Agosti 2005 and Miguélez Cavero 2008: 188 et passim. She also suggests that her argument applies to the PH (Miguélez Cavero 2008: 5). Webb 2006: 36.

2

Popular Receptions

Introduction The examples of student exercises investigated in the previous chapter redeploy Homeric poetry by using recognizably Homeric vocabulary, but they stop short of re-using entire lines of verse. Even in the case of the re-wording strategy, in which students most closely approached the Homeric source text, wholesale copying is avoided entirely. Chapter 1’s AP 9.474 exemplified the expansion strategy by imagining a meeting between Eidothea and Helen, and another poem from that same collection exemplifies the reception strategy to be analyzed in this chapter. Χαῖρ’, Ἰθάκη· μετ’ ἄεθλα, μετ’ ἄλγεα πικρὰ θαλάσσης ἀσπασίως τεὸν οὖδας ἱκάνομαι, ὄφρα νοήσω Λαέρτην ἄλοχόν τε καὶ ἀγλαὸν υἱέα μοῦνον· σὸς γὰρ ἔρως κατέθελξεν ἐμὸν νόον· οἶδα καὶ αὐτός, “ὡς οὐδὲν γλύκιον ἧς πατρίδος οὐδὲ τοκήων.” (AP 9.458) Greetings, Ithaca! After the trials and bitter pains of the sea, I have reached your soil gladly, in order that I may see Laertes, my wife, and my splendid only son! Love of you enchanted my mind. Now I also know “That nothing is sweeter than your homeland and parents.” These lines echo the Homeric Odysseus’ sentiments about his native land expressed throughout the Odyssey, most closely paralleling a passage from the thirteenth book when the son of Laertes realizes that he has reached Ithaca at last: γήθησέν τ’ ἄρ’ ἔπειτα πολύτλας δῖος Ὀδυσσεὺς χαίρων ᾗ γαίῃ, κύσε δὲ ζείδωρον ἄρουραν. αὐτίκα δὲ Νύμφῃσ’ ἠρήσατο χεῖρας ἀνασχών· “Νύμφαι Νηϊάδες, κοῦραι Διός, οὔ ποτ’ ἐγώ γε ὄψεσθ’ ὔμμ’ ἐφάμην· νῦν δ’ εὐχωλῇσ’ ἀγανῇσι χαίρετ’· ἀτὰρ καὶ δῶρα διδώσομεν, ὡς τὸ πάρος περ, DOI: 10.4324/9781003378082-3

Popular Receptions 37 αἴ κεν ἐᾷ πρόφρων με Διὸς θυγάτηρ ἀγελείη αὐτόν τε ζώειν καί μοι φίλον υἱὸν ἀέξῃ.” (Odyssey 13.352–360) Then much-enduring, divine Odysseus rejoiced at the land, and he kissed the wheat-bearing field. At once, with uplifted hands, he prayed to the Nymphs: “Naiad Nymphs, daughters of Zeus, I declared that I would see you no longer, but as it is, rejoice in soothing thanksgivings. I will give gifts to you, as I did before, if Zeus’ daughter who carries off the spoil willingly allows me to live and my beloved son to prosper.” Even though this passage from the Odyssey and AP 9.458 have little diction in common, it is clear that the writer of the latter had the former in mind, compressing, streamlining, and expanding eight lines into four. The final line is a quotation of Odyssey 9.34, in which Odysseus describes his native land to the Phaeacians. So although this line is not being re-purposed to refer to something other than Ithaca, it is taken out of context, occurring long before Odysseus’ return to his native island, by which the author demonstrates mastery of the Odyssey, moving a Homeric character from words to knowledge. AP 9.458 mixes the re-wording strategy that its author learned in the classroom with different strategies, such as collation and quotation, a mixture that will be the focus of this chapter about popular receptions of Homer. By “popular” I mean “consumed by large audiences.” Venues like theaters could accommodate huge crowds, such as the 10,000 spectators that Geneviève Husson estimates for the theater at Oxyrhynchus.1 By contrast, the progymnasmata considered in the previous chapter had much more limited audiences, even if some of those exercises made it into compilations or were used to instruct future pupils. Classroom audiences were the pepaideumenoi, the educated (or in the process of being educated) elite of their society. Perhaps because of the disdain that attaches to popular culture in all times and places, popular receptions of Homer are exceedingly lacunose, if they survive in the first place. Beginning with a performance of part of the Iliad in the third century b.c.e., we will explore how these compositions are both similar to and different from the exercises assigned to students as well as Quintus’ PH. Performing Homer in the Third Century b.c.e. On a scrap of papyrus that Stephanie West dates to the third century b.c.e. and calls P12 are four lines from a description of Achilles’ arms that occurs during his fateful duel with Hector in Book 22 of the Iliad. καλαὶ δὲ περισσείοντο ἔθειραι χρύσεαι, ἃς Ἥφαιστος ἵει λόφον ἀμφὶ θαμειάς. οἷος δ’ ἀστὴρ εἶσι μετ’ ἀστράσι νυκτὸς ἀμολγῷ ἕσπερος, ὃς κάλλιστος ἐν οὐρανῷ ἵσταται ἀστήρ,

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Popular Receptions ὣς αἰχμῆς ἀπέλαμπ’ εὐήκεος, ἣν ἄρ’ Ἀχιλλεὺς πάλλεν δεξιτερῇ φρονέων κακὸν Ἕκτορι δίῳ (Iliad 22.315–320) The hairs of the crest were waving beautifully – golden, which Hephaestus placed all around the plume. Like an evening star, the loveliest one in the sky, will go among its fellows at the dead of night, so was the spear that Achilles, with evil intent against splendid Hector, was shaking in his right hand. χρύσεαι, ἃς Ἥφαιστος ἵει λόφον ἀμφὶ θαμειάς, σείων Πηλιάδα μελίην κατὰ δεξιὸν ὦμον δεινην· ἀμφὶ δὲ χαλκὸς ἐλάμπετο εἴκελος αὐγῇ ἤ πυρὸς αἰθομένου ἤ ἠελίου ἀντιόντος. (P12)2 Golden, which Hephaestus placed all around the plume, [Achilles?] brandishing Mount Pelion’s fearsome ashwood spear on his right shoulder, and its bronze was shining around like a ray, either of burning fire or the sun.

Both texts describe Achilles’ helmet and spear, but whereas the vulgate’s simile uses a star as its vehicle, P12 compares the spear to fire or sunshine. These same lines appear earlier in the same book, in the first encounter of Hector with Achilles, just before the Trojan prince takes off around his city’s walls in a vain attempt to outrace the swift-footed son of Peleus. Ὣς ὅρμαινε μένων, ὃ δέ οἱ σχεδὸν ἦλθεν Ἀχιλλεὺς ἶσος Ἐνυαλίῳ κορυθάϊκι πτολεμιστῇ σείων Πηλιάδα μελίην κατὰ δεξιὸν ὦμον δεινήν· ἀμφὶ δὲ χαλκὸς ἐλάμπετο εἴκελος αὐγῇ ἢ πυρὸς αἰθομένου ἢ ἠελίου ἀνιόντος. (Iliad 22.130–5) So he was pondering as he waited, and Achilles, equal to warlike Enyalius in his bright helmet, approached, brandishing Mount Pelion’s fearsome ashwood spear on his right shoulder. Its bronze was shining around like a ray, either of burning fire or the rising sun. That these lines are identical to verses that appear earlier has led some to interpret P12’s verses as an interpolation. Others have interpreted the existence of these verses on a papyrus separate from the manuscript tradition as so-called “plus verses”–that is, verses that are as “authentic” as those that editors have decided should appear in the vulgate texts. Interpolations have been explained as resulting from tired copyists making errors, but that theory is less convincing in cases like P12, which are independent of the vulgate manuscript tradition, so it is not a matter of editors identifying and eliminating verses in the vulgate. Instead of viewing

Popular Receptions 39 such plus verses as mistakes, it is more profitable to construe them as evidence of performance. This is the argument of Derek Collins; in his view, plus verses should be interpreted as the creations of performers trying to expand the Homeric poems not for private reading but for public performance. I have used the term “expand” intentionally to parallel the term that I used for the third strategy of reception in the previous chapter and to bring out the similarities and differences between elite and popular modes of reception.3 In the case of P12, the exigencies of performance impelled performers not only to recite Homeric text, as the identical lines in the vulgate and papyrus show, but also to create new verses that could be correlated with a prop. Such a prop suggests that P12’s plus verses were created not by rhapsodes, who used only gestures and an unadorned staff, but by a more theatrical type of performers called the Homeristai. The theatricality of the Homeristai will be discussed in greater detail further on in this chapter, but first we need to take a step back to examine attitudes towards such re-deployments of verses from the Homeric epics. Centonism and the Pepaideumenoi What we see in P12 and in other plus verses is a practice that dates at least to at least the late fifth century b.c.e.,4 but doing so became prevalent in the Roman Empire. This practice resulted in poems called “centos,” a word that in Greek means “patchwork garment,” because such poems “patched” together lines from the Iliad and/or Odyssey. Centos were used in a variety of situations and registers, from funerals (e.g., an epigram in honor of a deceased man),5 to medicine (e.g., a list of Iliadic verses chanted to cure illnesses),6 to divination (e.g., using verses from Homeric poetry as oracles)7 in what Philip Hardie has called “the naturalisation of the alien.”8 Homeric verses were re-deployed to address “alien” topics (that is, narratives not contained in the Homeric epics), including pagan subjects like Echo (AP 9.382) and Hero and Leander (AP 9.381), or Christian ones, like the fifthcentury Eudocia’s Homeric Centos.9 In this chapter, I confine my investigation to a sub-type of this “centonism,”10 poems that re-deploy Homeric verses to expand Homeric narratives. Whether or not centonism derives from the practices of Homeric performers, as Usher and Collins argue,11 they are strikingly similar. At some point, educators saw the value of using centonism in their classrooms. Centos are not mentioned in any extant education handbook, but we do get a sense of their pedagogical significance from one of Libanius’ letters. That late-fourth century educator addresses one Tatianus, who created a ποιήσεως . . . τῇ παρ’ Ὁμήρου δι’ αὐτῶν τῶν Ὁμήρου, “poem combined with Homer’s poetry through his verses” (Foerster letter 990 section 2). This was apparently a cento, though nothing remains of it.12 It re-deployed Homeric verses to form another Homeric narrative, according to Eudocia’s description: κεῖνος δ’ ἐξ ἐπέων σφετέρων ποίησεν ἀοιδὴν/Τρώων τ’ Ἀργείων τε κακὴν ἐνέπουσαν ἀϋτήν,/ὥς τε πόλιν Πριάμοιο διέπραθον υἷες Ἀχαιῶν, αὐτὴν Τροίαν ἔχουσαν, ἐν ἀργαλέῳ τε κυδοιμῷ/μαρναμένους αὐτούς τε θεούς, αὐτούς τε καὶ ἄνδρας (apol. 24–8), “He made a poem from [Homer’s] verses that told of the evil battle of Trojans

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and Argives and how the sons of the Achaeans were destroying Priam’s city, holding Troy itself, in the harsh battle cry, and the gods and mortals themselves fighting.” Libanius says that Tatianus’ poem made “education wider” (εὐρυτέρας τῆς παιδεύσεως), which might suggest that, since Libanius was a teacher himself, that he planned on using Tatianius’ poem as a model text in his schoolroom. Aside from this indirect evidence, the connection between education and centonism has also been suggested by Usher, who argues that centos paralleled rhetorical practices learned in classrooms, and Anna Lefteratou, who contends that various elements of the progymnasmata appear in Eudocia’s centos.13 Another connection between centonism and education is the exercise of paraphrase. In her exploration of the uses of paraphrase in the schoolroom, Laura Migulélez Cavero points out that paraphrase appears throughout ancient culture, not just as progymnasmata,14 and I connect this widely practiced cultural strategy to the relationship of plus verses to Homeric performance. Teachers like the first-century Theon, whose handbook includes a section on the paraphrase as an exercise, might have encouraged their students to practice centonism. The products of paraphrasing and centonism were different, though,15 in spite of their common origin. These practices are on a continuum, just like the receptions of Homer that they produced, but they were perceived very differently by different audiences. Whereas centonism was an accepted part of popular receptions of Homer, the elite pepaideumenoi were critical of it. This resulted from their experiences in the classroom. Their teachers assigned progymnasmata that were appropriately challenging for them to develop their skills, but, as is true of students at all times and places, once they had overcome the challenges of the progymnasmata, they were dismissive of them. Thus the pepaideumenoi wrote “spoof[s] on rhapsodic exercises in the schools”16 and satirized the wider cultural practice of centonism. These spoofs and satires did not expand Homer through Homer, to mis-quote a well-worn saying of the Hellenistic scholar Aristarchus, but rather addressed contemporary events with verses from the Iliad and Odyssey. Take, for instance, Dio Chrysostom, whose Trojan Speech we discussed in Chapter 1 in comparison to student receptions of Homer. A different oration by this sophist exhorts the inhabitants of the city of Alexandria to transcend their reputation for frivolity and instead live up to their illustrious history of intellectualism. This Oration 32 includes a cento in sections 82–85 that consists of thirty-six lines taken from the Iliad. The first line is Iliad 23.368, a description of the chariot race in the funeral games for Patroclus. This peacetime event, the only one in either the Iliad or the Odyssey, matches Dio’s subject, but the rest of the poem re-deploys Homeric verses from a variety of passages. Particularly discordant given the aim of this speech is line 24 of section 84, which is Achilles’ insult of Agamemnon: οἰνοβαρές, κυνὸς ὄμματ’ ἔχων, κραδίην δ’ ἐλάφοιο, “Drunkard with a dog’s eyes and the heart of a deer” (Il. 1.225). This cento also creates parts of lines with Homeric vocabulary that do not appear in the Homeric epics, like line 26 of section 84 (εἰ δ’ ἄγε νυν πείρησαι, ἵνα κναφθεὶς ἀποτίνῃς, “Come now, try, so you lie mangled”).

Popular Receptions 41 Dio pretends that this cento was authored by someone other than himself, execrating that putative individual in section 81 as τις . . . τῶν σαπρῶν τούτων ποιητῶν, “one of those rotten poets.” Dio is probably referring to himself,17 but in any case the phrase does attest to the disdain that Dio and his audience felt for centos. At the same time, the sophist doth protest too much: a cento does appear in one of his texts, is integral to his rhetoric, and is rather lengthy at thirty-six lines compared to other extant centos, which are often ten lines or less. Dio depicts the audiences that appreciated centos as an ὄχλῳ, “crowd, throng, mob” (section 24) and as ἀπαιδεύτοισι θεαταῖς, “uneducated spectators” (section 4). The adjective ἀπαίδευτος signals that centonism was disdained by the pepaideumenoi. This is also reinforced by the characterizations of rhapsodes by sophist-adjacent writers as Anne Gangloff points out, including Plutarch and Lucian.18 Similarly, the secondcentury writer Irenaeus is upset at centonists for their appropriation of the authority of Christian texts, but the discourse about education comes through again: Τίς οὐκ ἂν τῶν ἀπανούργων συναρπαγείη ὑπὸ τῶν ἐπῶν τούτων, καὶ νομίσειεν οὕτως αὐτὰ Ὅμηρον ἐπὶ ταύτης τῆς ὑποθέσεως πεποιηκέναι; Ὁ δ’ ἔμπειρος τῆς Ὁμηρικῆς ὑποθέσεως ἐπιγνώσεται, [suppl. μὲν τὰ ἔπη, τὴν δ’ ὑπόθεσιν οὐκ ἐπιγνώσεται,] εἰδὼς ὅτι τὸ μέν τι αὐτῶν ἐστι περὶ Ὀδυσσέως εἰρημένον, τὸ δὲ περὶ αὐτοῦ τοῦ Ἡρακλέος, τὸ δὲ περὶ Πριάμου, τὸ δὲ περὶ Μενελάου καὶ Ἀγαμέμνονος. Ἄρας δὲ αὐτὰ, καὶ ἓν ἕκαστον ἀποδοὺς τῇ ἰδίᾳ, ἐκποδὼν ποιήσει τὴν ὑπόθεσιν. (Against Heresies 1.1.45–56) What ignorant person would not be taken in by these verses and so would think that Homer had crafted them on that topic? One who is experienced in Homeric topics will recognize the verses, but not the topic, knowing that one verse was spoken about Odysseus, another about Heracles himself, another about Priam, and another about Menelaus and Agamemnon. This centonist takes the Homeric verses out, assigns each one to his own poem, and makes his own topic. The participle εἰδὼς, “knowing,” that he uses to describe centonists recalls Dio’s criticisms of centonism based in education. As one of the few who could read and write, Irenaeus likely had a similar educational experience as Dio, whence his critique of centos as problematic for uneducated audiences. Another example of centonism in intellectual circles shows us that not all highly educated individuals were as disdainful of the form. Much shorter than the one that appears in Oration 32 is a poem that commemorates a visit to Egypt by the Roman emperor Hadrian. That cento employs verses from the Iliad and Odyssey and was composed, as the final line tells us, by one Areius, who was employed by no less an intellectual institution than the Museum of Alexandria. Ὦ πόποι, ἦ μέγα θαῦμα τόδ’ ὀφ[θαλμοῖσιν ὁρῶμαι]· ἦ μάλα τις θεὸς ἔνδον, οἳ οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἔχουσιν, ἤϋσεν φωνήν· κατὰ δ’ ἔσχεθε λαὸν ἅπαντα.

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Popular Receptions Οὐ γάρ πως ἂν θνητὸς ἀνὴρ τάδε μηχανόῳτο. Ἀρείου Ὁμηρικοῦ ποιητοῦ ἐκ Μουσείου ἀκούσαντος. What a great marvel this is that I see with my eyes! Truly one of the gods, who inhabit wide heaven Shouted within and held back the entire populace, for a mortal could not bring these things about. [Composed] by Areius, Homeric poet, from the Museum, after he heard.

Like AP 9.458 that opened this chapter, Areius’ poem quotes Homeric verses, but whereas the former reproduces an entire verse only in its final line, the final line of Areius’ poem is the only one that is not a quotation: line 1 is Iliad 13.99, line 2 is Odyssey 19.40, line 3 is Odyssey 24.530 with a small alteration to the grammatical case of the second word, and line 4 is Odyssey 16.196. Μουσείου in the final line probably refers to the Museum of Alexandria, which was directly supported by the Roman emperors, particularly the philhellenic emperor Hadrian, whose visit occasioned Areius to compose this cento. The feeling was probably mutual, since Hadrian not only wrote Greek poetry but also admired it, especially Homer’s.19 By using lines from both Homeric epics, and even altering one slightly, as well as highlighting his membership in the Museum, Areius displays his erudition to an audience, some of whom were already “part of the intellectual elite,” in Patricia Rosenmeyer’s words, and others aspiring to be – the poem allowed individuals to participate in the erudite world that Areius evokes.20 That Areius’ cento also captured a popular audience is suggested by its find spot in a public place, inscribed on the right foot of a statue in southern Egypt.21 Quintus does not disdain the narrative strategies of centonism, but neither is his epic, as one critic alleged, “a kind of Homeric cento.”22 On the one hand, he never re-uses entire verses from Homeric poetry, and on the other hand, he does add to Homeric narratives and not contradict them. This puts the PH in the middle of the continuum – neither constrained by the Homeric poems nor departing from them. Homeristai I now return to the argument of Collins with which I ended my musings about the third-century b.c.e. papyrus P12. Collins speculates that these plus verses were created for performance, either by rhapsodes or by Homeristai. The latter are more germane for our explorations of Quintus’ poetics, for the Homeristai were especially popular in the imperial period. According to a passage from the third-century sophistadjacent Athenaeus, the Homeristai were created around the same time as the date of the P12 papyrus: ὅτι δ’ ἐκαλοῦντο οἱ ῥαψῳδοὶ καὶ Ὁμηρισταὶ Ἀριστοκλῆς εἴρηκεν ἐν τῷ περὶ Χορῶν. τοὺς δὲ νῦν Ὁμηριστὰς ὀνομαζομένους πρῶτος εἰς τὰ θέατρα παρήγαγε Δημήτριος ὁ Φαληρεύς., “Rhapsodes are also called Homeristai, as Aristocles said in his On Choruses. The first one to introduce those now called Homeristai into the theater was Demetrius of Phalerum.”23 This passage indicates that the Homeristai were similar to rhapsodes in the sense that they also performed

Popular Receptions 43 the Homeric epics, but their performances were more visual. Rhapsodes performed with a simple wooden staff, whereas Homeristai were actors with costumes and props, like a theatrical dagger with a retracting blade, as recounted in the second-century novel Leucippe and Clitophon (Book 4 Chapter 20 sections 6–7).24 Indeed, as Michael Hillgruber points out, the Homeristai incorporated elements that extra-theatrical performers used, since they were part of “‘Volkstheater’” (“folk theater.”)25 A special prop, like the spear of P12, is not out of the question for such performances. It is debatable whether the Homeristai replaced rhapsodes, as the latter appear in inscriptional evidence through Quintus’ own century,26 but in any event the Homeristai were quite popular in his day, performing in all parts of the empire, from the northwest (the Roman province of Noricum; modern-day Austria and Slovenia),27 to the east (Aphrodisias, a city in modernday Turkey),28 to the south (Egypt).29 Homeristai performed at festivals but were also hired for private occasions, as in the case of the wealthy Roman freedman Trimalchio’s dinner party. The audiences for their receptions were much broader than for Chapter 1’s classroom receptions, and so Homeristai performances are essential to understanding the entire continuum of imperial receptions of Homer. In spite of their name, the Homeristai performed passages from the Iliad and Odyssey as well as episodes from Homer-adjacent poetry. In the Satyricon, a firstcentury Roman novel, a band of Homeristai are hired by Trimalchio, a wealthy and gauche freedman: ipse Trimalchio in pulvino consedit, et cum Homeristae Graecis versibus colloquerentur, ut insolenter solent, ille canora voce Latine legebat librum.30 mox silentio facto “scitis” inquit “quam fabulam agant? Diomedes et Ganymedes duo fratres fuerunt. horum soror erat Helena. Agamemnon illam rapuit et Dianae cervam subiecit. ita nunc Homeros dicit quemadmodum inter se pugnent Troiani et Tarentini. vicit scilicet et Iphigeniam, filiam suam, Achilli dedit uxorem. ob eam rem Aiax insanit et statim argumentum explicabit.” haec ut dixit Trimalchio, clamorem Homeristae sustulerunt, interque familiam discurrentem vitulus in lance dunaria elixus allatus est, et quidem galeatus. secutus est Aiax strictoque gladio, tamquam insaniret, concidit, ac modo versa modo supina gesticulatus mucrone frusta collegit mirantibusque {vitulum} partitus est. (Satyricon 59) Trimalchio himself sat up on a cushion, and when the Homeristai spoke to each other in Greek verses, as they were arrogantly accustomed to do, he recited the text in Latin in a singsong voice. Soon he asked for silence and then said: “Do you know the story they’re doing? Diomedes and Ganymede were two brothers. Helen was their sister. Agamemnon carried her off and substituted a deer as a sacrifice to Diana. So Homer’s now telling the story of how the Trojans and the Tarentines fought with each other. Of course Agamemnon won and gave his daughter Iphigenia to Achilles in marriage. This drives Ajax mad, and he’ll explain the plot right now.” As Trimalchio said this, the Homeristai raised a

44 Popular Receptions shout, and among the slaves running in different directions a boiled calf was brought in on a presentation dish weighing two hundred pounds, and on its head was a helmet. Ajax followed after it and, as if he were mad, used his drawn sword to cut it to pieces, and after making first forehand then backhand sweeps, collected pieces on his sword point and divided them among the astonished guests.31 This passage has often been interpreted as a satire of the cultural pretensions of the nouveaux riches; Trimalchio cannot even get the fundamentals of the Iliad right! But perhaps instead of satire, some of the features of this performance are intentional improvisations. Instead of the uncouthness of Trimalchio being the butt of the joke, the non-eliteness (that is, as Greensmith puts it, “the anti-paideutic joke”)32 of the Homeristai and Trimalchio’s liking of their performance are. They are meant to be interpreted as ludicrous by the novel’s audience, since both the historical author and the narrator were elites: Petronius was a member of the Roman emperor Nero’s court, while the character narrating this passage, Encolpius, opens the extant part of the Satyricon by arguing with a sophist (appropriately named Agamemnon) and at another point appeals to his status as an educated individual (pro consortio studiorum, section 101), echoing the disdain of Homeristai-derived centonism by other pepaideumenoi like Dio and Irenaeus in his dismissal of the performance with adverb insolenter, “arrogantly.” The improvisatory nature of Trimalchio’s Homeristai becomes apparent from their performance’s most glaring “error.” The backdrop of the performance is the war between the Tarentines, not the Achaeans, and the Trojans.33 Tarentum was a town on the coast of southern Italy that was a Greek colony founded in the eighth century b.c.e. and absorbed by Rome in the second century b.c.e., with a Roman colonia established there in the first century. That the formerly Greek Tarentini oppose the proto-Roman Troiani is not a gaffe by the preposterous Trimalchio but this Homeristai troupe’s acknowledgment of their audience’s context. The novel relates that Trimalchio’s palatial home is located somewhere in southern Italy, with another estate near Tarentum (section 48), its rams being purchased directly from Tarentum (section 38). Trimalchio’s guests must either live in southern Italy, like the narrator himself, or be visiting. By swapping in Tarentines for Achaeans, the Homeristai improvise to address their audience more directly, in what must have been typical of their adaptions of Trojan war narratives.34 The first narrative episode in the performance is attributed to Homer specifically (Homeros dicit), which is then linked to the episode of Ajax’s madness, the identity of which is made clear by the omniscient narrator calling the meat carver Aiax.35 The irony and entertainment value in the context of Trimalchio’s dinner is highlighted by the actor Ajax’s carving of a roast calf, since this episode has the goddess Athena causing Ajax to lose his mind and slaughter the Achaeans’ cattle. This is not narrated at length in either the Iliad or the Odyssey, even though it appears elliptically when Odysseus encounters Ajax’s shade in Odyssey Book 11 who turns away, “angry about the victory that I won when I pleaded my case for the arms of Achilles beside the ships” (κεχολωμένη εἵνεκα νίκης,/τήν μιν ἐγὼ νίκησα δικαζόμενος

Popular Receptions 45 παρὰ νηυσὶ/τεύχεσιν ἀμφ’ Ἀχιλῆος, lines 544–6). The source of the Homeristai’s narrative here is the Epic Cycle poem the Little Iliad or perhaps Sophocles’ fifthcentury b.c.e. tragedy Ajax.36 As discussed in Chapter 1, it is impossible to know for sure whether the sources of any given progymnasma included drama, and the same is true here, though it is also important to observe that the performance of Trimalchio’s Homeristai does not contradict Homeric narratives. This troupe of Homeristai begin from Homer, but, as Hillgruber argues,37 they are not limited to the Iliad and Odyssey, because they go on to perform an episode that is known to the Homeric Odyssey but not narrated fully in it. They perform Homer and Homericize Homer-adjacent material (that is, in the case of Ajax’s madness, in a way already Homeric), linking the latter to the former and expanding the concept of what Homer is as they do so. Like Homer’s epics in the imperial period, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho is a canonical text that is frequently studied in modern classrooms. Perhaps for that reason, Gus Van Sant chose to remake it in a 1998 film of the same name. In contrast with other filmic remakes that adopt a loose attitude towards their hypotexts, Van Sant elected to make his Psycho a “shot-for-shot” remake – that is, one-to-one correspondences between each frame of the hypo- and hypertexts. Van Sant’s film is very nearly a carbon copy of Hitchcock’s film, but there are a number of small differences, the most notable being the insertions of new images. For instance, when Marion is murdered by Norman Bates, Hitchcock’s camera pans from Marion’s body to her blood going down the drain. This abstracted image might have inspired Van Sant to insert into this scene two shots of a sky with storm clouds moving over it. Charles Derry likens these shots to “surreal memory fragments,”38 a visual representation, a Homeric simile, a Homeristai improvisation, of Marion’s death. As Vera Dika proclaims of this film, “the viewer has been presented with the image itself and has been made to compare its material surface to the original, not as parody, but to reveal its status as an image.”39 In the same way, Trimalchio’s Homeristai perform Homeric narratives with insertions of their own, and in doing so draw our attention to the impossibility of truly remaking the originating image (Homer). The strategy of Trimalchio’s Homeristai parallels what the Byzantine grammarian Constantine Lascaris called Quintus’ “Homericizing” in the PH: . . . ἠθέλησε τὰ τῷ Ὁμήρῳ παραλελειμμένα τῆς Ἰλιάδος Ὁμηρικῶς ποιῆσαι, “he wished to Homericize the things left to the side by Homer in the Iliad.”40 Quintus also includes Ajax’s madness in his epic, but he makes it Ὁμηρικῶς, refracts that episode through the lens of Homer.41 At the same time, this addition to Homer parallels the narrative strategy of addition that we saw in the cases of student exercises and poems that appear in the Palatine Anthology. This strategy of addition contrasts with the reception of Homer by rhapsodes. Whereas the Homeristai improvised and expanded, rhapsodes stuck to the texts of the Homeric epics. In Chapter 1, I used Gregory Nagy’s term “scripture” to characterize the stability of the Homeric texts that were used in schoolrooms, and this term also applies to public Homeric performances. Prior to the second century b.c.e. rhapsodic performances had dominated public receptions of the Iliad and Odyssey,

46

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but this changed with Demetrius of Phalerum. In a passage quoted earlier, Athenaeus tells us that Demetrius created two categories of Homeric reception, by rhapsodes and Homeristai. Rhapsodes preserved scriptural rigidity and thus conservative interpretations of the Homeric epics for their audiences of οἱ γέροντες, “old men” (Plato Laws 658D)42 at symposia (Athenaeus Deip. 14.12.1–2). Symposia were drinking parties for elite men, who were often the pepaideumenoi, as Athenaeus’ guest list demonstrates. Rhapsodes also performed at public festivals, just as the Homeristai did, but the latter group’s interpretations of Homer were more flexible. They improvised and expanded, their notion of scripture more liberal than that of the rhapsodes. This is not to deny the creativity of rhapsodes, but compared to the Homeristai, rhapsodic performances engendered nostalgia in their audiences for Homeric poems that stayed the same. Achilles and Patroclus in a Homeristai Script Dating perhaps a hundred years after Petronius’ novel, a papyrus gives us further insight into the practices of the Homeristai. Its first editor identified it as a script for a Homeristai performance:43 . . . ιδεπυλ . . . . .η.ε..ροκ ψυχὴ ἐφειστήκει γοόωσά τε μυρομένη τε Πηλεΐδην . . . ουσα κατατ ὁσσάκι δ’ ὁρμήσειε πυλάων . . . . . . σελθειν θυρέων μ αρου τοσσάκι μιν προπάροιθεν ἀποστρέψασκε παραφθὰς Πάτροκλος και . . . ρος . . . “μνῆσαι πατρὸς σεῖο, θεοῖς ἐπιείκελ’ Ἀχιλλεῦ μηδὲ Θέτιν χήρην λείψῃς . . . πρίν τι κακὸν παθέειν· ῥεχθὲν δέ τε νήπιος ἔγνω μή τις ἀπ’ ἀθανάτων .ριαμ . . . ἐμβήῃ· μάλα τούς γε φιλεῖ ἑκάεργος Ἀπόλλων (P.Oxy XLII 3001)44 [untranslatable line] shade lamenting and weeping stood beside . . . the son of Peleus . . . and as many times as he stirred from gates . . . . . . of stone . . . So many times would Patroclus anticipate and turn him away [untranslatable line] “Keep in mind your father, godlike Achilles, and do not leave Thetis bereft . . . before suffering some evil. A fool recognizes a thing once it has been done. Lest any immortal . . . Enter. Far-shooting Apollo loves them very much.

Popular Receptions 47 These lines are a version of the scene in which the shade of Patroclus speaks to Achilles in Iliad Book 23: εὕδεις, αὐτὰρ ἐμεῖο λελασμένος ἔπλευ Ἀχιλλεῦ. οὐ μέν μευ ζώοντος ἀκήδεις, ἀλλὰ θανόντος· θάπτέ με ὅττι τάχιστα πύλας Ἀΐδαο περήσω. τῆλέ με εἴργουσι ψυχαὶ εἴδωλα καμόντων, οὐδέ μέ πω μίσγεσθαι ὑπὲρ ποταμοῖο ἐῶσιν, ἀλλ’ αὔτως ἀλάλημαι ἀν’ εὐρυπυλὲς Ἄϊδος δῶ. καί μοι δὸς τὴν χεῖρ’· ὀλοφύρομαι, οὐ γὰρ ἔτ’ αὖτις νίσομαι ἐξ Ἀΐδαο, ἐπήν με πυρὸς λελάχητε. οὐ μὲν γὰρ ζωοί γε φίλων ἀπάνευθεν ἑταίρων βουλὰς ἑζόμενοι βουλεύσομεν, ἀλλ’ ἐμὲ μὲν κὴρ ἀμφέχανε στυγερή, ἥ περ λάχε γιγνόμενόν περ· καὶ δὲ σοὶ αὐτῷ μοῖρα, θεοῖς ἐπιείκελ’ Ἀχιλλεῦ, τείχει ὕπο Τρώων εὐηφενέων ἀπολέσθαι. ἄλλο δέ τοι ἐρέω καὶ ἐφήσομαι αἴ κε πίθηαι· μὴ ἐμὰ σῶν ἀπάνευθε τιθήμεναι ὀστέ’ Ἀχιλλεῦ, ἀλλ’ ὁμοῦ ὡς ἐτράφημεν ἐν ὑμετέροισι δόμοισιν, εὖτέ με τυτθὸν ἐόντα Μενοίτιος ἐξ Ὀπόεντος ἤγαγεν ὑμέτερόνδ’ ἀνδροκτασίης ὕπο λυγρῆς, ἤματι τῷ ὅτε παῖδα κατέκτανον Ἀμφιδάμαντος νήπιος οὐκ ἐθέλων ἀμφ’ ἀστραγάλοισι χολωθείς· ἔνθά με δεξάμενος ἐν δώμασιν ἱππότα Πηλεὺς ἔτραφέ τ’ ἐνδυκέως καὶ σὸν θεράποντ’ ὀνόμηνεν· ὣς δὲ καὶ ὀστέα νῶϊν ὁμὴ σορὸς ἀμφικαλύπτοι χρύσεος ἀμφιφορεύς, τόν τοι πόρε πότνια μήτηρ. (Iliad 23.69–92) You are asleep and have forgotten me, Achilles. You cared for me in life as well as in death. Bury me so that I may quickly pass through Hades’ gates. Shades of the dead keep me at a distance, and they do not at all allow me to join them beyond the river. I wander at random through Hades’ wide-gated house. Give me your hand. I lament, because never again will I return from Hades until you give me my due of fire. For while we live far from our dear comrades we will not deliberate seated; rather a hateful fate, which was my lot, gaped for me. Achilles like the gods, it is your fate to die beneath the rich Trojans’ wall. I will tell you another thing if you will believe it: do not put my bones apart from yours, Achilles; instead, since we were raised together in your house when Menoetius led me from Opoeis to your house so that I would be safe because of a grievous murder, on the day when I killed Amphidamas’ son foolishly and unwillingly because I had gotten angry about a dice game. There the horseman Peleus received me in his house, raised me kindly, and named me your attendant. And so may an urn, a golden amphora, which your mother gave you, also cover both our bones.

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Only one of this papyrus’ lines derives from this passage, with others taken from different places in the Iliad, often having nothing to do with Patroclus, and still others altered or completely new, as the following table shows: Table 2.1 Comparative data for P.Oxy XLII 3001 and the Iliad P.Oxy XLII 3001

Iliad

line 4

=Iliad 23.106

line 6: ὁσσάκι δ’ ὁρμήσειε πυλάων . . .

~Iliad 22.194: ὁσσάκι δ’ ὁρμήσειε πυλάων Δαρδανιάων =Iliad 22.197 =Iliad 24.486 =Iliad 17.32 and Iliad 20.198 ~Iliad 16.93: μή τις ἀπ’ Οὐλύμποιο θεῶν αἰειγενετάων =Iliad 16.94

line 8 line 10 line 12 line 13: μή τις ἀπ’ ἀθανάτων ριαμ line 14

Line 4, in which Achilles is telling his companions about the visit he received on the previous night from Patroclus, is the only one that has an identical form and content as its Iliadic hypotext. Lines 6 and 8 come from Achilles’ and Hector’s monomachia. Part of line 6 is missing in the papyrus, and Parsons argues that the final word was probably different than the Iliad’s Δαρδανιάων.45 Priam implores Achilles to remember his father Peleus in Iliad 24.486, which is identical to the papyrus’ line 10. This has an Iliadic analogy in Patroclus’ recollection of how he was taken in by Peleus after an unintentional homicide (23.89–90), but none of the phrasing is the same. The script’s line 12 is identical to Iliad 17.32 and 20.198 but dissimilar in content. In the first instance, Menelaus recalls his killing of Euphorbus’ brother, and in the second, Achilles taunts Aeneas. The content of Iliad 16.94, on the other hand, is at least relevant to an interaction between Patroclus and Achilles: the final line comes from Achilles’ instruction to Patroclus to stop fighting after he saves the Achaeans’ ships. These seven lines are akin to those of Areius’ cento that are taken more or less directly from the Homeric poems. Other lines of this script, however, diverge from this method in adding verses not from the Iliad or Odyssey. In line 11, for example, Parsons sees “an ill-considered borrowing from Andromache’s lament” of Book 22, presumably because the adjective χήρην appears in the same form and metrical sedes only in Hector’s wife’s grief-stricken words at Iliad 22.484.46 Θέτιν (lemma: forty-two times) appears in the same form and metrical position only at Iliad 13.350, in which the narrator describes how a rampaging Poseidon wants to give glory to Thetis. The stem λειψ-appears twenty-seven times, though never in the subjunctive as it does in the script; its position between the third and fourth feet in the script is echoed twice in Homeric poetry.47 The first four words of line 3 are identical to Iliad 16.93, but the four subsequent letters that Parsons reads do not match the rest of that line. The only words that include these letters are the nouns Πρίαμος (“Priam”; 150x in the Iliad), Πριαμίδης (“son of Priam”; 33x), and

Popular Receptions 49 φωριαμός (“trunk”; 2x). Line 5’s Πηλεΐδην appears in Homeric poetry twice in the same metrical slot, in the narrator’s description of the Myrmidons’ failed attempt to get Achilles to bathe (Il. 23.41), and in the narrator’s introduction of Antilochus’ concession speech (Il. 23.452). These instances document how the Homeristai redeployed Homeric verses whose content is far removed from Achilles’ dream of the departed Patroclus and, by doing so, created new meanings. The Homeristai used the Iliad and Odyssey in innovative ways, similar to and different from other compositions that we have been analyzing in this book. Unlike Dio’s cento, which employs lines from the Homeric epics to address a different subject than a Homeric narrative, the Homeristai script collates various lines from various places in the Iliad and puts them together to intensify a Homeric episode. Like the student exercises of the previous chapter, the script re-writes Homer, at times making use of the more conservative re-wording strategy as in P.Oxy XLII 3002, at other times more liberally as in AP 9.474, expanding Homeric narrative. Achilles and Patroclus in Homer, Libanius, and Quintus The relationship of the Homeristai script to educational exercises and to Quintus is illuminated by a text authored by the fourth-century Libanius. Since Libanius was himself a teacher, several of his extant works are progymnasmata intended for students to study and presumably use as models for their own compositions. In one of them, Progymnasmata 11, Libanius treated a narrative similar to the one in the Homeristai script, envisioning what Achilles would say on seeing Patroclus’ body. This exercise re-writes Achilles’ lament of Iliad 23, as indicated by its title Τίνας ἂν εἴποι λόγους Ἀχιλλεὺς ἐπὶ Πατρόκλῳ κειμένῳ;, “What would Achilles say to the deceased Patroclus?” Table 2.2 Comparative data for Libanius and the Iliad Libanius

Iliad parallel

section 1: (a) Achilles’ failed expectation that Patroclus would return alive and (b) Patroclus helped the Achaeans to his own detriment section 2: (a) Patroclus supported Achilles against Agamemnon and (b) Patroclus’ decision to come to Troy section 3: (a) Patroclus’ use of Achilles’ armor and (b) Patroclus’ defense of the Achaean fleet section 4: Achilles’ dread at visiting Patroclus’ father section 5: Achilles’ and Patroclus’ future common burial site section 6: Achilles’ vow to kill Hector and to drag his corpse section 7: Achilles’ desire to find new equipment but not borrow from Ajax section 8: Achilles asking Thetis to approach Hephaestus for new equipment

(a) Achilles: Il. 16.247 (b) Achilles: Il. 18.12–13 (a) narrator: Il. 1.304–307 (b) ~Nestor: Il. 11.765–6 (a) Achilles: Il. 16.64 (b) narrator: Il. 16.293 no parallel in Homeric epics Patroclus: Il. 23.83–92 narrator: Il. 23.396–403 no parallel in Homeric epics Thetis: Il. 18.135–6

50 Popular Receptions This progymnasma riffs on a related, though different, Iliadic passage from the one featured in the Homeristai papyrus. In this scene, which takes place prior to Patroclus’ visit, Achilles laments his death: τοῖσι δὲ Πηλεΐδης ἁδινοῦ ἐξῆρχε γόοιο χεῖρας ἐπ’ ἀνδροφόνους θέμενος στήθεσσιν ἑταίρου· χαῖρέ μοι ὦ Πάτροκλε καὶ εἰν Ἀΐδαο δόμοισι· πάντα γὰρ ἤδη τοι τελέω τὰ πάροιθεν ὑπέστην Ἕκτορα δεῦρ’ ἐρύσας δώσειν κυσὶν ὠμὰ δάσασθαι, δώδεκα δὲ προπάροιθε πυρῆς ἀποδειροτομήσειν Τρώων ἀγλαὰ τέκνα σέθεν κταμένοιο χολωθείς. (Iliad 23.17–23) For them the son of Peleus began an endless lament, putting his murderous hands on his comrade’s chest. “I greet you, Patroclus, even in Hades’ house, because I am fulfilling everything that I promised before to you – that, having dragged Hector here, I will give him to dogs to eat raw, and that in front of your pyre I will cut the throats of twelve glorious Trojan children in anger at your death.” Both Libanius’ exercise and the Homeristai script intensify the Iliad, though in different ways. The purpose of the former is to demonstrate that the composer is knowledgeable about the various episodes related to Patroclus’ death, while the latter compiles related Homeric moments for the delectation of the audience. The reanimation of Homeric narrative in these two texts differs from Quintus’ treatment of Patroclus. Because the PH takes place after Patroclus’ death, there was no need for Quintus to tread the same narrative ground as Libanius and the Homeristai, but nevertheless he does. Unlike the Homerstai and Libanius, Quintus does not recall the various episodes surrounding Achilles’ lament of Patroclus. Intertexuality with Homer is instead achieved through the word ἑταῖρος, “comrade.” See table 2.3 on the following page. When Achilles makes his first appearance in the PH, he is taking turns with Ajax lamenting at Patroclus’ tomb. The narrator says only that the two warriors are “remembering their comrade.” Furthermore, Quintus re-uses Homeric words but not entire lines. Patroclus is described as a ἑτάροιο of Achilles and Ajax at PH 1.379, the archaic genitive singular creating a strong intertextual bond between it and the Homeric epics. Just as Quintus does, the Homeric narrator uses that word to describe Patroclus at Iliad 23.152, where the context is also lamentation for the fallen Patroclus. Quintus complicates this straightforwardness by using words that appear elsewhere in Homeric poetry in very different contexts. The participle μνησάμενοι and the genitive noun ἑτάροιο also appear at Odyssey 12.390, Odysseus’ description of how his crewmates recall Scylla killing their comrades (μνησάμενοι δὴ ἔπειτα φίλους ἔκλαιον ἑταίρους), and at Odyssey 22.208, where Odysseus asks Mentor to remember him: μνῆσαι δ’ ἑτάροιο φίλοιο. Quintus uses a different grammatical

Popular Receptions 51 Table 2.3 Depictions of Patroclus in the Posthomerica Posthomeric Patroclus

translation & speaker

1. ἀλλ’ ἄμφω περὶ σῆμα Μενοιτιάδαο κέχυντο μνησάμενοι ἑτάροιο, γόος δ’ ἔχεν ἄλλυδις ἄλλον (1.378–9)

narrator: “Both of them [Achilles and Ajax] had thrown themselves down around the tomb of Menoiteus’ son, Remembering their comrade, and grief held now one, now the other.” narrator: “As much as before around the grave of the deceased Patroclus.” Achilles: “I will take vengeance on you in anger for Antilochus, just as I did on Hector for Patroclus.” narrator: “The same as about his comrade Patroclus, killed in battle.” narrator: “[a prize that] before, mighty, great Patroclus took from the Trojans after killing shining Sarpedon.” Odysseus: “around the grave of Patroclus killed in battle” Agamemnon: “angry for the fallen Patroclus”

2. ὁππόσον ἀμφ’ ἑτάροιο πάρος Πατρόκλοιο δαμέντος (1.721) 3. Ἕκτορα γὰρ sΠατρόκλοιο, σὲ δ’ Ἀντιλόχοιο χολωθεὶς τίσομαι· (2.447–8) 4. οἷόν τ’ ἀμφ’ ἑτάροιο δαϊκταμένου Πατρόκλοιο (3.538) 5. πρόσθε βίη μεγάλου Πατρόκλοιοἤλασεν ἐκ Τρώων Σαρπηδόνα δῖον ὀλέσσας (4.289–290) 6. περὶ σῆμα δαϊκταμένου Πατρόκλοιο (5.315) 7. χωόμενος Πατρόκλοιο δεδουπότος· (7.697)

construction, as well as a different verb. This comparison shows how Quintus is similar to centonists in drawing from the diction and content of Homeric poetry, but different from them in varying these two elements significantly. Quintus’ variation also allows for multiple resonances with the Homeric epics, rather than the strict one-to-one comparisons of centos. Whereas Libanius and the Homeristai refer to a vast network of narrative episodes, Quintus limits his references to Patroclus to a handful of Iliadic narratives. In addition to the Posthomeric Patroclus being a ἑταῖρος, his death is recalled frequently in different contexts by different characters as the reason for Achilles’ subsequent anger (item #7) and killing of Hector, its memorialization with games (item #5), and its effect on Achilles’ appearance (item #4). None of these are connected to Achilles’ lament and subsequent actions, as they are in the Homeristai script and Libanius. These reveal that Quintus wants his audience to draw on specific elements from their memories of the Homeric version of Patroclus. The emphasis is on the audience’s memory, rather than a mastery of details, as in Progymnasma 11, or a deepening of a specific scene, as in the Homeristai script. The Heracles Cento Previously, we discussed how centonism probably grew out of the performance practices of rhapsodes and Homeristai, and a comparison of a cento on a Homeric topic will shed further light on the similarities to and differences from their receptions of Homer and Quintus. The following poem is preserved for us by Irenaeus,

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in the same passage where he expresses his negativity towards centonism, discussed previously. Ὡς εἰπὼν, ἀπέπεμπε δόμων βαρέα στενάχοντα Φῶθ’ Ἡρακλῆα, μεγάλων ἐπιΐστορα ἔργων, Εὐρυσθεὺς, Σθενέλοιο πάϊς Περσηϊάδαο Ἐξ Ἐρέβευς ἄξοντα κύνα στυγεροῦ Ἀΐδαο. Βῆ δ’ ἴμεν, ὥστε λέων ὀρεσίτροφος ἀλκὶ πεποιθὼς Καρπαλίμως ἀνὰ ἄστυ· φίλοι δ’ ἀνὰ πάντες ἕποντο, Νύμφαι τ’ ἠΐθεοί τε, πολύτλητοί τε γέροντες, Οἶκτρ’ ὀλοφυρόμενοι, ὡσεὶ θάνατόνδε κίοντα. Ἑρμείας δ’ ἀπέπεμπεν, ἰδὲ γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη· Ἤιδεε γὰρ κατὰ θυμὸν ἀδελφεὸν, ὡς ἐπονεῖτο. (Against Heresies 1.1.35–44) Thus Eurystheus, child of Sthenelus, grandson of Perseus, spoke, and he sent him away groaning heavily, the man Heracles, privy to great deeds, to carry off the dog of abominable Hades from Erebus. He went through the city swiftly, like a mountain-bred lion who trusts his strength. All of his allies followed – brides, bachelors, old men who had endured much – lamenting piteously, as if he were going to death. Hermes sent him out, and gray-eyed Athena, for she knew how her brother intended to labor. These verses derive from different passages in the Iliad and Odyssey, many from narratives about Heracles. Like the madness of Ajax as performed by Trimalchio’s Homeristai, a narrative that already exists in the Homeric epics is expanded by imperial artists. Even though he lived a few generations before the Trojan War of Homer’s epics, Heracles is an important paradigm for the Achaeans, and so he is one of the most Homeric elements, as paranarratives about him are “relevant in some way either to the interpretation of their immediate context or to that of the main narrative, or both.”48 Moreover, just as Ajax’s madness is told elliptically in the Odyssean underworld, Heracles’ labor is mentioned in Iliad Book 8 by Athena. εἰ γὰρ ἐγὼ τάδε ᾔδε’ ἐνὶ φρεσὶ πευκαλίμῃσιν εὖτέ μιν εἰς Ἀΐδαο πυλάρταο προὔπεμψεν ἐξ Ἐρέβευς ἄξοντα κύνα στυγεροῦ Ἀΐδαο, οὐκ ἂν ὑπεξέφυγε Στυγὸς ὕδατος αἰπὰ ῥέεθρα. (Iliad 8.366–9) Had I known these things in my sharp mind when he sent him forth to the house of Hades, fastener of the gate, to carry off the dog of abominable Hades from Erebus, he would not have escaped the sheer streams of the Styx. The Heracles cento poet has expanded the Iliadic Athena’s paranarrative from four lines to ten, in much the same way as P12 expands the description of Achilles’

Popular Receptions 53 weapons. Irenaeus quotes this poem as an example of how centonists twist meanings, but the Heracles cento that he cites would be entirely appropriate in the Iliad, in terms of vocabulary, phraseology, and content. As in the Iliad and Odyssey, Heracles makes frequent appearances in the PH, and the very same labor described in the cento is one of the scenes on his grandson Eurypylus’ shield: Ἐν δ’ ἄρ’ ἔην μέγα δεῖμα καὶ ἀθανάτοισιν ἰδέσθαι Κέρβερος ὅν ῥ’ ἀκάμαντι Τυφωέι γείνατ’ Ἔχιδνα ἄντρῳ ὑπ’ ὀκρυόεντι, μελαίνης ἀγχόθι Νυκτὸς ἀργαλέης. Ὃ δ’ ἄρ’ ἦεν ἀεικέλιόν τι πέλωρον, ἀμφ’ ὀλοῇσι πύλῃσι πολυκλαύτου Ἀίδαο εἴργων νεκρὸν ὅμιλον ὑπ’ ἠερόεντι βερέθρῳ· ῥεῖα δέ μιν Διὸς υἱὸς ὑπὸ πληγῇσι δαμάσσας ἦγε καρηβαρέοντα παρὰ Στυγὸς αἰπὰ ῥέεθρα, ἕλκων οὐκ ἐθέλοντα βίῃ πρὸς ἀήθεα χῶρον θαρσαλέως. (PH 6.260–268) On it was a great terror even for immortals to see, Cerberus, whom Echidna bore for tireless Typhoeus At the foot of a chilling cave, near swift black Night. He was an unseemly monster that shut in the dead throng Beneath the misty pit around the destructive gates Of much-lamented Hades. Easily did the son of Zeus Overcome him with beatings and, staggering beside the sheer streams of the Styx, carry him, confidently dragging him by force to a strange place though he was unwilling. Here Quintus combines several different elements from his Homeric hypotexts, which parallel, but do not mirror, the centonist’s strategy of re-deploying verses from both the Iliad and the Odyssey. In addition, many words in the Posthomeric passage are found in the Homeric lexicon, but some are not. Quintus also pastes together names and narratives that appear in the Homeric poems with those that do not: for instance, neither “Cerberus” nor “Echidna” appear in the Homeric epics, whereas “Typhoeus” does. Ecphrases provide another angle on this technique of expanding but not replicating Homer. Calum Maciver has done this admirably with Quintus’ version of the shield of Achilles, ecphrasized in Book 18 of the Iliad and re-deployed in similar yet different terms in Book 5 of the PH.49 The Heracles cento evokes another Posthomeric ecphrasis, of Philoctetes’ belt, given to him by Heracles, which is also described in Odyssey Book 11. As in the case of Achilles’ shield, this ecphrasis is strikingly similar to a Homeric one. Odysseus’ encounter with Heracles in the underworld occasions a description of the latter’s baldric:

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Popular Receptions σμερδαλέος δέ οἱ ἀμφὶ περὶ στήθεσσιν ἀορτὴρ χρύσεος ἦν τελαμών, ἵνα θέσκελα ἔργα τέτυκτο, ἄρκτοι τ’ ἀγρότεροί τε σύες χαροποί τε λέοντες, ὑσμῖναί τε μάχαι τε φόνοι τ’ ἀνδροκτασίαι τε. μὴ τεχνησάμενος μηδ’ ἄλλο τι τεχνήσαιτο, ὃς κεῖνον τελαμῶνα ἑῇ ἐγκάτθετο τέχνῃ. (Odyssey 11.609–614) The belt around his chest, a golden baldric, was fearful, on which god-fearing works had been made: bears, wild boars, fierce lions, fights, battles, murders, and homicides. May the craftsman, who designed that baldric with his skill, not make anything else.

PH 11.204–205 relates that Philoctetes’ bow and the belt that holds it was given to him by Heracles. Is this the same object as the described in the Odyssey 11 passage we considered previously? It is unclear, but that ambiguity is part of Quintus’ aesthetics. Περὶ γάρ οἱ ἐν ζωστῆρι φαεινῷ ἄρκτοι ἔσαν βλοσυραὶ καὶ ἀναιδέες· ἀμφὶ δὲ θῶες σμερδαλέοι καὶ λυγρὸν ὑπ’ ὀφρύσι μειδιόωσαι πορδάλιες· τῶν δ’ ἄγχι λύκοι ἔσαν ὀβριμόθυμοι καὶ σύες ἀργιόδοντες ἐυσθενέες τε λέοντες, ἐκπάγλως ζωοῖσιν ἐοικότες· ἀμφὶ δὲ πάντῃ ὑσμῖναι ἐνέκειντο μετ’ ἀργαλέοιο Φόνοιο· δαίδαλα μέν οἱ τόσσα περὶ ζωστῆρα τέτυκτο. (PH 10.180–187) On his shining belt were bristling and ruthless bears, fearful jackals, and leopards grinning banefully beneath their brows. Near them were spirited wolves, sharp-tusked boars, and strong lions, looking just like they were alive. All around it were fights, accompanied by painful Murder. So many cunning things had been designed around his belt. The words for these two items are different in the two passages: whereas in the Odyssey Heracles’ baldric is called a τελαμών, in the PH Philoctetes’ baldric is a ζωστῆρ. Since in the Posthomeric universe Heracles gave his baldric to Philoctetes (11.204), Quintus’ audience interprets the τελαμών and the ζωστῆρ as one and the same. This is confirmed by the interchangeable meanings of τελαμών and ζωστῆρ in the Homeric lexicon as well as by their similar decorations. Both ecphrases have bears, lions, and boars (denoted by the same nouns, ἄρκτοι, λέοντες, and σύες), fighting. Quintus adds other creatures: leopards, wolves, and jackals, all of which have Homeric precedents. He transfers the adjective σμερδαλέος, “fearful,” from a description of the baldric to a description of jackals. The other adjectives in the ecphrasis also appear in Homeric verses, but not in the

Popular Receptions 55 ecphrasis of the baldric. This Posthomeric ecphrasis, then, highlights its author’s similarities to and differences from centonism. Even though none of Quintus’ verses is taken from Odyssey, there are various engagements with the Odyssean Heracles’ baldric on general levels of narrative and structure of the decorations as well as specific levels of word choices. Like Maciver’s interpretation of the Iliadic and Posthomeric shields of Achilles, Quintus’ ecphrasis of Philoctetes’ baldric advertises his “very Homeric, but un-Homeric, poem.”50 Conclusion This chapter has explored the different ways that the Homeric epics were performed in public venues during the imperial period. Such performances were “popular” in the sense that their audiences included elites and non-elites.51 Popular performances of Homer were beloved by imperial audiences, as the geographical and chronological distribution of the Homeristai’s performances suggest. This chapter has also investigated how these popular performances compare and contrast with Quintus’ PH. Even though few centos are extant, much less ones whose narratives fit into the story-world of the Homeric epics, they were hugely popular in the Roman Empire in a variety of forms, from epigrams to medical writings. There are few examples of centos that center on narratives told in the Homeric epics, however, perhaps due to the criticisms of individuals like Dio and Irenaeus, which reflect a negative attitude resulting from classroom experiences with Homer. Comparisons of the PH to the third-century b.c.e. P12, to the second-century P.Oxy XLII 3001, and to the Heracles cento show that Quintus’ reception strategies are similar to and different from popular receptions of Homer. He shares with them the aim of re-deploying Homeric poetry in order to tell stories that do not appear in the Iliad or Odyssey. The origin of their shared techniques of word choice and extension of narrative episodes in the Homeric epics is the same, though used differently, in education. Whereas other imperial texts received Homer by contradicting the narrative universe that his poetry created, Quintus’ epic adds to and adapts Homeric verses. An important difference is that Quintus does not re-deploy whole verses from the Iliad or Odyssey, as popular receptions did. Instead, he uses Homeric vocabulary to create something new and yet closely connected to the characters and events of his hypotext. In the imperial period, rhapsodes, per Anne Gangloff, were “comme représentants de la poésie épique traditionelle à l’époque imperiale,”52 transmitters of traditional interpretations of Homeric verses. Still, they differed from students’ experiences of stable classroom texts in that they performed in front of diverse audiences. For that reason, rhapsodic performances added dimensions to Homeric poetry through their enunciation, gesticulation, and props. If the plus verses of P12 were created by rhapsodes, that papyrus is evidence of how Homeric performance changed the Homeric epics, and the same can be said of rhapsodes’ successors in the theaters, the Homeristai. Building on rhapsodic performance, they regularly expanded Homer, as their predecessors did, but their expansions and additions of non-Homeric material pushed the envelope with flamboyant improvisations

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that catered to the audience and additions of non-Homeric narrative material. In his epic, Quintus incorporates many of the strategies of such popular receptions. Greensmith collates oratory, student exercises, and the Homeristai,53 and while there are important commonalities between these three types of Homeric reception, elite and non-elite is an important difference. In Chapter 1 we explored the elite receptions of the classroom by students, some of whom went on to become pepaideumenoi, writing declamations as sophists and/or listening to them in the audience. This contrasts with the non-elite receptions of this chapter, although they share an origin, and both are engaging with the cultural capital of Homer. The nostalgias that these two categories evoked in their audiences were quite different. In combining these two, Quintus trades on a nostalgia held by both educated and non-educated alike. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29

Husson 1993: 99. Text after West 1965: 144. Greensmith uses the similar term “Homeric textual expansion” (2020: 72). Salanitro 1997: 2325–2334. Hunter 2018: 16–17. Rowlandson 1998: 340–341. Martín-Hernández 2013. Hardie 2008: 171. On Eudocia, see Usher 1998 and Lefteratou 2019. I use this term after Usher 1998: 2. Usher 1998: 28. Cribiore 2001: 227–228 calls Tatianus’ poem “some sort of a Homeric Cento.” Usher 1998: 29 and Lefteratou 2019. Miguélez Cavero 2008: 312. ibid. Usher 1998: 28. See Cohoon and Crosby 1940: 255 n. 1 (“doubtless Dio himself”); their view is supported by the numerous other (unattributed) centos that appear throughout Oration 32. Gangloff 2018: 142. Bowie 2002 investigates Hadrian’s taste in Greek verses, noting that the Roman emperor had a particular interest in Homer. Rosenmeyer 2018: 139. Bernand 1960: 111. Knox 1985: 715. Deipnosophistae 14.12 lines 8–11. In Hillgruber’s estimation, this passage shows that the Homeristai incorporated elements used by other extra-theatrical performers, such as “den Zauberern und Gauklern, Mimen und Pantomimen” (“magicians, jugglers, mimes, and pantomimes”) (2000: 67). See also Webb 2008: 25’s list of public performers in the Roman Empire: “dancers, jugglers, tightrope walkers . . . acrobats, clowns, ‘wonder workers,’ strong-men, puppeteers, conjurers, knife jugglers, . . . dancing bears, . . . [and] beggars performing stunts.” Hillgruber 2000: 67. For this debate, see especially West 2010, Gangloff 2010 and 2018. Heger 1980. Roueché 1993: 18–22. Hillgruber 2000: 68.

Popular Receptions 57 30 On the nature of this book, see Hillgruber 2000: 64 n. 5, who argues that it is not a Latin translation of Homer; contra Nagy 1996: 169 and Greensmith 2020: 72. 31 Edition and translation (with modifications): Schmeling 2020. 32 Greensmith 2020: 72. 33 I have accepted Schmeling’s reading Tarentini over Scheffer’s Parentini. 34 In keeping with Nagy’s notion that the Homeric poems were “script” in the imperial period, González 2013: 451 feels that the Homeristai had “more slavish dependence on a script for his performance.” See also Nagy 1996: 178 n. 90: “the performance traditions of the Homeristai were bound, by default, to a more canonical textual tradition of Homer.” (italics in the original) Contra Greensmith 2020: 70. 35 As Collins 2004: 210 also suggests, this individual is, in my opinion, another one of the Homeristai. It is unclear whether Aias is a member of the familia (i.e., Trimalchio’s personal servants) or the hired Homeristai. On the one hand, Romans did name slaves after Homeric characters (including gladiators named Aias; see Robert 1971: 114 and Freijeiro 1950: 134), so it is not impossible that Petronius’ Aias belongs to Trimalchio’s familia, but on the other hand, Aias is a part of the narrative that the troupe performs. In support of this last point is that a servant, at an earlier point called scissor (section 36), is ordered to serve the meat by Trimalchio with an imperative, neither of which applies to Aias. 36 The second possibility is supported by a comment of Libanius, who suggests that this episode stems from “drama” (σκηνή) (Progymnasmata 12 section 23). That Libanius composed ideal exercises for his handbook further suggests that this episode was a common topic for progymnasmata. 37 Hillgruber 2000: 65. 38 Derry 2009: 121. 39 Dika 2003: 215. Italics in the original. 40 Edition: quoted by Köchly 1850: cxii. 41 On Quintus’ portrayal of Ajax’s madness, see James and Lee 2000. 42 Gangloff 2018: 130. Although Plato wrote the Laws at the end of the fifth century or beginning of the fourth century b.c.e., his testimony is still applicable to the imperial period, as Athenaeus suggests. 43 Parsons 1974: 9, with additional support in Hillgruber 2000: 64 n. 5, Parsons 2012: 21–23, and Greensmith 2020: 76. Nagy 1996: 178 n. 90 and Hunt 2019 are skeptical. 44 Edition: Parsons 1974. 45 Parsons 1974: 11. 46 Andromache uses this same word to describe herself some lines later at 22.499. 47 Uncompounded forms of λειψ- occur between the third and fourth feet at Il. 18.11 and 24.742. Compound forms of λειψ- occur between the third and fourth feet at Il. 10.377, 12.226, 14.171, and 18.11. 48 Alden 2000: 1. 49 Maciver 2012a: 39–86. 50 Maciver 2012a: 86. 51 See Husson’s statement that the audiences for popular performances were not only elites (“l’élite municipal, ‘ceux de gymnase’ et les habitants qui pouvaient se prévaloir d’une ascendance greque”) but also non-elites (“cette société urbaine de la chôra”) (1993: 99). 52 Gangloff 2010: 51. 53 Greensmith 2020: 49–80.

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Introduction In the early third century, the sophist Lucius Flavius Philostratus wrote a biographical novel titled Life of Apollonius of Tyana about a philosopher who lived a few hundred years before the author’s time. In his travels to Asia Minor, he spends a night by the grave of Achilles, where the ghost of the Achaean warrior reveals special knowledge imparted to him by his participation in the Trojan War. Achilles permits the curious philosopher to ask five questions, and his answers reveal details of Homer’s depictions of the Trojan War that are correct, incorrect, or omitted altogether. For instance, he tells the philosopher that that Helen was actually in Egypt and never came to Troy at all (4.16.5). We encountered this tradition in the first chapter in connection with the “deleted scene” poem AP 9.474, where we concluded that this narrative strand, in which the divinely crafted doppelgänger of Helen goes with Paris to Troy, causing Achaeans and Trojans to fight and die for her, does not appear in either of the Homeric epics. These traditions about Helen will be a main focus in this chapter as an indication of opposition to Homeric narrative. Philostratus can correct the Homeric Helen’s narrative because his sources and Homer’s are different, a mortal participant versus immortal, omnipresent goddesses. This chapter investigates how source citation is an important element of Homeric receptions in the imperial period, in part because source is an important element of the Homeric epics themselves, but also because of larger cultural currents in Quintus’ own time. The imperial interest in source citation arose as a consequence of the Roman Empire’s accumulation of texts and subsequent spread of knowledge. This was a gradual process that was instigated at first by Rome’s military expansions and subsequent accessions of territory that already had accumulated knowledge. Egypt, which Rome made a part of its empire at the end of the first century b.c.e., is a good example. Its capital city, Alexandria, boasted a library that held texts acquired over many hundreds of years. From the first century c.e. onwards, the knowledge accumulated through such military acquisitions was disseminated through the building of new libraries, like the two built by the Roman Emperor Trajan, who had two libraries, one with Greek texts and the other with Latin texts, in his forum in the center of Rome. The patrons of these new libraries DOI: 10.4324/9781003378082-4

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were wealthy Romans, which further reflected the cultural importance of these institutions.1 The resulting spread of the availability of texts increased polymathy, wide learning, gained through “itemisation, analysis, ordering, hierarchisation, synthesis, synopsis,”2 which in turn is reflected in the “thought libraries” of literature written by imperial authors. In miscellanies like the third-century Aelian’s Various History these writers compiled vast stores of knowledge and re-presented newly enlarged pictures of their topics to their audiences. In this atmosphere, there was a desire for new sources to provide more information about the Trojan War. Philostratus’ Achilles witnessed the events at Troy with his own eyes as an active human participant, but Homer never did, living several generations later, according to a general opinion in antiquity. For that reason, the Homeric poems depend on the Muses, goddesses who inspire poetry: Ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι Ὀλύμπια δώματ’ ἔχουσαι· ὑμεῖς γὰρ θεαί ἐστε πάρεστέ τε ἴστέ τε πάντα, ἡμεῖς δὲ κλέος οἶον ἀκούομεν οὐδέ τι ἴδμεν· οἵ τινες ἡγεμόνες Δαναῶν καὶ κοίρανοι ἦσαν· πληθὺν δ’ οὐκ ἂν ἐγὼ μυθήσομαι οὐδ’ ὀνομήνω, οὐδ’ εἴ μοι δέκα μὲν γλῶσσαι, δέκα δὲ στόματ’ εἶεν, φωνὴ δ’ ἄρρηκτος, χάλκεον δέ μοι ἦτορ ἐνείη, εἰ μὴ Ὀλυμπιάδες Μοῦσαι Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο θυγατέρες μνησαίαθ’ ὅσοι ὑπὸ Ἴλιον ἦλθον· ἀρχοὺς αὖ νηῶν ἐρέω νῆάς τε προπάσας. (Iliad 2.484–493) Tell me now, Muses who have Olympian homes – because you are goddesses who are present and know everything, while we hear only report and know nothing – who the Danaäns’ leaders and commanders were. I could not number or name the multitude, even if I had ten tongues, ten mouths, an unbreakable voice, and a heart of bronze, unless the Olympian Muses, daughters of aegisbearing Zeus, remembered how many came beneath Troy. But I will name all the ships and their leaders. The Muses are authoritative sources in this passage because of their divinity, their omnipresence, and their omniscience. This dependence on the Muses as sources of the knowledge is a also literary convention, above all in poetry. So it comes as a double surprise that the PH does not invoke the Muses, or any other divinity for that matter, in its first line or even in its first book. Quintus waits until nearly the end of his epic to call on the goddesses, at the head of a catalogue. Elsewhere in the PH the Muses do appear, but in a narrative episode rather than outside the narrative, when they attend Achilles’ funeral. This ambivalence about the Muses is the focus of the following section, in which the Posthomeric Muses reveal an aspect of Quintus’ orientation towards Homeric narratives.

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Quintus’ Homeric Muses The Iliad 2 passage tells us why Homer invokes the Muses, but those goddesses appear in the first lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Though he does not invoke them at the start of his epic, eventually Quintus declares that his source is the Muses. He does this in order to name the Achaeans who volunteer to lie in ambush for the Trojans: Τούς μοι νῦν καθ’ ἕκαστον ἀνειρομένῳ σάφα, Μοῦσαι, ἔσπεθ’ ὅσοι κατέβησαν ἔσω πολυχανδέος ἵππου· ὑμεῖς γὰρ πᾶσάν μοι ἐνὶ φρεσὶ θήκατ’ ἀοιδήν, πρίν μοι ἀμφὶ παρειὰ κατασκίδνασθαι ἴουλον, Σμύρνης ἐν δαπέδοισι περικλυτὰ μῆλα νέμοντι τρὶς τόσον Ἕρμου ἄπωθεν ὅσον βοόωντος ἀκοῦσαι, Ἀρτέμιδος περὶ νηὸν Ἐλευθερίῳ ἐνὶ κήπῳ, οὔρεϊ οὔτε λίην χθαμαλῷ οὔθ’ ὑψόθι πολλῷ. (PH 12.306–313) Because I ask, Muses, recount to me clearly how many entered the wooden horse, for you put every song in my chest before hair spread on my cheeks, as I was pasturing my very glorious herds in the plains of Smyrna, three times as far from the Hermus as it is to hear someone shouting, around Artemis’ temple in the Eleutherian garden, on a hill neither very low nor very high. An invocation to the Muses like this one is a typical element of the epic genre, even appearing in imperial poems that have no narrative connection to the Iliad or Odyssey, like the Halieutica, an epic about aquatic life by Oppian, and Description of the World, an epic about geography by Dionysius Perigetes. Both of those epics are didactic, a tradition connected to Hesiodic tradition, especially the archaic epic Works and Days. Oppian and Dionysius are imperial poets,3 so their versions of the Muses as sources are produced in response to similar cultural currents as Quintus’, and they also demonstrate that the Muses were aspects of both the Homeric and Hesiodic traditions. In an epic that bridges the Homeric epics, Quintus’ invocation of the Muses is a specific reference to the Iliad and Odyssey. And yet Quintus’ Muses are not the same as Homer’s Muses. Unlike the two Homeric epics, the PH does not invoke them from the outset – in fact, the passage under discussion is the only apostrophe to the Muses in the whole of Quintus’ epic, and it appears almost at the end of the poem. The next section investigates Quintus’ treatment of the Muses, concluding that by mixing the Homeric and Hesiodic depictions of the Muses, he draws attention to those epics as sources; by not invoking the Muses in Book 1, he cites Homeric poetry as a source; and the Muses are invoked in Book 12 to signal his mixing of Homeric and Hesiodic modes. The clearest intertext with Quintus’ invocation of the Muses is Homer’s invocations of the goddesses in lines 484–493 of Iliad Book 2, previously translated. In addition to the resonance that every Muse invocation has with every other Muse invocation, these two are particularly similar invocations of the Muses within the

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poem to help the poet perform a prodigious feat of memory. The two invocations’ diction is also similar: the verbs Ἔσπετε and ἔσπεθ’ are nearly identical, temporal adverbs preceded or followed by first-person pronouns (νῦν μοι and μοι νῦν),4 and both Quintus and Homer employ the correlative adverb ὅσοι.5 Quintus’ Non-Proem As daughters of the goddess Mnemosyne (whose name means “Memory”), the Muses are important parts of how Homer and his audiences understood the roles of memory in the Iliad and Odyssey, and this role was equally important in catalogues that appear within the narrative of the epic, like the example just discussed, and at the outset of the poem. The goddesses played a crucial role in the existence of the epic; without them, it would not exist. On the surface, then, it is odd that Quintus invokes them for one feat of memory but does not call on them for another, the beginning of the PH. Calum Maciver, Emma Greensmith, and others have interpreted this as a deliberate tactic to create a “direct link” with Homer, while others argue that Quintus replaces the divine Muses with mortal characters.6 My own view aligns more closely with the former. Quintus omitted a proem, and with it the initial invocation to the Muses, to indicate the PH’s relationship to the Homeric Iliad. In addition to their roles in helping the Homeric narrators begin their epics, the Muses’ appearances in the first lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey make them an integral part of those poems’ identities. These two very good reasons for invoking the Muses in the first line of both Homeric epics do not convince Quintus to do the same, though: Εὖθ’ ὑπὸ Πηλείωνι δάμη θεοείκελος Ἕκτωρ καί ἑ πυρὴ κατέδαψε καὶ ὀστέα γαῖα κεκεύθει, δὴ τότε Τρῶες ἔμιμνον ἀνὰ Πριάμοιο πόληα δειδιότες μένος ἠὺ θρασύφρονος Αἰακίδαο· ἠύτ’ ἐνὶ ξυλόχοισι βόες βλοσυροῖο λέοντος ἐλθέμεν οὐκ ἐθέλουσιν ἐναντίαι, ἀλλὰ φέβονται ἰληδὸν πτώσσουσαι ἀνὰ ῥωπήια πυκνά· ὣς οἳ ἀνὰ πτολίεθρον ὑπέτρεσαν ὄβριμον ἄνδρα, μνησάμενοι προτέρων ὁπόσων ἀπὸ θυμὸν ἴαψε θύων Ἰδαίοιο περὶ προχοῇσι Σκαμάνδρου, ἠδ’ όσους φεύγοντας ὑπὸ μέγα τεῖχος ὄλεσσεν, Ἕκτορά θ’ ὡς ἐδάμασσε καὶ ἀμφείρυσσε πόληι, ἄλλους θ’ οὓς ἐδάιξε δι’ ἀκαμάτοιο θαλάσσης, ὁππότε δὴ τὰ πρῶτα φέρεν Τρώεσσιν ὄλεθρον. Τῶν οἵ γε μνησθέντες ἀνὰ πτολίεθρον ἔμιμνον· ἀμφὶ δ’ ἄρά σφισι πένθος ἀνιηρὸν πεπότητο ὡς ἤδη στονόεντι καταιθομένης πυρὶ Τροίης. Καὶ τότε Θερμώδοντος ἀπ’ εὐρυπόροιο ῥεέθρων ἤλυθε Πενθεσίλεια θεῶν ἐπιειμένη εἶδος (PH 1.1–19)

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Sources When god-like Hector had been overcome by the son of Peleus, the pyre had consumed him, and the earth had covered his bones, then the Trojans stayed in the city of Priam, fearing the excellent force of Aeacus’ dauntless grandson. As cattle in a forest do not want to go to face a fearsome lion but in fear they cower in dense shrubs together, so throughout the city they fled in the face of the mighty man, recalling how many souls he sent forth, running around the mouths of the Idaean Scamander, how many he had killed as they fled beneath the wall, and how he had overcome Hector and dragged him around the city. Recalling these things, they remained in their city, and grief settled around them as if for the grievous fire of a burning Troy. Then from the wide-flowing streams of the Thermodon came Penthesilea, clothed like the gods.

Although this opening does not deliver a proem of the sort that Quintus’ audience expects from their textual nostalgia for Homer, it does resemble the beginnings of some books of the Iliad and Odyssey that transition between previous events and those of the subsequent book. The closing lines of Book 21 and the opening lines of Book 22 of the Iliad are especially good parallels for the PH: οὐδ’ ἄρα τοί γ’ ἔτλαν πόλιος καὶ τείχεος ἐκτὸς μεῖναι ἔτ’ ἀλλήλους, καὶ γνώμεναι ὅς τε πεφεύγοι ὅς τ’ ἔθαν’ ἐν πολέμῳ· ἀλλ’ ἐσσυμένως ἐσέχυντο ἐς πόλιν, ὅν τινα τῶν γε πόδες καὶ γοῦνα σαώσαι. (Iliad 21.608–611) They did not dare to wait any longer for one another outside the city wall and realized who had fled and who had died in battle. Whomever feet and knees saved poured quickly into the city. Ὣς οἳ μὲν κατὰ ἄστυ πεφυζότες ἠΰτε νεβροὶ ἱδρῶ ἀπεψύχοντο πίον τ’ ἀκέοντό τε δίψαν κεκλιμένοι καλῇσιν ἐπάλξεσιν· αὐτὰρ Ἀχαιοὶ τείχεος ἆσσον ἴσαν σάκε’ ὤμοισι κλίναντες. Ἕκτορα δ’ αὐτοῦ μεῖναι ὀλοιὴ μοῖρα πέδησεν Ἰλίου προπάροιθε πυλάων τε Σκαιάων. (Iliad 22.1–7) In that way they fled into the city, like fawns whose sweat dries, and they quenched their thirst, leaning on their lovely battlements. But the Achaeans were going closer to the wall, resting Shields on shoulders. Destructive Fate forced Hector to stay before Troy and the Scaean gates. The first line of Book 22 recapitulates the last four lines of Book 21 with the temporal adverb ὡς, a strategy that Walter Leaf calls “the usual opening of a new canto,” appearing in books 7, 9, 12, 16, 18, and 20 of the Iliad and Books 6, 7, and 13 of the

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Odyssey.7 The content and structure recall the opening lines of the PH, with the Trojans seeking refuge in the city and similes comparing the Trojans to animals. These shared elements suggest that Quintus was engaging with this passage specifically, or else that he was imitating Homeric narrative strategy in a more general way. Another layer of Quintus’ reception of Homer here is the temporal conjunction εὖτε. ὡς is a temporal conjunction as well, but whereas the former is often used in the context of introducing new narrative material, εὖτε is not; instead, it is employed in the middle of an ongoing narrative. For instance, Odyssey’s Amphimedon employs εὖτε in his description of how Odysseus’ return coincided with Penelope’s loom trick. εὖθ’ ἡ φᾶρος ἔδειξεν, ὑφήνασα μέγαν ἱστόν, πλύνασ’, ἠελίῳ ἐναλίγκιον ἠὲ σελήνῃ, καὶ τότε δή ῥ’ Ὀδυσῆα κακός ποθεν ἤγαγε δαίμων ἀγροῦ ἐπ’ ἐσχατιήν, ὅθι δώματα ναῖε συβώτης. (Odyssey 24.147–150) When she displayed the shroud that she wove on the great loom and washed it, shining like the sun or moon, then an evil spirit from somewhere led Odysseus to the edge of the field where the swineherd’s house was. Both the Odyssean and Posthomeric passages correlate εὖτε with τότε; event A happened followed by event B.8 By structuring the beginning of his epic with those two adverbs as well as by echoing an often-deployed strategy for starting a new book of Homeric poetry, Quintus proclaims that, as Silvio Bär admirably puts it, “nothing has changed ‘since the end of the Iliad’”;9 PH Book 1 is both Book 25 of the Iliad and the start of a different epic. Just as successive books of the Homeric epics depend on the initial invocation of the Muses in the first book, so too does the PH depend on Iliad 1.1’s order to the goddess to sing. Through these three intertexts, Quintus asserts that the PH’s source is not the Muses, but Homer himself. Another aspect of this similarity-difference push-pull that appears throughout the PH has to do with what Gregory Nagy has pointed out about how epic proems demarcate the poem to which they are attached from other compositions on the same subject.10 We can see this in one version of the opening of the epic Aethiopis as compared to the final line of the Iliad, whose events it followed: ὣς οἵ γ’ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος· ἦλθε δ’ Ἀμαζών, Ἄρηος θυγάτηρ μεγαλήτορος ἀνδροφόνοιο. In this way they were tending to Hector’s grave, and an Amazon arrived, daughter of Ares the great-hearted man-slayer. Ὣς οἵ γ’ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο. (Iliad 24.804) In this way they were tending to the grave of horse-breaking Hector.

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These two passages are identical except for the Aethiopis’ replacement of Hector’s epithet ἱπποδάμοιο with the clause “and an Amazon came,” which has identical metrical value and that appears numerous times in both Homeric epics in the form “and X came.” The fact that variations of this hemistich appear in the Iliad and the Odyssey indicates that these lines were created by an individual or individuals with a clear understanding of the mechanics of Homeric verse.11 The Aethiopis might have had a typical epic proem with an apostrophe to the Muses, but the composer(s) of the two verses attributed to the Aethiopis felt that such a proem would make a seamless transition impossible. For that reason, that epic’s proem was eliminated, and the two lines recorded by the scholiast were substituted. This process can only be guessed at because the Aethiopis’ “original” proem is not extant, but a historical parallel presents itself in Pausanias’ comment about another epic, Hesiod’s Works and Days. According to the imperial travel writer, because the Thespians claimed that the Works and Days was the only work genuinely authored by Hesiod, they removed that epic’s proem: Βοιωτῶν δὲ οἱ περὶ τὸν Ἑλικῶνα οἰκοῦντες παρειλημμένα δόξῃ λέγουσιν ὡς ἄλλο Ἡσίοδος ποιήσειεν οὐδὲν ἢ τὰ Ἔργα· καὶ τούτων δὲ τὸ ἐς τὰς Μούσας ἀφαιροῦσι προοίμιον, ἀρχὴν τῆς ποιήσεως εἶναι τὸ ἐς τὰς Ἔριδας λέγοντες. (Pausanias 9.31.4) Those of the Boeotians living around Helicon have a tradition that they believe, saying that Hesiod created only the Works and Days. They remove the proem to the Muses from that poem, alleging that its beginning is the part about the Strifes. These Greeks’ version of Works and Days omitted lines 1–10 of our vulgate manuscripts; for them, the authentic poem began at line 11 with the narrator’s statement that there are multiple kinds of strife: Μοῦσαι Πιερίηθεν ἀοιδῇσι κλείουσαι, δεῦτε Δί’ ἐννέπετε, σφέτερον πατέρ’ ὑμνείουσαι. ὅν τε διὰ βροτοὶ ἄνδρες ὁμῶς ἄφατοί τε φατοί τε, ῥητοί τ’ ἄρρητοί τε Διὸς μεγάλοιο ἕκητι. ῥέα μὲν γὰρ βριάει, ῥέα δὲ βριάοντα χαλέπτει, ῥεῖα δ’ ἀρίζηλον μινύθει καὶ ἄδηλον ἀέξει, ῥεῖα δέ τ’ ἰθύνει σκολιὸν καὶ ἀγήνορα κάρφει Ζεὺς ὑψιβρεμέτης, ὃς ὑπέρτατα δώματα ναίει. κλῦθι ἰδὼν ἀίων τε, δίκῃ δ’ ἴθυνε θέμιστας τύνη· ἐγὼ δέ κε Πέρσῃ ἐτήτυμα μυθησαίμην. Οὐκ ἄρα μοῦνον ἔην Ἐρίδων γένος. (Works and Days 1–12) Muses from Pieria, glorifying in songs, come here, tell in hymns of your father Zeus, through whom mortal men are unfamed and famed alike, and

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named and unnamed, by the will of great Zeus. For easily he strengthens, and easily he crushes the strong, easily he diminishes the conspicuous and increases the inconspicuous, and easily he straightens the crooked and withers the proud – high-thundering Zeus, who dwells in the highest house. Listen to me, watching and listening, and straighten the verdicts with justice yourself; as for me, I will proclaim truths to Perses. So there was not just one birth of Strifes after all.12 Pausanias’ testimony is evidence that imperial Greeks were still concerned about the relationship between proems (and their Muses) and poems in the imperial period. Mutatis mutandis, had Quintus also invoked the Muses in a proem at the beginning of his epic, he would have demarcated his composition from Homer. Nonnus’ Polyphonic Muses In contrast to Quintus’ embrace of Homer and his consequent erasure of the Muses at the beginning of the PH are Nonnus’ depictions of the goddesses. His Dionysiaca was composed at least one hundred years after the PH and centers on the life and times of the god of wine Dionysus. Nonnus calls his epic poem a ποικίλον ὕμνον, “variegated song” (1.15),13 that at times emulates Homer and at other times rejects his poetry. This paradox is on display in the proem, in which the narrator calls on a Muse to help him with his topics: Εἰπέ, θεά, Κρονίδαο διάκτορον αἴθοπος εὐνῆς . . . καὶ στεροπὴν Σεμέλης θαλαμηπόλον· εἰπὲ δὲ φύτλην/Βάκχου δισσοτόκοιο (1.1–4), “Tell, goddess, of the messenger of the son of Cronus’ fiery bed . . . and of Semele’s lightning bolt lady-in-waiting, and tell of the race of Zeus-born Bacchus.” This proem parallels the structure and diction of the beginnings of the Iliad and Odyssey: the two instances of εἰπέ echo Odyssey 1.1’s ἔννεπε, and the subjects of those imperatives are the Muse, characterized with the noun θεὰ as at Iliad 1.1.14 This Homericizing is complicated by the three thematic nouns διάκτορον, στεροπὴν, and φύτλην that parallel the accusative singular subjects of the Iliad (Μῆνιν) and of the Odyssey (Ἄνδρα) and distinguish Dionysiaca’s subjects from Homer’s – an erotic subject, Zeus’ lover and Dionysus’ mother, Semele is never mentioned in the Homeric epic, and her son is called Βάκχου here, a word that does not appear in the Homeric lexicon. In these opening lines, the Muses alternately inspire and are rejected by Nonnus – that is, they are emblems of the Dionysiaca’s “imitation and innovation.”15 They inspire the Iliad and Odyssey, and so they are important to establish the Dionysiaca within epic tradition, but the goddesses are responsible for the elements of Homeric verses that Nonnus rejects. This mixture characterizes Nonnus’ entire project, and so the Muses appear as his sources throughout the Dionysiaca, though in different guises, depending on the needs of the epic at those points. When Nonnus is channeling Homer as a literary ancestor πατρὸς Ὁμήρου, “father Homer” (25.265),16 he calls on the Muses in their Homeric guise (once again using the noun θεά) as well as when he wants the Ὁμηρίδες Μοῦσαι, “Homeric Muses,” to “tell” (εἴπατε, which recalls Dionysiaca 1.1 and 1.3, which in turn recall Odyssey 1.1) his

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audience who was killed in battle (32.184–185), an intertext with the catalogue of Agamemnon’s victims in Book 11 of the Iliad. The same attraction to and repulsion from Homeric aesthetics is evident in another invocation in the same book that replaces the Muse and her sisters with a group more appropriate for Nonnus’ themes: ἄξατέ μοι νάρθηκα, Μιμαλλόνες ὠμαδίην δὲ νεβρίδα ποικιλόνωτον ἐθήμονος ἀντὶ χιτῶνος σφίγξατέ μοι στέρνοισι, Μαρωνίδος ἔμπλεον ὀδμῆς νεκταρέης, βυθίῃ δὲ παρ’ Εἰδοθέῃ καὶ Ὁμήρῳ φωκάων βαρὺ δέρμα φυλασσέσθω Μενελάῳ (Dionysiaca 1.34–38) Mimallones, bring me fennel and, in place of the usual chiton, put over my chest the variegated fawn skin draped over the shoulder, redolent of Maron’s nectar, and let Menelaus cherish the stinking seals’ skin from Eidothea of the deep and Homer.17 θεὰ of the Dionysiaca’s first line is replaced by the Mimallones, a rare name for priestesses of Dionysus popularized in the imperial period by the likes of Plutarch and Polyaenus.18 These aspects make Nonnus’ Mimallones a more authoritative source than the (Homeric) Muses, reinforced by accoutrements befitting the god of wine: fennel, which was used to make thyrsoi (staffs wielded by Dionysus and his followers) and a fawn skin, a typical piece of clothing for Dionysus’ followers. Nonnus’ rejection of Homer also refers to the same part of the Odyssey as the Palatine Anthology poem discussed in the first chapter, but while AP 9.474 adds onto the Homeric narrative, thereby embracing the Homeric aesthetic, Nonnus’ narrator abandons the seal skins that Eidothea gives to Menelaus and his crew. The fawn skin is “variegated”–a variant of the adjective used to describe the Dionysiaca as a whole and Nonnus’ aesthetic stance in it.19 At the same time, the narrator also describes that Dionysian garment with another Odyssean narrative: the fawn skin smells like the wine Apollo’s priest Maron gives Odysseus. Nonnus’ Muses adopt a Dionysian aspect again when, in Book 13 line 34, they are Κορυβαντίδες, “Corybantic.” This invocation prefaces a Homeric moment, as the goddesses are called on to help the narrator list Dionysus’ army, which parallels the catalogue of the ships in the Iliad 2 invocation. But Nonnus transforms this potential Homeric intertext into a Dionysian moment by bestowing an epithet on his Muses that refers to a crucial moment in the god of wine’s origin story, the Corybantes guarding the baby Dionysus. This narrative is related in lines 135– 140 of this same book, speaking again to the heady mixture of Homeric and nonHomeric in Nonnus’ epic. Quintus’ Hesiodic Muses Just as Nonnus’ Muses are “variegated,” shifting between an enormous number of genres, Quintus’ Muses also oscillate between the two most prominent voices of

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ancient Greek epic, Homer and Hesiod. The centrality of those two poets to a Greek identity was expressed by the historian Herodotus in the fifth century b.c.e. when he opined that Homer and Hesiod shaped Greece’s worldview (2.53). In Quintus’ own time, those sentiments were re-affirmed by the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, the preface to which indicates that Herodotus’ understanding was still current in the second century. The Posthomeric Muses have Homeric guises in the Book 12 invocation, but when they appear or are mentioned in the narrative itself, they are Hesiodic. By “Homeric” I mean the expression of traits that characterize the goddesses in the Iliad and Odyssey, and by “Hesiodic” I refer to their depictions in poems attributed to Hesiod, like the Theogony, Works and Days, and the Shield of Heracles. My argument here parallels Nagy’s positioning of the Homeric Muses in the panhellenic sphere – that is, the supra-local – and the Hesiodic Muses in the epichoric, the local.20 The Iliad’s Muses live on Olympus, as attested by the four instances in that epic of the phrase Ὀλύμπια δώματ’ ἔχουσαι, “having homes on Olympus,” whereas Hesiodic poems link the Muses to Pieria, a region in the foothills of Olympus, and Helicon, a mountain in Boeotia. The Theogony calls its Muses Ἑλικωνιάδων, “the ones from Helicon,” in its opening line, and says that they were born in Pieria (line 53). The latter birthplace is evoked by Works and Days, which calls on the Μοῦσαι Πιερίηθεν (line 1), “Muses from Pieria,” and Shield of Heracles similarly calls them Μοῦσαι Πιερίδες (line 206), “Pierian Muses.” The Homeric epics do not distinguish the Muses from one another, whereas the Theogony does, giving them names in lines 77–9. Given the Homericizing of Quintus’ epic, his audience expects his Muses to be Olympian, but in the PH’s narrative, they are Heliconian or Pierian. Ironically, their first appearance is at Achilles’ funeral, which the Byzantine appreciator of Quintus Constantine Lascaris would call Ὁμηρικώτατος, “most Homeric,” in the sense that it is a memorial for a principal character of the Iliad, a kind of mise-enabîme that encapsulates Quintus’ relationship with Homer. Achilles embodies one of the Iliad’s main values, klēos, “glory” or “fame,” as one of the Muses, Calliope, tells Achilles’ grieving mother Thetis: οἱ κλέος αἰὲν ἐπιχθονίοισιν ἀοιδοὶ/καὶ μένος ἀείσουσιν ἐμῇ ἰότητι καὶ ἄλλων/Πιερίδων (645–647), “bards will always sing his kleos and might for mortals by my will and that of the other Pierians.” Calliope’s characterization of herself and her sisters as Pierians is reinforced by the narrator specifying that they depart from and return to Helicon (3.594 and 785). In a later book, Odysseus applies the same adjective to them in voicing approval for a proposition that he and Diomedes retrieve Neoptolemus from the island of Scyrus. Although Neoptolemus evokes Homer as the son of Achilles who is mentioned by his father at Iliad 19.327 and whose exploits at Troy give his father joy in the afterlife in Odyssey Book 11, the Posthomeric Odysseus evokes Hesiod, echoing Calliope’s self-characterization at Achilles’ funeral in his description of a ἀοιδὸς ὃν ἀθάνατοι φιλέουσι/Πιερίδες (6.75–6), “singer whom the immortal Pierians love.” The Homeric intertexts in the “autobiography” passage of PH Book 12 was the focus of an earlier part of this chapter; it also has a strong “Hesiodic subtext” that “has been enriched with a Homeric element” as Bär says,21 Hesiodic

68 Sources associations that parallel those in Books 3 and 6. In lines 308–310 of Book 12, the narrator describes his first encounter with the Muses: ὑμεῖς γὰρ πᾶσάν μοι ἐνὶ φρεσὶ θήκατ’ ἀοιδήν,/πρίν μοι ἀμφὶ παρειὰ κατασκίδνασθαι ἴουλον,/ Σμύρνης ἐν δαπέδοισι περικλυτὰ μῆλα νέμοντι, “for you put every song in my chest before hair spread on my cheeks, as I was pasturing my very glorious herds in the plains of Smyrna.” The Iliad 2 invocation also uses the explanatory particle γὰρ to explain why the narrator invokes the Muses at this particular juncture, but Quintus’ explanation has more similarities with the Theogony’s depiction of its narrator’s investiture: αἵ νύ ποθ’ Ἡσίοδον καλὴν ἐδίδαξαν ἀοιδήν, ἄρνας ποιμαίνονθ’ Ἑλικῶνος ὕπο ζαθέοιο. ... καί μοι σκῆπτρον ἔδον δάφνης ἐριθηλέος ὄζον δρέψασαι, θηητόν· ἐνέπνευσαν δέ μοι αὐδὴν θέσπιν, ἵνα κλείοιμι τά τ’ ἐσσόμενα πρό τ’ ἐόντα, καί μ’ ἐκέλονθ’ ὑμνεῖν μακάρων γένος αἰὲν ἐόντων, σφᾶς δ’ αὐτὰς πρῶτόν τε καὶ ὕστατον αἰὲν ἀείδειν. (Theogony 22–3 & 30–34) They taught Hesiod lovely song once, while he was shepherding flocks beneath holy Helicon. And to me they gave a scepter to possess, the bough of a blooming laurel, wonderful to look at. They breathed in me a divine voice, so that I would sing the present and the past, and they ordered me to hymn the race of the everliving blessed ones as well as to sing of them always first and last. The diction parallels between the Theogony and PH passages are far less numerous than between Iliad 2 and the latter; in fact, only the only shared word is ἀοιδήν, “song.”22 The autobiography that follows, however, is similar, which is even more significant considering that autobiography does not appear at all in either the Iliad or the Odyssey. Whether the PH 12 autobiography is literal or not, Quintus is clearly evoking Hesiod here.23 Calliope in Triphiodorus Though Calliope is prominent in Hesiod’s Theogony and Quintus’ PH, she is even more so in the short epic Capture of Troy by Quintus’ contemporary, the late thirdor early fourth-century Triphiodorus, as that poem’s source:24 Τέρμα πολυκμήτοιο μεταχρόνιον πολέμοιο καὶ λόχον Ἀργείης ἱππήλατον ἔργον Ἀθήνης, αὐτίκα μοι σπεύδοντι πολὺν διὰ μῦθον ἀνεῖσα ἔννεπε, Καλλιόπεια, καὶ ἀρχαίην ἔριν ἀνδρῶν κεκριμένου πολέμοιο ταχείῃ λῦσον ἀοιδῇ. (Capture of Troy lines 1–5)

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The delayed end of the very laborious war and the ambush, the equine product of Argive Athena, tell me right away, Calliope, and give free rein to it, since I am rushing through a wordy subject, and undo in a swift song the ancient strife of men after the war had been decided. In his commentary on Triphiodorus’ epic, Bernard Gerlaud suggests that the poet is opposing Quintus’ “pesante” (“heavy”) epic by invoking this particular Muse.25 At 691 lines Capture of Troy is approximately 8% of the PH, about the length of a book of Homeric poetry, as I have pointed out elsewhere,26 somewhat shorter than Theogony and Works and Days, and longer than Shield of Heracles. This, combined with Hellenistic poetry intertexts throughout Triphiodorus’ short epic, gives the impression that he is less aligned with Homeric aesthetics than Quintus.27 His combination of the “hyper-traditional” Homeric and the “anti-traditional” Hesiodic is also on display in the oeuvre of other imperial poets like Nestor of Laranda, whose work will be featured in the next chapter.28 Poetry and Prose: Stesichorus and Ptolemy the Quail Quintus’ combination of Homeric and Hesiodic aspects of the Muses is paralleled in the work of another poet who pre-dates him by hundreds of years. The sixth-century b.c.e. lyric poet Stesichorus was what Lawrence Kim has called a “patron saint”29 of Homeric revisionism because he contradicted Homeric narratives in one of his most well-known works, titled the Palinode. Even though the first-century Capitoline Tablet, one of the Tabulae Iliacae, cites Stesichorus and Homer as its sources,30 Stesichorus was more well known to ancient audiences for his rejection of the versions of Helen that appear in the Homeric epics. His Palinode, or “Recantation Song,” comes down to us in a very fragmentary state, but even so Stesichorus’ opposition to Homeric narrative is palpable in his declaration, οὐκ ἔστ’ ἔτυμος λόγος οὗτος,/οὐδ’ ἔβας ἐν νηυσὶν ἐυσσέλμοις/οὐδ’ ἵκεο πέργαμα Τροίας (fr. 15), “This story is not true:/ You did not embark in well-benched ships,/And you did not arrive at Troy’s citadel.” Instead of Helen going with Paris to Troy and with Menelaus to Egypt, as in Homeric narratives, this tradition held that an eidōlon, a doppelgänger, went to Troy while the authentic Helen ended up in Egypt. An imperial commentator tells us that there were two poems titled Palinode that both had invocations in their openings: ἔστιν ἡ μὲν ἀρχή· δεῦρ’ αὖτε θεὰ φιλόμολπε, τῆς δέ· χρυσόπτερε παρθένε, (fr. 16 lines 9–11) The beginning of the first one is, “Come here once more, goddess who loves song and dance,” While the other one is, “Golden-winged maiden”

70 Sources The first opening invokes the Muse as a θεὰ just as the first line of the Iliad does, but Stesichorus marks his difference from Homer with the adjective that modifies it, φιλόμολπος, which is not a Homeric word. Similarly, the second opening invokes a παρθένος, a Homeric noun but one that is never deployed to describe the Muses, and the adjective modifying it, χρυσόπτερος, is Homeric but never applied to maidens. These alternations of Homeric and non-Homeric play out on the levels of narrative and diction as well as in the lyric meter, which has some similarities, but is also quite different from, the dactylic hexameter of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In short, Stesichorus’ poetry provided an “alternative lyric world” to Homer, in Michael Squire’s apt phrase,31 for imperial authors like Dio Chrysostom, whose Egyptian priest adduces Stesichorus as an example of how ignorant the Greeks are (Trojan Speech section 40), like Maximus of Tyre, who opens one of his speeches with a quotation from the first Palinode (Oration 21.1), and like Philostratus, whose Apollonius calls one of Stesichorus’ poems σοφία, “wisdom” (6.11.168). Stesichorus’ alternative lyric world, at least in the case of the Palinode, was premised on its rootedness in Hesiod. The same commentator on fragment 16 also declares that Stesichorus’ version of Helen derives from Hesiod. Whether that attribution to “Hesiod” is correct or not,32 this testimonium shows that in the imperial period the idea that Helen’s eidōlon was a non-Homeric tradition was widespread. In what amounts to an acknowledgement of this non-Homeric stance of Hesiodic poetry, Quintus combines the Homeric with the Hesiodic through the sources of his epic. Herodotus’ Inspiration of Revisionists Stesichorus’ Palinode has all of the features of Homeric revisionism observed at the beginning of this chapter in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Philostratus corrects the Homeric version of Helen not only by providing an alternative narrative but also by adducing a more authoritative source than the Muses. In their revisions of Homer, imperial authors combined Stesichorus’ strategies with the approaches of history writing. About one hundred years after Stesichorus’ corrections of Homer, Herodotus composed his Histories to document the Persian Wars in the fifth century b.c.e. Like Stesichorus he connects Helen with Egypt, but unlike the Palinode’s take, there is no eidōlon. According to Egyptian priests interviewed by Herodotus personally (ἔλεγον δέ μοι οἱ ἱρέες ἱστορέοντι τὰ περὶ Ἑλένην γενέσθαι ὧδε, “when I asked the priests told me Helen’s story” (2.113)), Paris and Helen were shipwrecked in Egypt as soon as they left Greece for Troy, and the pharaoh kept Helen in Egypt because he felt that Paris had wronged Menelaus. Paris went on to Troy, and the Trojan War happened as Homer depicted it in the Iliad. Homer chose to depict Helen as coming to Troy, Herodotus tells us, because it was more suitable to epic poetry (2.116). Herodotus’ informants’ authority derives not only from the fact that these events unfolded in their own country but also from the fact that priests learned it παρ’ αὐτοῦ Μενέλεω, “from Menelaus himself” (2.118). There is no indication that Herodotus took this Helen-in-Egypt narrative from Stesichorus, but imperial authors receiving Homer took their cues

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from him and Stesichorus: from both, the rejection of Homeric narrative with an intra-Homeric source; from Herodotus, the prose form; and from Stesichorus, the source for a contradiction of Homer in a narrative form. The Herodotean Sources of Philostratus and Dio Chrysostom As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, the sophist Philostratus’ Apollonius cited the ghost of Achilles, a deceased Achaean veteran, for his corrections of the Homeric Iliad. He does something similar in his dialogue Heroicus, the source for which is another deceased veteran, the Achaean Protesilaus. Similarly, Dio Chrysostom’s source for his corrections of the Iliad in his Trojan Speech are the words of a long-dead Achaean, but instead of invoking a ghost, Dio turns to a heretofore undiscovered account left by Menelaus in Egypt, much as Herodotus does. In his Heroicus, Philostratus has a problem. His source is a paradoxical one, because Protesilaus was barely a participant in the war. As Homer himself relates, Protesilaus was the first casualty of the war, killed on the Trojan beach as he leapt from his ship, and so he is long dead by the start of the Iliad. He therefore cannot be an eyewitness to most of the events of the Trojan War and its aftermath. Philostratus solves this problem by making Protesilaus a δαίμων (section 43.3), a divine spirit who visits different places at different times, much like Castor and Polydeuces in the Iliad, now inhabiting the underworld, now Phthia, now Troy. In this way, he is a superior source to Homer’s Muses because he combines the situatedness of a mortal who participated in Homeric narratives with the omnipresence of those goddesses. But the Muses are also a part of Protesilaus’ world and are even superior to him in one respect. He is concerned about revealing what he knows about Homer’s birthplace because he fears retribution from them (44.2). He acknowledges that they are crucial for poetry (43.5) and does not criticize them. Though the details of the narrative invoking their authority are incorrect, they are not to blame for the imperfections of what his interlocutor characterizes as τὰ ποιήματα ἀνθρώπου ταῦτα, “these poems of a mortal man” at 43.10. They are not responsible for the Iliad and Odyssey, since Homer’s source for them was the ghost of Odysseus. This ghost is not described as an eidōlon per the Egyptian Helen tradition, nor as a δαίμων like the Philostratean Protesilaus, but instead as a ψυχὴ, the Homeric word for “ghost.” This difference in diction signals to Heroicus’ audience that Homer’s epics do not present the truth. Even though Odysseus told Homer true narratives, in the same mold as Philostratus’ Protesilaus, part of their deal was that the latter would alter them and put the former in a good light. In addition to the Heroicus’ reliance on eyewitnessing, Philostratus’ source also alludes to Stesichorus’ correction of Homer through the story that Protesilaus blinded a landowner (4.2). This parallels how Stesichorus’ Helen blinded Homer when he did not tell truth – when he, in other words, told the narratives of the Iliad and Odyssey – and in the Heroicus this same story indicates that Philostratus’ Protesilaus is about to correct Homer too. But Protesilaus blinds the landowner, not because that mortal had followed Homeric tradition, but because the δαίμων desired the land! In this Philostratus reveals his source citation as parody, not intending the

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Heroicus to be a serious criticism of the Homeric epics, and certainly not Homer himself. This is true of all the sources cited in the Homeric receptions considered throughout this chapter. As Karen ní Mheallaigh has pointed out, such fictionalizations of sources were not only intentional and expected (even appreciated) by audiences in the imperial period,33 but in this context they also remind audiences of Homer’s position at the peak of cultural prominence in the Roman Empire. This tongue-in-cheek attitude towards sources also appears in Dio’s Trojan Speech. This oration similarly corrects Homer and cites a “superior” source in the form of a deceased Achaean soldier, in this case Menelaus. Here, though, the corrections are not from séances, but from an account of the war written by Menelaus. Dio adds another layer to the irony of his source citation by immediately taking away the first-hand nature of his source. Whereas the accounts of Philostratus’ Achilles and Protesilaus are reported through one intermediary, Dio’s Menelaus has two intermediaries. Menelaus inscribed his account on pillars, but those pillars, on which not just the “true” version of the Trojan war was inscribed but also πᾶσαν τὴν πρότερον ἱστορίαν, “all of previous history” (section 39), were either destroyed by the elements or otherwise forgotten/disbelieved by the populace. Fortunately for the audience of Trojan Speech, an Egyptian priest memorized Menelaus’ account and related it to Dio. This is an intertextual nod to Herodotus, who, as we have seen, also doubted Homeric narratives about Helen’s Egyptian travels and cited Egyptian priests’ memories of Menelaus’ written account. This ironic stance towards a source is paralleled in even more fantastical source citation in the following century by the para-sophist Lucian. In his dialogue The Rooster, which we encountered in the first chapter in the context of the centrality of Homer in education, the titular rooster claims that he is a reincarnation of the sixth/fifth-century b.c.e. philosopher Pythagoras, who in turn is a reincarnation of the Trojan hero Euphorbus, one of the contributors to Patroclus’ death in Book 16 of the Iliad. In this way Lucian’s avian source experienced the war first-hand as a Trojan soldier and parallels Philostratus’ Achilles and Protesilaus and Dio’s Menelaus.34 Like those sources, Lucian satirizes, citing more authoritative sources by putting more distance between Euphorbus and the rooster via the latter’s reincarnation as Pythagoras after his time as Euphorbus. This additional ironic layer makes the rooster’s memories unreliable at best. Nevertheless, Lucian’s rooster arrogantly crows that he was the one to kill Patroclus (section 17), whereas the Homeric narrator relates that Euphorbus did not kill Patroclus, though his blow was first (16.812–813). Unlike Achilles, Protesilaus, and Menelaus, Euphorbus is a cowardly warrior who attacks but does not kill (οὐδὲ δάμασσ’, 16.813) an unarmed (γυμνόν, 815) soldier and then rushes back to safety (αὖτις ἀνέδραμε, 813). If the poet attached to the canonical Iliad can be reincarnated as a camel, a common beast of burden, as the rooster asserts in section 17, then the reincarnation of Euphorbus as a common bird, the property of a humble shoemaker, is an even more authoritative source. While Philostratus gently corrects Homer, Dio explicitly calls Homer a liar (μηθὲν ἀληθὲς λέγειν Ὅμηρον, “Homer does not speak the truth at all” (section 17)), characterizing the point-by-point refutation of his poems in his Trojan Speech

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as Ὁμήρῳ ἀντιλέγοντα, “criticizing Homer” (section 14). This stance does not appear in all the sophists’ work, as demonstrated by Dio’s claim that . . . τινὲς τῶν σοφιστῶν ἀσεβεῖν με φήσουσιν Ὁμήρῳ ἀντιλέγοντα καὶ ἐπιχειρήσουσι διαβάλλειν . . . , “some sophists will say that I am being impious in criticizing Homer, and they will try to attack” (section 14). Dio’s prediction of his colleagues’ hostile reactions demonstrates that this speech, as in all sophistic orations, is competitive. For instance, as we saw in Chapter 1 in the cases of Libanius’ anaskeuē exercise and Aelius Aristides’ Embassy to Achilles speech, not all sophists, much less all imperial authors, revised the Homeric epics as definitively (or even at all) as Dio does in this piece of oratory. Even Dio himself elsewhere in his oeuvre adopts a different attitude towards Homer. In Oration 61, the sophist and a student interlocutor reenvision the inner life of the Homeric war captive Chryseïs. In Dio’s version this otherwise silent character manipulates her dire situation in the Achaean camp. Here Dio does not contradict but adds to Homeric narrative in a very different attitude from the one he takes in Trojan Speech, even if it makes similar interpretative moves, as Lawrence Kim argues.35 Historiographical Narrators: Dictys and Dares The sources of both Philostratus and Dio are eyewitnesses, following Herodotus’ strategy. The same is true of two other texts written in the imperial period, Dictys of Crete’s Journal of the Trojan War and Dares’ On the Destruction of Troy.36 Dictys’ and Dares’ narrators are further removed from those of the three texts previously explored in that they are living eyewitnesses. Dictys’ and Dares’ works have often, though not by any means unproblematically, been labeled novels37 or historiographies, a genre that Dares alludes to when he describes his text as hanc historiam (XII). In any case, two things are certain: Dictys’ and Dares’ texts are not typical sophistic products, and their audiences were aware of their tongue-in-cheek-ness as “pseudo-documentary fictions.”38 This satirical tone applies above all to their sources, an “authenticating strategy”39 that mirrors the consultation of dead and reincarnated Homeric characters. The difference in these works’ genres belies their intertextuality with sophists’ works: Stefan Merkle points out that at two points Heroicus attacks Journal of the Trojan War.40 Intertextuality, in turn, demonstrates that all of the works considered thus far in this chapter receive Homer despite their superficial dissimilarities. Just as the genre of these two works is unclear, so too are the circumstances of their production. Both Dictys’ and Dares’ texts survive in full in Latin versions of the fourth and fifth/sixth centuries, respectively. Before that point, Journal of the Trojan War was composed in Greek, papyrus fragments of which date to the second or third century.41 The case for Dares is more problematic. Although no Greek fragments have yet been unearthed, an ostracon from the second century contains lines of poetry in Greek that have some similarities with Dares’ narrative.42 Perhaps these derive from the Phrygian Iliad that an otherwise-unknown author named “Dares the Phrygian” wrote (Aelian, Varia Historia 11.2). Further support for this connection is the author of On the Destruction of Troy naming that

74 Sources text’s narrator Dares Phrygius. The existence of a Greek version might also be suggested by the similarities of Dares’ structure and approach to those of Dictys, and Merkle adds that Dares’ vitriol towards Homer does not appear anywhere else in Latin literature.43 Rather than reporting to the audience at second hand through intermediaries, Journal of the Trojan War represents itself as the actual words of an individual who alleges that he himself participated in the conflict, an otherwise unknown Achaean warrior Dictys, Cretensis genere, Gnoso civitate, isdem temporibus, quibus et Atridae, fuit . . . . Hic fuit socius Idomenei . . . , “Dictys of Crete, from the city of Knossus, lived at the same time as the sons of Atreus. . . . He was a companion of Idomeneus” (prologus). This Idomeneus leads a contingent to Troy as king of the Cretans in the Iliad, and though Idomeneus is an important character in that epic, a Dictys is never mentioned. This placement of a source outside of Homeric narrative is different from the intra-Homeric sources of Philostratus and Dio and so allows the author of Journal of a Trojan War more flexibility in his criticism of Homer. This Dictys is similar to Philostratus’ Protesilaus and Achilles and Dio’s Menelaus in being a mortal who was closely engaged in the conflict, and so his knowledge of it as one who . . . cuncta sciens perpessusque magna . . . , “knows everything and has great experience” (5.17) surpasses an uninvolved spectator like Homer. The irony of Robin Lane Fox’s “close encounters” with spirits in Philostratus and Dio is gone in Dictys;44 indeed, that author goes to some lengths to distance himself from the trope, as he claims to have interviewed Odysseus, though presumably while he was still alive, as opposed to the Philostratean Homer’s consultation of the Ithacan in the underworld (section 43.12). Dictys injects ironic distance, though, into his preface, which states that he wrote in Phoenician, which Nero had translated into Greek. This three-part translation was probably also a feature of the Greek version, and so the tongue-in-cheekness identified by ní Mheallaigh inheres here. Journal of the Trojan War is only as truthful as its “translation.” That Dictys hails from an island known for producing liars is another layer of irony.45 The narrator of On the Destruction of Troy also asserts that he was part of Homeric narrative. Whereas Dictys fought on the Achaean side, Dares claims to have been an ally of Troy: Dares Phrygius . . . ait . . . hos se vidisse . . . . A Dardanis autem audisse . . . , “Dares the Phrygian said that he himself saw them [and] that he himself heard from Trojans” (XII). Dares is like Herodotus in this description, someone who investigates and makes inquires, and elsewhere he is figured as an eyewitness himself: se militasse usque dum Troia capta est, “he was a soldier until the fall of Troy” (XII). As with Dictys, though, Dares is not a Homeric character.46 The fifth book of the Iliad does mention that two Trojan warriors saved from death on the battlefield have a father named Dares, but this cannot be the same character as the Homeric Dares, who is ἀφνειὸς ἀμύμων/ἱρεὺς Ἡφαίστοιο, “an excellent and wealthy priest of Hephaestus” (Iliad 5.9–10). This does not preclude Dares from being a part of the world of the Iliad, however; it only means that, like Dictys, Dares can more effectively criticize Homeric narratives, since he is outside of them. Another similarity with Journal of the Trojan War is the irony that Dares adds to his narrative by claiming that it is a Latin translation of the account (in

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Greek? in Phrygian?): inveni historiam Daretis Phrygii ipsius manu scriptam . . . . quam ego . . . transtuli, “I found Phrygian Dares’ history written in his own hand. I translated it” (epistula). Dares’ intra-Homeric ontology allows the author of this text to criticize Homer, at times explicitly. We saw in the previous section that Philostratus’ ghosts criticize only certain elements of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Dictys foregoes that approach entirely, depending on his audience’s knowledge of the Homeric poems to see his contradictions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Dares, too, expects this of his audience, but he also makes his criticisms more explicit, particularly in the prefatory letter, where the translator asks the audience whether it would be better to believe Dares, an eyewitness who per id ipsum tempus vixit et militavit, cum Graeci Troianos obpugnarent, “lived and fought in that very time when the Greeks besieged the Trojans,” or Homer, a second-hand source qui post multos annos natus est . . . , “who was born many years after” (epistula). Another bone of contention is how divinity is portrayed. Dares’ letter-writer calls Homer insano . . . quod deos cum hominibus belligerasse scripserit, “insane because he wrote that gods fought with mortals.” One of the most well-known instances of this comes in Book 3 of the Iliad in a one-on-one-combat between Paris and Menelaus. As the Achaean is dragging off the Trojan in victory, Aphrodite breaks the chin-strap of Paris’ helmet and flies him back to the safety of his and Helen’s bedroom. Dares does not mention this incident at all, while Dictys, who also tends to exclude the Olympians’ contacts with mortals, does include it. In Book II section 40 of Journal of the Trojan War, Menelaus does defeat Paris, but rather than being rescued by the goddess of love, Paris is rushed off the field of battle by a globus barbarorum, “group of barbarians,” a band of his fellow Trojans. What Georg Danek has called the rationalizing of Dares and Dictys inspired a similar scene in the 2004 film Troy directed by Wolfgang Petersen.47 There Paris is defeated by Menelaus but saved by hugging the ankles of his brother Hector, who kills Menelaus in response! Troy also gestured to a god-free sequel, a rationalizing of Aeneid Book 2, with Paris’ later comment to Aeneas about the possessor of “the sword of Troy” taking the Trojans to safety (rather than Aphrodite/Venus) after the destruction of the city. The historiographical slant of Dictys’ and Dares’ narrators is played straight for the most part, with a few satirical flourishes here and there. Satire rises to the level of text, rather than sub-text, in another imperial author’s work, the firstcentury Ptolemy the Quail’s New History. Our knowledge of Ptolemy and his oeuvre survives only through a Suda entry and a summary of the New History by the ninth-century Christian patriarch Photius, whose summaries, incidentally, are crucial for our understanding of other Homer-adjacent compositions, the poems of the Epic Cycle. The Suda entry and Photius inform us that the New History was a collection of information in prose about many Greek texts, including interpretations of difficult passages in the Homeric epics. This structure distinguishes it from the other works considered in this chapter, especially the miscellanies mentioned in the introduction, in that the New History’s raison d’être was to satirize the imperial obsession with sources, poking fun at the proliferation of

76 Sources libraries and access to texts.48 The title New History, arrogant tongue firmly in cheek, claims to supersede all earlier historiographies: the six books of New History contained narratives about mythological characters from different times like Heracles and Achilles, as well as historical figures, from Croesus in the sixth century b.c.e. to Alexander of Macedon in the fourth. This chronological inclusiveness recalls Herodotus, whose own Histories (Ἱστορίαι, which the author himself describes as ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε, “this display of historiē” (1.1)), spanning events of the pre-historic Trojan War through the fifth century b.c.e., was one of the principal inspirations of Homeric receptions in the imperial period. Ptolemy is also connected to Herodotus in the ways that he cites sources in his redefinitions of Homeric narratives. One of Ptolemy’s sources is named Helen, but not the Homeric Helen, or even an individual who lived during the Trojan war, but unattested ἡ πρὸ Ὁμήρου Ἑλένη ἡ τὸν Ἰλιακὸν συγγραψαμένη πόλεμον, “Helen before Homer, who composed The Trojan War,”49 a daughter of the legendary Athenian Musaeus. Ptolemy claims that this Helen’s written account of the war was plagiarized by Homer, taking part in the criticism of the poet by Dio and Dares. This Helen is an extra-Homeric source, bringing Ptolemy much closer to the tradition of Herodotus’ priests as well as the narrators of Dictys and Dares. Ptolemy’s second source is named Phantasia, whose very name, “Miss Fantasy,” has an ironic edge, is a re-affirmation of the make-believe of New History.50 She lived before Homer and in Egypt: Φαντασία τις Μεμφῖτις Νικάρχου θυγάτηρ συνέταξε πρὸ Ὁμήρου, “Phantasia, daughter of Nicarchus of Memphis, composed before Homer.”51 As he did to the Athenian Helen, Homer stole Phantasia’s version and passed it off as his own, and Phantasia has no connection to the characters or events of the Homeric versions. By locating these sources in Egypt and naming one of them “Helen,” Ptolemy echoes Herodotus’ historiographical method with his Egyptian priest sources’ correction of the Homeric narratives about Helen. Ptolemy also mentions Stesichorus’ story about being blinded by Helen.52 This is ironic, in Ptolemy’s typical style, as Stesichorus’ Helen and Ptolemy’s Phantasia are both associated with Egypt. Whereas the lyric poet cites one extra-Homeric source, Ptolemy cites two, neither of which saw the events with their own eyes.53 At the same time, Ptolemy relates an anti-Stesichorus story about Helen, in which the Sicilian poet writes the Palinode as a response to another Helen’s betrayal: ψευδῆ δὲ τὸν περὶ τῆς πηρώσεως εἶναι λόγον, “his story about his being blinded is false.”54 Ptolemy’s sources have more of a satirical bent than others that we have explored in this chapter, and this has caused considerable consternation, with some arguing that they are genuine and others that they are invented. For instance, Alan Cameron distinguishes between what he sees as Dio’s “literary device” of Menelaus’ crumbled accounts in Trojan Speech that is meant to be detected by the audience, as opposed to Ptolemy’s “serious” citations, while ní Mheallaigh points out that doubt about the authenticity of his sources was part of Ptolemy’s point.55 Given the numerous ridiculous claims made in New History, this latter view has more merit, a view echoed even by the self-serious Photius, who at one point admits the πολλὰ καὶ τερατώδη καὶ κακόπλαστα, “many monstrous, ill-conceived,” nature of Ptolemy’s work but simultaneously proclaims that it is Χρήσιμον, “useful.”56

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Ptolemy’s stance towards Homeric narratives in New History also diverges from other imperial receptions of Homer in that he examined odd elements of the Iliad and Odyssey and created narratives to explain them. Ptolemy’s “solutions” are often outlandish, but they do begin from the Homeric epics and frequently do not contradict them. For instance, his explanation of Patroclus’ epithet ἱππεῦ, “horseman,” which appears four times in the Iliad in direct addresses by the narrator. Other characters are called “horsemen,” often as a group in contrast to other types of soldiers and sometimes in the nominative ἱππότης, but neither that noun nor ἱππεύς is ever applied to Patroclus outside of the narratorial apostrophes. Later commentators puzzled over these addresses to Patroclus, with Hellenistic scholars explaining them as an indication of a turn in the plot and as a sign that Patroclus has been hit but not wounded.57 Ptolemy’s solution takes the issue in a completely different direction: Ὅτι Πάτροκλον ἐξόχως Ὅμηρος ἱππέα καλεῖ ὡς παρὰ Ποσειδῶνος ἐραστοῦ γεγονότος μαθόντα τὴν ἡνιοχικήν, “Homer calls Patroclus ‘horseman’ above others because he learned the art of charioteering from his lover Poseidon.”58 This is similar to a description of Nestor’s son Antilochus in the Iliad, whom ἐφίλησαν/Ζεύς τε Ποσειδάων τε, καὶ ἱπποσύνας ἐδίδαξαν/παντοίας, “Zeus and Poseidon loved and taught all sorts of horsemanship” (23.306–308). Not only does Ptolemy’s explanation of this odd aspect of Homeric narrative appear in the Iliad (albeit in a different form), but it is also not impossible from the point of view of the Iliad or Odyssey. As in the student exercises of Chapter 1 that adopted the “addition” narrative strategy, Ptolemy’s relationship between Poseidon and Patroclus is plausible and could have happened “off-screen.” New History does at some points conflict with Homeric narratives. Ptolemy says that when Priam is traveling to the Achaean camp to ransom his son’s body, the king of Troy is accompanied by his children, including his daughter-in-law Andromache.59 Iliad 24’s Zeus explicitly tells Iris that Priam is to have no other mortal accompaniment, and his sons and sons-in-law follow him through Trojan territory but turn back before they reach the Achaean camp. This swerve from Homeric narrative is the only one that Ptolemy makes and is relatively minor, as opposed to the major revisions investigated earlier in this chapter. Ptolemy’s version here mirrors Dictys’ Journal of the Trojan War (Book III section 20), as Nathaniel Griffin points out,60 in an intertextual moment like that noted earlier in this chapter between Philostratus’ Heroicus and Dictys. These three authors were swimming in the same cultural currents. Ptolemy’s satire of sources is paralleled in the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. That film begins with a quotation from Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 translation of the opening of the Odyssey: “O Muse!/ Sing in me, and through me tell the story/Of that man skilled in all the ways of contending/A wanderer, harried for years on end.” The film that follows is a loose adaptation of Homer’s epic in that it combines a wide variety of sources, from the cinematic to the literary. This farrago was comically deflated by the Coens when they claimed never to have read a translation of the Odyssey, but only the comic-book version in Classics Illustrated. This statement is self-consciously ludicrous, as Margaret Toscano points out, not only in contrast with the large number

78 Sources of allusions in O Brother to everything from music to film to literature, but also given the film’s several points of contact with Homer’s epic.61 So, too, Ptolemy’s citations of Helen and Phantasia acknowledge the prominence of source citation in the imperial period (particularly for Homeric receptions, which required a source prior to the Iliad and Odyssey), but they also poke fun of it. This returns us to our consideration of Stesichorus as a model for imperial receptions of Homer. As explored earlier in this chapter, Stesichorus’ Palinode has most of the elements that Herodotus brings together in his Histories. In the context of Ptolemy, though, Stesichorus additionally shows how poetry could be used to re-envision Homeric narrative. Most of the receptions of Homer in the imperial period are in prose, particularly the go-to examples of revisionism, but Ptolemy’s Anthomeros, attested only by the Suda (entry pi 3037), was ποίησις ῥαψῳδιῶν εἰκοσιτεσσάρων, “a hexameter poem in 24 books.” Derived as it is from the preposition ἀντί and Homer’s name, this poem’s title suggests that its orientation might have might have had a similar orientation to Dio’s Trojan Oration (which, as we saw above, employed the same preposition in its self-description) Conclusion This chapter has focused on source citation in receptions of Homer as a way of better understanding their approaches to receiving the Iliad and the Odyssey. Those receptions’ obsession with sources was motivated in part by renewed interest in the nature, compilation, and re-deployment of sources in the context of the Roman Empire’s annexation of vast swathes of territory (and therefore knowledge), in part by the longstanding expectation of source citation in epic poetry. These two impetuses turned imperial authors to the poet Stesichorus and the historian Herodotus, who cited sources other than Homer in their contradictions of his narratives. Stesichorus’ verse Palinode corrected Homer with an eyewitness source other than Homer’s Muses; Herodotus’ Histories provided a prose model for doing the same. Both writers cite sources who are first-hand eyewitnesses to the events at Troy, Helen and Menelaus. These eyewitnesses also appeared in the Iliad and/or Odyssey, the better to be able to question Homeric narratives. Imperial receptions take on these aspects in their own source citations, attributing their contradictions to the authority of eyewitnesses, who therefore supersede the poet Homer and are superior even to the Muses, since they have special knowledge of the Trojan war that only participants can have. These receptions took a satiric angle on their sources. In some cases, that satire is overt, as with Lucian’s rooster, but even the most seemingly “sincere” receptions, like Dio’s Trojan Speech, mock their sources. Dio adds links to Herodotus’ already-complicated source citation chain, his priest declaring that his knowledge comes from other priests who memorized an account by Menelaus that has long since crumbled into dust (section 38)! This satire is overt, meaning that Dio expected his audience to be in on the joke with him, as opposed to the seriousness of Stesichorus and Herodotus. This satire did not extend to these texts’ foundational veneration for Homer, however. In a similar way, Quintus’ epic also responds to the heightened interest in source citation in the imperial period, but, unlike other receptions, his veneration does not take the form of satire but of intertextual mixing. His Muses are intertextual nods to

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Homer’s sources, though he modifies this stance by eliminating an opening invocation to those goddesses, thereby pointing to the Iliad as his primary source. The Posthomeric Muses also have touches of the Hesiodic in their depictions and characterizations. Through these similarities and differences, Quintus simultaneously asserts his engagement with broader imperial culture as well as with poetry specifically. Quintus’ deployments of the Muses thus do not position his reception of Homer as overly traditional, but the very fact that they appear in his epic at all contrasts the PH with receptions that contradict the Iliad and Odyssey. In fact, we have seen in this chapter that the goddesses of inspiration also grace the verses of texts that are much less Homeric than the PH, such as Nonnus’ Dionysiaca. There, the poet calls on the “Homeric Muses” at one time and the non-Homeric Mimallones at another. Even Quintus parallels this in not invoking the Muses at or even near the beginning of his poem and mixing in Hesiodic elements to their characterizations in other parts of his epic. Quintus’ engagements with the Muses are typical of the imperial era, which was focused on the citation of sources at a time of the rapid expansion of knowledge, while his mixture of the Homeric and the Hesiodic positions his reception on the continuum not as a carbon copy of the Iliad and Odyssey but not entirely contradicting them either. In the next chapter we will investigate this via the Homeric reception of Nestor of Laranda, an imperial poet whose Muses have a strongly Hesiodic tone. Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Casson 2001: 83–92 and Whitmarsh 2006: 362. König and Whitmarsh 2007: 38. On Oppian’s use of the Muses, see Kneebone 2020: 52–54. Pace Greensmith 2018: 267, who includes this word in her argument for the Callimachean resonances of this interaction with the Muses. This temporal adverb and the first-person pronoun, however, often appear in Homeric Muse invocations: in addition to Iliad 2.484, the phrase appears in Muse invocations at Iliad 11.218 and Iliad 16.112. Additionally, James 2004: 330–331 points out that the two catalogues share several names, which he thinks is conscious. The first view is represented by Maciver 2012b: 30 and Greensmith 2020: 2. The second view is represented by Bouvier 2005, who argues that Penthesilea replaces the Muses and the proem. Similarly, Bär 2010: 296 sees the exchange between the Trojan women Hippodameia and Theano in Book 1 as replacing the Muse and proem. Leaf 1902: 427. See Maciver 2012b: 29–30 for further precisions about εὖτε. He points out that εὖτε is a rather rare word in the Homeric lexicon, only being used twice in the Iliad. “es hat sich ›seit dem Ende der Ilias‹ nichts verändert”: Bär 2009: 145. Nagy 1999: 16. This individual might have been a rhapsode (see Burgess 2001: 140–142 and Burgess 2004: 5), or he might have been an editor of the Epic Cycle (see Burgess 1996: 8). Most 2018 with modifications. Paschalis 2014: 104: “Ποικίλια appears as an intrinsic feature of Nonnus’ allusive engagement with Homer and other epic poets.” Hopkinson 1994a: 33 n. 7. Geisz 2017: 50. For a reading of this phrase as a metapoetic gesture, see Maciver 2016: 542–545. On these lines, see the commentary in Miguélez Cavero 2008: 130–131. On the Mimallones, see Geisz 2017: 37 and 43.

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19 Paschalis 2014: 121. 20 Nagy 1999: 130. See also the argument of Beecroft 2006 that Stesichorus emphasizes the epichoric in his Palinode. 21 Bär 2007: 40 and 46: “hesiodeischer Subtexte”; “mit einem homerischen Element angereichert hat.” 22 . . . and even this word might not have been shared, as Vian 1963–1969: 101 n. 1 and Campbell 1981: 103 point out. 23 I interpreted this passage in Chapter 1. 24 On dating, see Tomasso 2012: 372–373 and Miguélez Cavero 2013: 4–6. 25 Gerlaud 1982: 103 and Maciver 2020: 182. 26 See Tomasso 2012: 382. 27 Paschalis 2005: 92, Hollis 2006, Whitby 1994: 120, Vian 2001: 294–296, Ypsilanti 2007: 94, and Ypsilanti 2019: 281–282. 28 Maciver 2020: 165. 29 Kim 2010b: 15. 30 See Squire 2011: 18–19, 106–109, and 253–254 n. 20. 31 Squire 2011: 107. 32 See Gantz 1993: 574–575 for a well-balanced consideration of the texts and issues involved. 33 ní Mheallaigh 2014: 122–123. 34 See Merkle 1994: 193. 35 Kim 2008: 602. He also makes an instructive comparison to Libanius’ model progymnasmata on pages 617–620, which were explored in Chapter 1. 36 I have adopted the titles of Dictys’ and Dares’ works from Kim 2010b: 15. 37 Merkle 1994: 184 summarizes the view that Dictys’ work is a novel and discusses the issues at Merkle 1996: 564–565. He discusses the possibility that it is historiography at Merkle 1996: 563 and 579. 38 ní Mheallaigh 2008. 39 ní Mheallaigh 2008: 404. 40 Merkle 1994: 193–194. 41 See Horsfall 2008–9: 56 and Gainsford 2012: 59–60. 42 This ostracon is dated to the mid-second century by the editor (Cockle 1997: 258). 43 Merkle 1996: 578 n. 33 44 The phrase is cited by Zeitlin 2001: 242–255 after Lane Fox 1986: 102. 45 ní Mheallaigh 2008: 409. 46 See Merkle 1996: 575. 47 Danek 2007: 78–79. 48 ní Mheallaigh 2014: 119. 49 Codex 190 Bekker page 149b lines 22–23. 50 Kim 2010b: 2. 51 Codex 190 Bekker page 151a lines 37–38. 52 Codex 190 Bekker page 149b. 53 Ptolemy is thus lampooning imperial revisionist sources that were also connected to Stesichorus’ Helen, discussed above in the cases of Philostratus’ Protesilaus and Dio’s Menelaus. 54 Codex 190 Bekker page 149b lines 38–39. 55 Cameron 2004: 137 and ní Mheallaigh 2014: 120–121. 56 Codex 190 Bekker page 146b lines 1–6. 57 Aristonicus on Iliad 16.20 and A scholiast on Iliad 16.812. 58 Codex 190 Bekker page 147a line 8. 59 Codex 190, Bekker page 151b line 37-page 152a line 1. 60 Griffin 1907: 109–110. Cameron further argues at 2004: 149 that the additions to Priam’s entourage are Dictys’ creation and that Ptolemy depended on Dictys. 61 Toscano 2009: 51.

4

Word Choices

Introduction In the late second or early third century, a poet named Nestor composed an epic entitled Metamorphoses. In one of the surviving fragments, Nestor calls on the Muses to inspire him:1 Σπείσατέ μοι, Μοῦσαι, λιγυρὴν εὐτερπέα φωνήν, ἡδὺν ἀπὸ στομάτων Ἑλικωνίδος ὄμβρον ἀοιδῆς· ὅσσοι γὰρ ῥοφέουσιν ἀοιδοτόκου πόμα πηγῆς, ὑμετέρων ἐπέων λιγυρῇ τέρπονται ἀοιδῇ (AP 9.364) Pour in me, Muses, a clear, delightful voice, a sweet rainstorm of Heliconian song from your mouths. As many as gulp down the drink of the spring that inspires poetry delight in the clear song of my words. Nestor’s association with Hesiod is evident in these lines, marked out most clearly with the adjective Ἑλικωνίδος in the second line. As explored in the previous chapter, in both the Theogony and Works and Days, the Muses hail from Helicon, and the Muses’ Posthomeric manifestations are also, at least on one occasion, linked to that same mountain. Nestor’s invocation would fit right alongside our investigation of Nonnus’ Muses; indeed, Nestor intensifies his connection to Hesiod by applying Ἑλικωνίς not to the Muses themselves but rather to his own poetic practice, calling his composition “Heliconian song.” His poetry is a λιγυρῇ . . . ἀοιδῇ, “clear song,” which is identical to Hesiod’s description of his Works and Days as λιγυρῆς . . . ἀοιδῆς in line 659. In Homeric poetry, by contrast, the purpose of the Sirens’ deadly λιγυρή ἀοιδή (Od. 12.44 and 183), which lures travelers to their island where they will lie unremembered, inverts heroic epics’ memorialization of mortals. In a similar way, Quintus uses λιγυρός once, not to describe his own poetry but in a description of the short-sighted merry-making of Trojan allies, who celebrate a temporary success λιγυροῖσιν . . . καλάμοισιν, “with clear-toned flutes” (PH 6.171).2 These two declarations of aesthetics, the neo-Hellenistic and the Posthomeric, indicate different angles that these poets adopt in their receptions of Homer, which this chapter investigates. DOI: 10.4324/9781003378082-5

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Nestor’s programmatic use of the adjective λιγυρός evokes the Hesiodic voice, which proclaims his alignment with the neo-Hellenistic aesthetic. A term coined by John Ma in his investigation of Nestor,3 “neo-Hellenistic” refers to imperial-era poets who adopted the practices of Hellenistic poets. In their own turn, Hellenistic poets had adopted the Hesiodic voice to produce an alternative to martial epic associated with “the other” epic poet Homer,4 in the form of lyric and didactic poems.5 Ma’s term is usefully comparable to two earlier explorations of poetics along similar lines: Neil Hopkinson’s description of Nonnus as “avant-garde” and Quintus as “traditional” and Albert Wifstrand’s bifurcation of post-third century b.c.e. poets who followed the Hellenistic Callimachus’ changes of the meter of dactylic hexameter verses and those did not.6 These diodic conceptualizations of imperial receptions of Homer do not capture their dynamic mixtures, including Nestor and Quintus. Nestor’s Metamorphoses exemplifies neo-Hellenistic aesthetics in its programmatic invocation of the Hesiodic Muses, as well as in its title, which mirrors the title of the Roman Ovid’s first-century epic that was also associated with Hesiodic poetry.7 Nestor’s Suda entry relates that his Metamorphoses was ὥσπερ καὶ Παρθένιος ὁ Νικαεύς, “just like Parthenius of Nicaea.”8 Whatever this indicates about the content of Nestor’s epic,9 it at least informs us that his Metamorphoses had a Hellenistic orientation. Some of the titles of Nestor’s other poetry suggest what Ewen Bowie calls “the hellenistic [sic] didactic tradition” and “Hesiodic and Callimachean tradition”:10 Cure Encyclopedia (Πανακεία) and Cures from the Garden (Ἀλεξικήπος), a title that recalls the title of the Hellenistic Nicander’s Antidotes (Ἀλεξιφάρμακα),11 suggest that they embodied the Hellenistic penchant for didacticism presented through a Hesiodic lens.12 In addition to these Hesiod and Hellenistic-inspired works, Nestor thought highly of the Homeric poems, as his work Ἰλιάς λειπογράμματος, Lipogramatic Iliad, makes clear. Nestor’s entry in the Suda is our only record of this work, although the title is accompanied by a description of how it was structured. That the first book did not contain any words with alpha in them, the second book any words with beta, and so on, suggests “learning, a mastery of epic vocabulary, and a sense of play with the arbitrary nature of language and form,”13 the erudition that characterized the Hellenistic aesthetic. Nestor’s Lipogramatic Iliad reminds us that just as Callimachus did not dislike Homer,14 neo-Hellenistic poets embraced him as well. They did not like what they considered poor imitators. Their difference from Quintus lay in their respective receptions of the Iliad and Odyssey. As this chapter will demonstrate through their word choices, neo-Hellenistic poets refracted Homer through a Hesiodic lens, whereas Quintus refracted Homer-adjacent material through a Homeric lens. Neo-Hellenistic Diction and the Critics Nestor forges a relationship with Hesiod through the Muses and with Homer through a single word choice. In the fourth line of the following fragment, he uses a word that appears rarely in Homeric verses:

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Εἷρπε τὸ μέν, τὸ δ’ ἔμελλε, τὸ δ’ ἦν ἔτι νωθρὸν ἐν εὐνῇ, αὐτὰρ ὁ διψήσας ποταμῷ ὑπέθηκε γένειον· πᾶς δ’ ἄρα Κηφισὸς εἴσω ῥέεν, ἀργαλέον δὲ ἀνθερεὼν κελάρυζε· κατερχομένου δὲ ῥεέθρου Κηφισὸν κώκυον ὀλωλότα πολλάκι Νύμφαι. (AP 9.129) Part of it crawled, part of it was about to crawl, part of it was still torpid in its lair; but it thirsted and put its jaw in the river. Then all Cephissus flowed in, and its throat gurgled horribly. As the stream sank, the Nymphs often lamented for the Cephissus that had perished.15 Ma describes this epigram, which he and others hypothesize is an excerpt from a longer poem, as a description of the dragon Python drinking a river dry. For the noise the river water makes in the creature’s throat, Nestor uses κελάρυζε, which appears only three times in Homeric verses: in the Iliad, it describes blood trickling from a wound (11.813) and water being diverted from a spring into a garden (21.261), as well as in the Odyssey to a description of sea water running down Odysseus’ head (5.323). Ma notes that Nestor inflects the verb in the same way as Homer does in Iliad 11, even going so far as to say that AP 9.129.3–4 “reworks” Iliad 11.16 Nestor has transposed this verb from a Homeric narrative to a narrative that appears in Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos, in which Apollo foresees that he will battle Python (lines 90–93). One commentator has connected Nestor’s verses to Callimachus’, but Ma argues for an intertext with Dionysius Periegetes instead,17 an imperial poet whose dactylic hexameter Description of the World similarly draws on Hellenistic poetry in order to verify the geography of the Roman Empire. In either case, Nestor highlights a neo-Hellenistic pose in this passage. Quintus also employs κελάρυζε once in his epic, in a description of Ajax’s blood flowing from a wound (5.484), parallel to Homer’s use in Iliad 11. Metrically, though, he differs from both Homer and Nestor in adding a nu moveable. In this way Quintus differentiates his reception from Nestor’s. It is not so much a matter of aesthetic stances as it is strategies for receiving Homer: Nestor replicates the form of a rare Homeric word precisely and applies it to a non-Homeric situation, whereas Quintus changes the form but applies it to almost the same context as Iliad 11. Nestor and Quintus are not as far apart as it might seem at first. κελάρυζε is among the words of Homeric receptions that the second-century Cerealius criticizes: Οὐ τὸ λέγειν παράσημα καὶ Ἀττικὰ ῥήματα πέντε εὐζήλως ἐστὶν καὶ φρονίμως μελετᾶν· οὐδὲ γὰρ εἰ “κάρκαιρε” καὶ εἰ “κοναβεῖ” τό τε “σίζει” καὶ “κελάρυζε” λέγεις, εὐθὺς Ὅμηρος ἔσῃ. νοῦν ὑποκεῖσθαι δεῖ τοῖς γράμμασι καὶ φράσιν αὐτῶν εἶναι κοινοτέραν, ὥστε νοεῖν, ἃ λέγεις. (AP 11.144)18

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Word Choices Writing incorrect words and five Attic ones is not correct style and is foolish. You will not be Homer right away, even if you write “it was quaking,” “it clashes,” “it hisses,” and “it was gurgling.” Intent should be the foundation of letters and expression of the things that you write should be plainer in their meanings.

The first few lines of this epigram criticize superficial Atticizing, a topic whose relationship to imperial receptions of Homeric narrative will be explored in a future section of this chapter, but our focus here is the four verbs that Cerealius lists. All of these words appear in Homeric poetry, though not always in the forms that they have here, as the following table indicates: Table 4.1 Comparative data for Cerealius’ hapax legomena Form

Homer

Imperial

κάρκαιρε κοναβεῖ

—1 time in the Iliad —5 times in the Iliad and Odyssey difference: only in the aorist —1 time in the Odyssey

none —1 time in Oppian

σίζει κελάρυζε

—1 time in the Iliad —2 times in the Odyssey

—1 time in Oppian —1 time in Dionysius the epic poet —2 times in Dionysius Perigetes —1 time in Oppian —1 time in Quintus —12 times in Nonnus —1 time in Nestor —1 time in an anonymous epigram in the Greek Anthology

That three of the four verbs mentioned in the epigram appear in Homer in these exact forms suggests that these are quotations from criticized poetry. One of Cerealius’ targets was Nestor’s Metamorphoses, since the Larandan does use one of those words. None of the other verbs appear in the fragments attributed to him, though. Mary Whitby cautions against thinking that a small selection can represent a poet’s word choices more broadly,19 but because κελάρυζε appears in a programmatic passage and was chosen for inclusion in an anthology (rather than quoted by a commentator),20 it has more weight. Another indication that Cerealius is attacking neo-Hellenistic poetry’s receptions of Homer is the number of times κελάρυζε appears in a variety of extant imperial poetry outside of Nestor. Indeed, it appears no less than twelve times in the neo-Hellenistic epic par excellence, Nonnus’ Dionysiaca. By contrast, only one of Cerealius’ verbs (κελάρυζε again) appears in the PH. Cerealius’ criticism of neo-Hellenistic strategies for “being Homer” appear in another imperial epigram, though this time the attack is directed at poetry that emulates Homeric verses too closely. In the same century as Cerealius, Pollianus criticized incorrect uses of both Hellenistic poetry and Homeric poetry in a Palatine Anthology epigram:21

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Τοὺς κυκλίους τούτους τοὺς “αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα” λέγοντας μισῶ, λωποδύτας ἀλλοτρίων ἐπέων. καὶ διὰ τοῦτ’ ἐλέγοις προσέχω πλέον· οὐδὲν ἔχω γὰρ Παρθενίου κλέπτειν ἢ πάλι Καλλιμάχου. “θηρὶ μὲν οὐατόεντι” γενοίμην, εἴ ποτε γράψω, εἴκελος, “ἐκ ποταμῶν χλωρὰ χελιδόνια.” οἱ δ’ οὕτως τὸν Ὅμηρον ἀναιδῶς λωποδυτοῦσιν, ὥστε γράφειν ἤδη “μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά.” (AP 11.130)22 I hate those cyclic poets who say things like “And then”, stealing others’ words. For this reason I devote myself more to elegy – for I cannot steal anything of Parthenius’ or Callimachus’. May I become like “a long-eared beast” if I ever write “from rivers a fresh swallow’s nest.” They plagiarize Homer so shamelessly that they write, “Sing, goddess, the wrath.” Whatever else the referent or referents of line 1’s substantive adjective κυκλίους might be,23 Pollianus is deploying it in this poem to criticize contemporary writers. Line 7’s verb λωποδυτοῦσιν is in the present tense; the κύκλιοι “steal” phrases from Homeric poetry, like μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά (the same as Iliad 1.1) and αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα (a phrase that occurs 40 times in Homeric verses).24 Pollanius claims that he himself “is not able to” (οὐδὲν ἔχω: note the present tense again) pilfer phrases from Hellenistic poetry in the same way: he quotes partial lines from Callimachus’ Aetia and Parthenius’ Erotica Pathemata to prove his point. This declaration is clearly a praeteritio, per Hinds’ discussion; in the very act of disavowing the borrowed lines, Pollianus openly borrows Homer, Callimachus, and Parthenius.25 His verses also reveal an opposition between Homericizing and neo-Hellenistic reception strategies. But neither are these two aesthetic modes diametrically opposed, as Quintus’ epic demonstrates. In the PH one of Cerealius’ rare Homeric words and αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα (though not as many times as it does in Homeric verses – only on five occasions) appear. Quintus’ Word Choices This combination of strategies is also apparent in the word choices that Quintus makes throughout his epic. Approximately 80% of the PH’s lexicon appears in the Iliad and/or Odyssey, and the remaining 20% is derived from non-Homeric Greek literature, from poetry but also prose. The fact that Quintus could have selected a Homeric word in each of these instances indicates that each word choice was a conscious decision on his part. The rest of this chapter explores these nuances of Posthomeric diction, concluding that Quintus combines Homeric diction with words from a variety of genres and registers, including Hesiod and Hellenistic poetry, that results in a mixture of Homericizing and neo-Hellenistic strategies. Quintus’ difference from neo-Hellenistic poets is made clear in the “autobiographical” passage near the end of the PH. In Book 12, the Posthomeric narrator

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relates that his poetic abilities were divinely bestowed, in verses discussed in Chapter 3 in the context of Posthomeric source citation and Quintus’ depictions of the Muses. Here, lines 309 and 310 are our main focus for their potential allusions to Callimachus: πρίν μοι ἀμφὶ παρειὰ κατασκίδνασθαι ἴουλον,/Σμύρνης ἐν δαπέδοισι περικλυτὰ μῆλα νέμοντι, “before hair spread on my cheeks, as I was pasturing my very glorious herds in the plains of Smyrna.” These two lines’ allusions, or lack thereof, to Callimachus have occupied scholarship for a long time,26 and in this context it takes on a particular importance as the PH’s only programmatic passage. As with the lines from Nestor’s Metamorphoses that began this chapter, programmatic passages are crucial in our understanding of the mixture of the Homericizing and the neo-Hellenistic in imperial receptions of Homer. It is unclear whether Quintus is referring to Callimachus specifically or Hesiod more generally. One thing is straightforward: both Callimachus and Quintus are inspired by the Muses when they are tending their herds. In line 310 the Posthomeric narrator says that he was inspired while he was περικλυτὰ μῆλα νέμοντι, “pasturing very glorious herds,” which parallels the diction and content of a line from a fragment of Callimachus’ epic poem Aetia. There the narrator describes how he was ποιμ⸥ένι μῆλα νέμ̣⸤οντι (fr. 2 line 1),27 but unlike the Posthomeric narrator he was not in Smyrna. Rather, he was παρ’ ἴχνιον ὀξέος ἵππου, “beside the swift horse’s hoofprint,” a reference to the Hippocrene, a fountain created by Pegasus’ hoof on Helicon as related in the Theogony. This aligns Callimachus with Hesiod rather than Homer, whereas Quintus’ Smyrna connects him with ancient biographical traditions about Homer.28 As Emma Greensmith has argued at length, there are diction parallels in this passage between Hesiod, Callimachus, and Quintus, but so too between Homer and Quintus. On the one hand, all three of these authors include a participial form of the verb ποιμαίνω in their respective texts, and the direct objects of those participles are identical in the Aetia and the PH. But Iliad 2.605 shows that both words also appear in the Homeric lexicon: οἳ Φενεόν τ’ ἐνέμοντο καὶ Ὀρχομενὸν πολύμηλον, “who possess Pheneus and Orchomenus rich in herds.”29 Another potential intertext with Callimachus is at PH 12.309, in which the narrator describes his youth. That line parallels the Aetia’s description of Callimachus as a young man ἀ]ρ̣τ̣ιγένειο̣ς̣ ὤν̣, “with a beard just beginning to grow.”30 This intertext is limited to the Aetia because it does not appear in the Theogony (though the word ποθ’, “once,” in line 22 might have suggested this idea to ancient thinkers).31 We know about the phrase describing Callimachus’ youth from a scholiast, who might be making a comment on the poem or who might be paraphrasing the poem itself. It is impossible to determine whether Callimachus used the adjective ἀρτιγένειος or not; in any case, Quintus never employs that word. Instead of being an intertext with Callimachus, line 309 might be an intertext with Homer. In Book 11 of the Odyssey, the eponymous hero tells the spellbound Phaeacian court the tale of two giants named Otus and Ephialtes who piled mountains on top of one another in an attempt to reach Olympus and overthrow Zeus. Before they could do that, they were killed by Apollo πρίν σφωϊν ὑπὸ κροτάφοισιν ἰούλους/ἀνθῆσαι πυκάσαι τε γένυς εὐανθέϊ λάχνῃ, “before down had bloomed

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beneath their temples and densely covered their cheeks with downy hair” (lines 319–320). Elsewhere I have pointed out that πρίν and ἰούλος appear in both the Homeric and Posthomeric passages and that and the latter word is a Homeric hapax legomenon.32 Another aspect in favor of this being an intertext with Homer is a passage from Pausanias, who records a tradition that θῦσαι δὲ ἐν Ἑλικῶνι Μούσαις πρώτους καὶ ἐπονομάσαι τὸ ὄρος ἱερὸν εἶναι Μουσῶν Ἐφιάλτην καὶ Ὦτον λέγουσιν, οἰκίσαι δὲ αὐτοὺς καὶ Ἄσκρην, “they say that Ephialtes and Otus were the first to sacrifice to the Muses on Helicon and to declare that the mountain was sacred to the Muses, and they also lived in Ascra” (9.29.1).33 In the PH 12 passage, then, Quintus connects himself through an allusion to a Homeric hapax to two mythological figures that pre-date Hesiod’s claim to Helicon in the Theogony. The inverse of Nestor of Laranda’s programmatic passage discussed in the introduction to this chapter, the diction of Quintus’ programmatic passage privileges a Homeric rather than Hesiodic, much less a neo-Hellenistic, voice. The intertexts of lines 309–310 in Book 12 of the PH show that Quintus’ relationship to Callimachus is not straightforward, just as his relationships with neoHellenistic and Homeric aesthetics are not. He Homericizes Callimachus, much as the Homeristai Homericized the Epic Cycle’s Ajax (Chapter 2), but he also Hesiodicizes his Muses, as we explored in the previous chapter.34 Next, we will investigate that mixture through Quintus’ word choices. Of the 3800 words in Quintus’ vocabulary, George Washington Paschal estimates that 3000, or approximately 80%, are “Homeric,”35 by which he means words that appear in the Iliad and/or the Odyssey. The choice to use a primarily Homeric vocabulary contrasts with Cerealius’ criticism of writers who used “five Attic words” (Ἀττικὰ ῥήματα πέντε, line 1), which refers to Atticism. Emulation of the vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and pronunciation of authors who wrote in the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e. in the city of Athens, Atticism was popular among sophists in the imperial period,36 but it is nonsensical for poets. Poems already had their own forms of Atticism in the lexical traditions of their genres, as with Quintus’ Homeric lexicon. Both Atticism and Quintus’ Homericizing are motivated by nostalgia, by a desire to replicate the past, as Jim Porter remarks about the “correct” pronunciation of words in Atticism.37 Like Atticism, perfect Homericizing was an “unattainable ideal,”38 and in fact Quintus did not aim to create a flawless facsimile of the word choices of the Iliad and Odyssey. The other 20% of Quintus’ lexicon, does not appear in Homeric verses; such a percentage cannot be attributed to accidents. Some of these words are derived from Homer (“compounds formed on Homeric analogy”), while others do not have any precedent in Homeric diction. Those two categories interpenetrate, since, in many cases, an uncompounded word that appears in Homer is found in a compounded form in a non-Homeric author before the PH and in Quintus. I interpret such cases to be an innovation on Homer by a postHomeric author that Quintus then imitates (rather than Quintus’ own innovation on Homer). In what follows, I analyze select instances of these words, taken from the lists of non-Homeric words in Paschal’s study.39 Each instance appears in one, or at most two, author(s) before the fourth century, excluding lexicographers

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and scholiasts, and in Quintus. The resulting words are therefore non-Homeric hapax legomena (appearing once) or dis legomena (appearing twice). There have been many different definitions of what constitutes those kinds of words, but for the purposes of this investigation, they are defined as what Steve Reece calls “singularities.”40 Such instances are good tools for assessing reception because they draw the audience’s attention to “a specific passage.”41 Quintus’ uses of these word choices also rupture his audience’s experience of the Homeric poems by reminding them of the world outside of Homer. Any assessment of Quintus’ Homericizing via hapax legomena requires that the receiving audience be a specialized one. In this case, the pepaideumenoi investigated in Chapter 1 are ideal candidates, because they knew the Iliad and Odyssey very well through constant reading of those poems and as the basis for exercises in the schoolroom. This recalls Hellenistic poetry, which was composed by librarians, but Richard Hunter reminds us that the large numbers of it in papyrological finds shows that it had a popular audience as well.42 On the one hand, the PH did grow out of Vian’s “culture livresque,” Simon Goldhill’s imperial “culture . . . of the very big book,”43 but as we saw in Chapter 2, Quintus also shares a number of narrative strategies with popular receptions, which creates a bifurcated audience. This segmentation parallels the elite and popular audiences of Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction. As its title suggests, that film includes narratives from the “low” pulp crime genre, such as gangsters picking up money for their employer, while also referencing narratives from “high” genre films, such as a dance competition from the 1964 French New Wave film Bande à parte directed by Jean-Luc Goddard.44 Michael Z. Newman claims that Pulp Fiction “demand[s] a wide sweep of world-cinema-history knowledge,”45 but like the PH that film can be appreciated by audiences who have specialized knowledge as well as those who do not. Archaic Poetry We begin our exploration of Quintus’ non-Homeric diction with Homer’s rival, the archaic poet Hesiod. The introduction to this chapter looked closely at the opening lines of Nestor’s epic poem Metamorphoses, concluding that the poet made word choices that imply a Hesiodic composition. Although these two traditions were conceived as opposites of one another, their lexicons have much in common. An example is the verb περιάχω, “to echo around, resound,” which appears once in Hesiod (Theogony line 678), once in Homer (Iliad 7.267), and five times in Quintus’ epic.46 Diction shared by Homer and Hesiod has given rise to various explanations,47 but the present investigation considers only words that appear exclusively in poetry attributed to Hesiod. One such word is the adverb συνωχαδόν, “continually,” which appears in the Theogony’s description of Zeus ἀστράπτων ἔστειχε συνωχαδόν, “hurling lightning bolts continually” at the Titans (line 69). This is a Homeric moment: the Iliad refers to the Olympians’ war against the previous generation as well as the Titans’ subsequent existences in the afterlife, and Quintus echoes those references, including a moment that nearly replicates the Theogonic Zeus. In the funeral games for

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Achilles, Thetis presents helmet as a prize. On it is a scene of the Olympian-Titan conflict, in which the enemies of Zeus are suffering from his thunderbolts (5.103– 108). συνωχαδὸν does not appear in that passage, but Quintus uses it much later of the Achaeans’ ships in a storm that συνωχαδὸν ἀλλήλῃσιν/αἰὲν ερρήγνυντο, “kept smashing into one another continually.”48 That storm has a connection to the king of the gods, since Zeus’ daughter Athena has brought it on with her father’s permission, and so Quintus Homericizes Hesiod, but he does not use the word in a place that the audience expects. συνωχαδόν is closely associated with Hesiod, as it is glossed by a scholiast on the Theogony as συνεχῶς,49 an adverb with the same meaning that is used much more frequently. A word that is far less amenable to a Homeric context is the noun ὀαρισμός, “familiar conversation.” In Works and Days, lines 788–789 give a kind of horoscope for an individual born in the “sowing month” who φιλέοι . . . ὀαρισμούς, “loves gossip.” Unlike συνωχαδόν, part of a Homer-friendly passage in Hesiod, ὀαρισμός belongs to a didactic passage, and that association appears again in its use by two Hellenistic poets, Dorotheus and Callimachus. Perhaps ὀαρισμός could be used of an execrable Homeric character like Thersites, but Quintus employs it of a hero. When Achilles’ son Neoptolemus is leaving his home for Troy at the insistence of Odysseus and Diomedes, he has a δακρυόεις ὀαρισμὸς, “tearful conversation,” with his mother Deidamia (PH 7.315–316). Quintus once again has Homericized Hesiod, but here he shows off his incorporation of an element that is quite un-Homeric. The very name “Homeric Hymns” implies that those poems have more overlap with the Iliad and Odyssey than Hesiodic poems. Even though the Homeric Hymns’ lexicon is indeed quite close to the Homeric one, some words are unique to the Hymns. For an example, the noun κακοφραδία, which means “foolishness,” appears in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in the eponymous goddess’ description of how a mortal has suffered κακοφραδίῃσι τιθήνης, “because of the nurse’s foolishness.”50 Though κακοφραδία does not appear in Homeric verses, the closely related adjective κακοφραδής does, in the Cretan king Idomeneus’ rebuke of “foolish Ajax” for speaking about a chariot race (Il. 23.483). This gave Quintus a Homeric precedent, but instead he chose to re-deploy the Homeric Hymns’ noun, not once but twice. The first case, an incredulous response to Cassandra’s warning about the wooden horse (PH 12.554), replicates the Homeric Hymn to Demeter’s application of κακοφραδία to a woman, while the second instance appears in a simile, one of the most Homeric features, that compares the Achaeans’ murder of Astyanax to the κακοφραδίῃσι of a wolf pack separating a calf from its mother and driving it over a cliff.51 Quintus could have applied κακοφραδής to both of these passages, particularly since both of them depict the fall of Troy, but he chose not to. This can be construed as an interpretation of the question of why Athena does not help Odysseus for many years following his ships’ departure from Troy.52 In doing so, Quintus makes the Posthomeric κακοφραδία parallel to the Homeric κακοφραδής. Even though there are a number of differences between a heroic epic like the PH and similar compositions like the Theogony, Works and Days, and the Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry is even further removed in terms of its typical subjects, its

90 Word Choices meters, and its word choices. Richard Martin has shown how that initial impression is complicated by convergences between the two traditions’ lexica in the Homeric epics’ similes.53 An example of a convergence of lyric and Posthomeric diction that is not used in a simile is the substantive adjective ἀμφιπερικτίονες, “dwellers all around.” In an ecphrastic scene the Ceryneian Hind has been uprooting ἀμφιπερικτιόνων . . . ἀλωήν, “the neighbors’ vineyards” (PH 6.224). This same adjective also appears in the seventh-century b.c.e. Callinus, in an accusation that young people are lazy (fr. 1 line 2), and in the sixth-century b.c.e. Theognis, where it describes the audience of a musician and poet listening to lyric poetry (Elegies 1.1058). Martin compares Homer’s word choices in Homeric similes to Theognis’diction specifically,54 but in light of Quintus’ aim of receiving Homer, it is relevant that ἀμφιπερικτίονες is not Homeric. It falls into Paschal’s compound category in that it combines the adjective περικτίονες, which appears infrequently (6 times) in the Iliad and Odyssey, and the frequently used preposition ἀμφί. Quintus transfers Theognis’ usage from an audience listening to a non-epic composition to the victims of a monster worthy of an epic hero. Hellenistic Poetry The lexical overlaps that have been explored thus far present some contrast with Quintus’ epic, but there is considerably more friction between the PH and Hellenistic poetry. Quintus’ Homericizing aesthetic is quite different from the neo-Hellenistic aesthetic; even so, he does employ words that do not appear in the Homeric epics but that do appear in Hellenistic poetry. Homericizing explains why Hellenistic word choices appear in Quintus’ poem, but on the surface it is not as convincing for the third-century b.c.e. Apollonius of Rhodes because his epic, the Argonautica, is, like the PH and unlike other examples of Hellenistic poetry, a reception of the Homeric poems. A number of studies have compared Apollonius and Quintus, especially in their treatment of Homeric hapax legomena,55 but these obscure the PH not having Hellenistic aesthetics. Furthermore, the Argonautica and PH take place at different times in mythic history,56 and so the Argonautica does not position itself as a prequel to the Iliad, at least not in the ways that Quintus makes the PH a sequel to Homer. In the end, the Argonautica does not provide a significant source for Quintus’ diction because the former is, as James Clauss has observed “a Callimachean epic.”57 Whereas Quintus Homericizes non-Homeric texts, Apollonius Hellenisticizes Homer. The verb παραθερίζω, “to graze in passing,” first appears in the Argonautica’s description of how the Clashing Rocks παρέθρισαν ἄκρα κόρυμβα, “grazed the high stern” of the Argo as Jason and his crew pass through them.58 Quintus re-deploys the same verb twice, both times of battle injuries: Philoctetes’ arrow παρέθρισε χειρὸς ἐπιγράβδην χρόα καλόν, “grazed the beautiful skin of [Paris’] hand,”59 and a Trojan’s spear παρὰ δ’ ἔθρισεν ὀστέ, “grazed in passing the bones” of an Achaean warrior.60 Neither of these instances matches Apollonius’ use of παραθερίζω, and in fact Quintus highlights his appropriation of the Apollonian

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lexicon by combining παραθερίζω with the adverb ἐπιγράβδην, “scraping the surface,” an Iliadic hapax that has a meaning similar to παραθερίζω but that also does not appear in the Argonautica. In this collocation of Homeric and Apollonian word choices, Quintus shows his nuanced understanding of both epics. Derivatives of the λιταίν- stem, which means “to do wrong,” are absent from Homeric vocabulary but appear twice in the Argonautica, in Zetes’ question about whether the prophet Phineus “wronged” (παρήλιτες) the gods (2.246), and in Medea’s admission, ἦ μέγα δή τι παρήλιτον, “I did a great wrong” (3.891). Similarly, the Posthomeric Paris regrets his past behavior toward his ex-wife Oenone, asking for her medical assistance εἰ καί τι παρήλιτον, “even if I did some wrong.”61 At PH 12.417 the Trojans fear μὴ δή τι παρήλιτον, “that they did some wrong”62 to Athena in their rejection of the wooden horse. In these instances Quintus highlights his overlap with Apollonius not in terms of content but in terms of his approach to Homer. This is complemented by Vian’s argument that the narrative context of the Phineus and Posthomeric passages is parallel.63 In his Hymn to Artemis, Callimachus uses the adjective τετραβόειος, “of four bull-hides,” in a description of Cyclopes’ φάεα . . . σάκει ἴσα τετραβοείῳ, “eyes, equal in size to a shield made of four bull-hides” (line 53).64 Here Callimachus adapts a Homeric word into his own poetry, since a similar Homer adjective was at hand, ἑπταβόειος, “of seven bull-hides,” which appears five times in descriptions of Ajax’s shield. This adjective was sufficiently obscure for a scholiast to gloss it as τε̣τραπτύχῳ, “fourfold,”65 which the lexicographer Apollonius equates with the Homeric word τετραθέλυμνον.66 Callimachus’ refusal to use a Homeric word choice combined with τετραβόειος’s obscurity asserts its uniqueness. Indeed, no author after Callimachus employs it until Quintus does at PH 6.547, where it is used to describe Aeneas’ σάκος μέγα τετραβόειον, “great shield of four bulls’ hides.” In this way Quintus reclaims Homer from Hellenistic poetry. Near the beginning of Theocritus’ Idyll 24, Hera sends snakes to strangle Heracles in his crib. Woken by the terrified screams of his son, Amphitryon buckles on his armor and sword, and, because it is the middle of the night, he orders his servants to lighten the room with a log from the ἐσχαρεῶνος, “hearth” (line 48).67 This non-Homeric noun appears next in the PH four times: in a simile comparing a child’s grief to Teucer’s (5.504), in Cassandra’s attempt to burn the wooden horse (12.569), in a description of how several Achaeans are attacked by Trojans during the fall of the city (13.147), and in a description of the ashes a grieving Hecuba uses (14.26). The second instance is the most notable of these, for the phrase there, ἀπ’ ἐσχαρεῶνος ἑλοῦσα, imitates closely Theocritus’ phrasing, ἀπ’ ἐσχαρεῶνος ἑλόντες. Also notable are this noun’s ten instances in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, an imperial epic associated with the neo-Hellenistic aesthetic. Quintus’ redeployment of ἐσχαρεών demonstrates that his word choices are not diametrically opposed to those of non-Homericizing literature. With the shared word βαρύδουπος, “loud roaring,” Quintus shows his audience similarity between that his epic and Moschus’ short epic Europa. As with Theocritus’ Idyll 24, Europa’s content is epic adjacent, and so it was a straightforward matter for Quintus to apply the adjective Moschus employs in his periphrasis

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of Poseidon as the βαρύδουπος . . . Ἐννοσίγαιος, “loud-roaring Earthholder,” to another sea element, ἠιόνας βαρυδούπους, “loud-roaring shores” (9.426).68 The components of this compound, the adjective βαρύς, “loud,” and the noun δοῦπος, “thud,” appear frequently in the Iliad and the Odyssey, with common adjectives for “shore(s)” including “deep” (βαθύς; Il. 2.92), “with projecting spits” (Od. 5.418, Od. 5.440), and “long” (μέγας; Il. 7.462, Il. 12.31). Imperial Poetry Two examples from imperial-era poetry demonstrate how Quintus also employs diction from those receptions of Hellenistic poetry. The first comes from the second-century Oppian’s didactic epic Halieutica. Quintus’ intertextuality with the Halieutica, which mixes elements of Homeric style into its Hesiodic model has been studied before, both for its ability to date the PH and for a more nuanced understanding of Quintus’ poetic practices.69 Both epics employ a strategy familiar from other instances of Quintus’ word choices, combining two common Homeric words to create a new word that does not appear in the Iliad or the Odyssey, like the adjective θρασύφρων, “with a bold mind.” The Halieutica uses it to describe a fish species, the θρασύφρονες . . . χρέμητες, “bold-minded tunny” (1.112), which was an unusual word in the imperial period, as indicated by a scholiast’s gloss: τολμηροὶ ἐν τῷ δάκνειν δελφῖνας, ἄτακτοι, καὶ θρασεῖαι, ἀπότολμοι, σύντομοι εἰς τὸ δάκνειν, “daring in biting dolphins, undisciplined, and bold, daring, an abridgement for biting.”70 Although Homer never employs θρασύφρων, his lexicon includes four compounds of – φρων: δαίφρων (fifty-nine times), κρατερόφρων (five times),71 πολύφρων (ten times), and ταλασίφρων (thirteen times). Quintus could have used any one of these metrically equivalent adjectives, but he chose a non-Homeric word that simultaneously points up Quintus’ difference from Oppian in its application to humans and not to an animal (neither does χρέμητες appear in the Homeric poems or the PH). Quintus’ use of all five of these word choices highlights both his commitment to the Homeric as well as his desire to incorporate the non-Homeric into the PH. Another example is the verb περιπτώσσω, “to fear greatly,” the uncompounded form of which is Homeric. Quintus also uses the uncompounded form on six occasions and the compounded form once when the Trojans περιπτώσσοντες, “fear greatly,” Locrian Ajax (11.445). This relationship is reversed in an epigram attributed to Philostratus; his Achaeans περιπτώσσοντες, “fear greatly,” their enemy Telephus (Palatine Anthology Book 16 epigram 110 line 7).72 Though Telephus is not a major fixture in Quintus’ epic, being a character who features in narratives prior to the Iliad, he does appear in several flashbacks. Quintus emphatically does not apply Philostratus’ word choice in any of those, at one point even substituting the verb ἐφόβησε, “he put fear into,” in a description of the effect Achilles had on Telephus (8.151). Prose Quintus showcases his ability to assimilate Greek texts from a variety of time periods and registers into his epic, but he uses them as what Gian Biagio Conte calls

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“modello-esemplare”–that is, “the single word to be precisely imitated”–whereas the Homeric epics are both “modello-codice” (“modelling by code” in Stephen Hinds’ formulation) and “modello-esemplare.”73 In other words, Quintus uses nonHomeric diction in ways that make their presence clear to the audience, remaining distinct from the Homericizing texture of the PH. In this section, the focus will be on Quintus’ integration of prose hapax legomena as modelli-esemplari into the PH, which is a more difficult matter than the other examples considered thus far, particularly because of differing codes (in the imperial period, prose by definition was a rejection of poetry).74 The fifth-century b.c.e. Herodotus featured in Chapter 3 in our investigation of how the historian’s contradiction of the Homeric Helen was an important model for imperial writers. Quintus and the historian are both deeply engaged with the Homeric epics, and so it is not surprising that the former uses a word confined to the latter. Quintus employs the verb ἐπαγινέω, “to bring to,” in an ecphrasis where ῥόον . . ./. . . Ἡρακλέης ἐπαγίνεεν, “Heracles was bringing a stream forward.”75 ἐπαγινέω never appears in Homeric verses, though the non-Ionic verb ἐπάγω, which has an identical meaning, appears twice. Quintus spotlights his use of both forms by re-deploying ἐπάγω once and ἐπαγινέω once. Through the former he displays his command of Homer through making a dis legomenon a hapax, and through the latter he assimilates a non-Homeric word into his epic. Herodotus uses ἐπαγινέω not in his critical inquiries into Homer but in a narrative about the Egyptian king Psammetichus’ desire to prove his people were the oldest. In order to support that contention, Psammetichus has two Egyptian children taken from their parents and raised in isolation: ἐντειλάμενος . . . τὴν ὥρην ἐπαγινέειν σφι αἶγας, “he commanded [a shepherd] to bring goats to them from time to time” (2.2.9–11). Quintus’ word choice gains further dimension from Herodotus also using the Homeric form ἐπάγω on eighteen occasions. A Posthomeric intertext with two prose compositions is the verb κατωπιάω, “to cast the eyes down.” Forms of that word are employed by two philosophers, the fourth-century b.c.e. Aristotle and mid/late third century Porphyry. In his History of Animals, Aristotle uses the participial form κατωπιόων to describe the effects that flute playing has on horses,76 while Porphyry employs the verb when he argues that horses look down (κατωπιᾶν λέγεται) when they are ill, just as humans do, in his On Abstaining from Animal Food.77 Just as Quintus’ uses of Homeric hapax legomena tie him more closely to Homer, so too does Porphyry’s use of an Aristotelian hapax position him in the philosophical tradition, reinforced by his reference to Aristotle in the opening sentence of this section. By contrast, the Posthomeric narrator has not a horse, nor even an animal, but the god Apollo ἧστο κατωπιόων, “sit looking down” (3.133), avoiding Hera’s gaze after the goddess has rebuked him. Unlike the word shared by Aristotle and Porphyry, the adverb δράγδην, “by hand,” which appears in the first-century Plutarch’s The Obsolescence of Oracles as well as in the second-century Lucian’s dialogue Lexiphanes, cannot be attributed to a shared tradition. That this adverb is confined to prose texts written by

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imperial authors makes it worthy of analysis here, as well as its close association with the Homeric lexicon: the related noun δράγμα, “sheaf of corn,” appears twice in Homeric verses, and once in the PH in a simile comparing corpses on a battlefield to corn (PH 3.376). This demonstrates that Quintus wants his audience to be aware of the non-Homeric in δράγδην and the Homeric in δράγμα. That word was also suitable for prose, as its appearance in Xenophon’s sequel to Thucydides, the Hellenica (7.2.8 line 11), shows. Lucian uses the adverb in his depiction of someone at a gymnasium throwing weights that he was δράγδην ἔχων (section 5 line 6), “holding in his hands.”78 To use a phrase that will be the dominant metaphor of the next chapter, this word choice ruptures the Homericizing surface of the PH by causing the Posthomeric audience to think about the gymnasium, a post-Homeric space, as well as the centrality of gymnasium culture in the imperial period.79 At the same time, Lucian’s δράγδην simultaneously recalls instances in the Iliad of warriors throwing rocks at one another.80 There, however, the rocks are held in the hand, χειρὶ, rather than δράγδην, which describes Trojan citizens χερσὶ/δράγδην ἔγκατ’ ἔχοντες “holding their guts in their hands” (13.90–91).81 These lines are striking for their collocation of δράγδην and χερσὶ, through which Quintus demonstrates his command of Homeric poetry and of non-Homeric prose. Another of Porphyry’s writings, Philosophy from Oracles, is Quintus’ intertext for the adjective βαθυσκόπελος, “with high cliffs.” That word appears for the first in Porphyry, prefacing an oracle with a description of a location: βαθυσκοπέλους ἀνὰ πρῶνας θῆρας ὀρειονόμους ἐλάαν Λητωίδι κούρῃ, “to drive mountainranging animals for Leto’s daughter through promontories with high cliffs.”82 Especially striking is the Homeric flavor of Porphyry’s words, as ἐλάαν, a rare infinitive form of ἐλαύνω, appears fifteen times in Homer’s verses. By contrast, the compound adjective βαθυσκόπελος does not, though there are nine adjectives that compound βαθυ- with another noun, as well as the noun σκόπελος.83 Quintus describes wooded areas with Porphyry’s adjective three times. In the first, a simile compares Penthesilea to a lion ranging βαθυσκοπέλου διὰ βήσσης, “through a glen with high cliffs” (1.316); in the second, a simile likens a maddened Ajax to an animal running through βαθυσκοπέλοιο . . . βήσσης, “a glen with high cliffs” (5.372); in the third, the audience for Apollo’s song includes βαθυσκόπελοί τε κολῶναι, “crags with high cliffs” (3.104). None of these instances is linked to Artemis, though Quintus does preserve Porphyry’s association of this adjective with nature, as all of them feature animals; even Apollo’s audience in the last includes “wild animals and birds” (θῆρές τ’ οἰωνοί, 3.104) of a divinity who is, after all, Artemis’ brother. Conclusion This chapter has examined how the works of imperial Greek literature position themselves on the continuum of Homeric reception through their word choices. Nestor of Laranda positions his Metamorphoses via the Hesioidic voice, with an opening invocation to the Muses of Helicon and with a structure that recalls Ovid’s

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Hesiodic epic of the same title. Nestor’s diction, together with the suggestive titles of his other works, imply that he incorporated neo-Hellenistic aesthetics throughout his oeuvre. This stance contrasts with Quintus’. The majority of words in the PH are derived from the Homeric lexicon. The remaining words stem from a variety of non-Homeric Greek texts, including Hellenistic poetry, showing that Nestor and Quintus were probably not polar opposites. The cautionary “probably” is warranted here, due to the current state of Nestor’s works – out of thousands of verses, only a few hundred are extant. Other neo-Hellenistic poets whose work is more or less intact, like Nonnus, are not appropriate comparanda for the PH, because the Dionysiaca is a reception of Homeric aesthetics but not Homeric narratives.84 Quintus’ non-Homeric word choices highlight his audience’s contemporary context, though their infrequency also shows us that this technique is subtle. That will be investigated from a different perspective in the next chapter, but in the context of this chapter’s findings, we can say that the PH does not allow its audience to escape into the Homeric world entirely. Quintus’ non-Homeric word choices are not mistakes or momentary lapses of judgment, but rather intentional gestures at the situatedness of the epic. Posthomeric diction evokes Boym’s “restorative” nostalgia in the sense that his epic recalls the stable Homeric texts studied in the classroom, but it is also “reflective” nostalgia via the addition of non-Homeric words. Notes 1 Ma 2007: 98–103 makes a case for attributing this fragment to the Metamorphoses, but this is by no means universal. 2 Bärtschi 2022: 273 discusses Quintus’ portrayals of joy in the PH, concluding that they show “the devasting course of the war from a Trojan perspective.” This creates balance; Quintus is neither pro-Greek nor pro-Trojan (and therefore pro-Roman). 3 Ma 2007: 108. 4 Koning 2010: 333–343. 5 On Hesiod’s popularity as a model for Hellenistic poetics, see, for example, Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 51–60. 6 Hopkinson 1994a: 105 and Wifstrand 1933. 7 On Ovid’s intertextual relationship with Hesiod, see Ziogas 2013. 8 Suda entry nu 261. 9 Lightfoot 1999: 165 is skeptical that “Nestor’s poem had imitated Parthenius.” 10 Bowie 1990: 70 and 80. 11 Ma 2007: 87. 12 In this, Nestor can be associated with the two didactic poems the Halieutica and the Cynegetica. See “Oppian” in the index as well as Kneebone 2020: 14–15. 13 Ma 2007: 107. 14 See Cameron 1995: 263–302. 15 Translation: Ma 2007: 99 with modifications. 16 Ma 2007: 110. 17 Ma 2007: 100. 18 Edition: Beckby 1965–8. 19 Whitby 1994: 123. 20 Cirilo de Melo 2014: 450 comments on the difficulties of dealing with ancient quotations. 21 Dating: Nisbet 2003: 183–184. 22 Edition: Beckby 1965–8.

96 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Word Choices See Cameron 1995: 397–399 on these issues. Nisbet 2003: 188 n. 12. Hinds 1998: 22. See, e.g., Köchly 1850: III, Kehmptzow 1891: 36–37, Taccone 1904–5, Vian 1963– 1969: 101 n. 1, Campbell 1981: 101, Hopkinson 1994a: 106, Bär 2007: 49, and Greensmith 2018 and 2020: 157–188. Edition: Pfeiffer 1949–53. See Greensmith 2018: 262. That the collocation μῆλα + νεμ- does not occur in the Homeric or Hesiodic corpus suggests that PH 12.310 is an intertext with the Aetia. Edition: Pfeiffer 1949–53 (fragment 2 line 18). Vian 1963–1969: 101 n. 1 connects this line to the PH. Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 73. Tomasso 2010 78 n. 139. See also Greensmith 2018: 268. See Lamberton 1988: 501, who is skeptical of this tradition’s authenticity. See Tomasso 2010: 78 and Greensmith 2020: 160. Paschal 1904: 24. On the phenomenon of Atticism, see a good overview at Kim 2010a. Porter 2006b: 319–321. See Whitmarsh 2001: 127–128 on Lucian’s satire of Atticism’s euphony in his dialogue Lexiphanes. Swain 1996: 38. Paschal 1904: 22–27. Reece 2011: 330. Kumpf 1984: 5. Hunter 1993: 4. Vian 1963–1969: XLI and Goldhill 2009: 96–97. Bailey 2013: 126. Newman 2011: 37. PH 2.605, 11.382, 14.483, 14.534, and 14.416. See Rosen 1997. PH 14.517. Vian 1963–1969: 117 n. 3 notes that this adverb has a different, though related, meaning in the Theogony and the PH, and he compares, without comment, the related adverb συνοχηδόν, “in confinement,” in a Palatine Anthology epigram. Edition: Flach 1876 (BMM2 scholiast, line 2 on verse 690). Line 227. Edition: Allen, Halliday, and Sikes 1936. PH 13.259. Scheijnen 2018: 38 discusses how Quintus’ similes are one of his epic’s most Homeric features. See also the “The Sands of the Arena” section of the next chapter. See Clay 1997: 43–53. Martin 1997: 156–159. On Theognis in the PH, see Campbell 1981: 190, who discusses four phrasings shared by the two poets. The standard treatment of Apollonius’ uses of hapax legomena is Kyriakou 1995 and of Quintus’ Appel 1994. Vian 2001 analyzes shared narratives and themes. Clauss 1993: 2. Argon. 2.601. Edition: Fraenkel 1961. PH 10.238. PH 6.629. PH 10.305. Vian 1963–1969: 219 discusses textual readings of this passage. Vian 2001: 293. Edition: Pfeiffer 1949–1953. ibid.

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70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

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Lexicon Homericum page 134 line 24. Edition: Bekker 1833. Edition: Gow 1952b. Europa lines 120–121. Edition: Gow 1952a. On the Homeric positioning of Oppian’s Hesiodic work, see Bartley 2003. On Oppian as establishing a date for Quintus, see James and Lee 2000: 6, Baumbach and Bär 2007a: 3, and Maciver 2012a: 3. On Quintus’ intertextuality with Oppian, see Kneebone 2007 and James 2004: 310, 316, and 323. Edition: Bussemaker 1849. The gloss further suggests that this word was coined by Oppian, asserted by James and Lee 2000: 39. On this adjective in Book 5 of the PH, see James and Lee 2000: 39. Edition: Beckby 1965–8. Segal’s translations at Conte 1986: 31. Hinds 1998: 41. See Whitmarsh 2006: 190 on imperial prose writing as “the polemical renunciation of poetry.” PH 6.234–5. Bekker page 604b11; Edition: Louis 1964–9. De abstinentia 3.7.21. Edition: Bouffartigue, Patillon, and Segonds 1977–1995. Edition: Harmon 1913–1936. See König 2005, especially 345: “It was a central part of the common forms of education and public spectacle which occupied so much of public and private life.” Iliad 5.302, Iliad 8.321, and Iliad 20.285. Avlamis 2019: 190 discusses this passage in relation to Quintus’ use of historiographical tropes. Page 124 lines 2 and 3. Edition: Wolff 1856. Cunliffe 1963: 66. . . . which is why Nonnus’ Muses were appropriate objects of analysis in the previous chapter. Pace Shorrock’s characterization of the Dionysiaca as “a sustained attempt to appropriate the whole of Homer’s narrative and recast it in a new Dionysiac form” (2009: 379).

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Introduction In the previous chapter I analyzed instances in which Quintus chooses words that appear outside the Homeric lexicon. These words draw the audience’s attention outside the Homeric narrative world to different times and genres of Greek literature from the Archaic Period through the imperial present of Quintus and his audience. Through these diction choices Quintus pokes holes in his audiences’ nostalgia, and this chapter explores another aspect of that phenomenon in three references to Rome that are peppered throughout the PH: the author’s name, a prophecy about what Aeneas will do after the fall of his current city, and a simile that compares the Achaean kings Menelaus and Agamemnon to animals in an arena. The metaphor that structures this chapter is that of ruptures, made in the course of film scholar Vera Dika’s analysis of a 1996 anti-smoking advertisement. That advertisement is a photograph of two individuals on horseback, who, along with their white, Cattleman-style hats and boots, evoke the audience’s memories of texts that employ similar imagery, western films. These two individuals, riding back to their ranch after a hard day’s work on the range (or so viewers imagine), trigger in the audience recollections of rugged masculinity that appears in films of the western genre. Contrasting with that nostalgia is the advertisement’s message, written in attention-grabbing, white letters over the two riders, at the center of the image. One of the cowboys declares, “I miss my lung, Bob,” a reference to the medical practice of pneumonectomy. The audience infers that this cowboy has been smoking and has gotten lung cancer as a result. Cigarettes were as much a part of the cinematic western male ideal as the horses, hats, and boots of this photograph, but its aftermath – cancer and pulmonary surgery – are not. The disjunction between the content of the photograph and the words is what Dika calls “ruptur[ing] the . . . representational surface.”1 Similarly, the Roman ruptures in the PH foreground Quintus’ Homericizing and draw the audience’s attention to their dissonance. Rome is not at all present in the Iliad or the Odyssey, and so Quintus’ references to imperial culture highlight the distance between his creation and the Homeric epics. Scholiasts viewed ruptures in the Homeric epics as problematic, as we can see from their comments on similes. They identified only three of the numerous similes DOI: 10.4324/9781003378082-6

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in the Iliad and Odyssey as containing elements that did not belong to the Homeric vision of the heroic world.2 The first one appears in Iliad Book 15, where the narrator likens Ajax’s movements to a horse performer: ἀλλ’ ὅ γε νηῶν ἴκρι’ ἐπῴχετο μακρὰ βιβάσθων, νώμα δὲ ξυστὸν μέγα ναύμαχον ἐν παλάμῃσι κολλητὸν βλήτροισι δυωκαιεικοσίπηχυ. ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἀνὴρ ἵπποισι κελητίζειν ἐῢ εἰδώς, ὅς τ’ ἐπεὶ ἐκ πολέων πίσυρας συναείρεται ἵππους, σεύας ἐκ πεδίοιο μέγα προτὶ ἄστυ δίηται λαοφόρον καθ’ ὁδόν· πολέες τέ ἑ θηήσαντο ἀνέρες ἠδὲ γυναῖκες· ὃ δ’ ἔμπεδον ἀσφαλὲς αἰεὶ θρῴσκων ἄλλοτ’ ἐπ’ ἄλλον ἀμείβεται, οἳ δὲ πέτονται· ὣς Αἴας ἐπὶ πολλὰ θοάων ἴκρια νηῶν φοίτα μακρὰ βιβάς (Iliad 15.676–686) He was walking on the sterns of the ships with great strides, and he was wielding a large, smooth pole, twenty-two cubits long and held together by clamps. As when a man who knows well how to ride horses, whenever he harnesses four horses out of many and in a rush drives them from the plain to a great city on a well-traveled road. Many see him, men and women. He leaps always firmly and without falling, moving one horse to another at different times, and they fly. In this way Ajax was taking great strides on the sterns of many swift ships. The first-century commentator on Homer Aristonicus took issue with the infinitive κελητίζειν “because he himself [i.e., ὁ ποιητὴς in other scholiast comments, Homer] knows about a riding horses, but he does not introduce the heroes using them” (ὅτι κέλητα αὐτὸς μὲν οἶδε, χρωμένους δὲ τοὺς ἥρωας οὐ συνίστησι).3 In Book 18, Achilles shows his face to the Trojans, though he does not re-enter battle yet: ἔνθα στὰς ἤϋσ’, ἀπάτερθε δὲ Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη φθέγξατ’· ἀτὰρ Τρώεσσιν ἐν ἄσπετον ὦρσε κυδοιμόν. ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἀριζήλη φωνή, ὅτε τ’ ἴαχε σάλπιγξ ἄστυ περιπλομένων δηΐων ὕπο θυμοραϊστέων, ὣς τότ’ ἀριζήλη φωνὴ γένετ’ Αἰακίδαο. (Iliad 18.217–221) There he stood, shouting, and Pallas Athena at a distance spoke. He incited a huge panic in the Trojans. As when a clear sound, a trumpet, blasts because of life-destroying enemies encircling a city. In this way the voice of Aeacus’ grandson was clear.

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A scholiast objects to this simile because “the poet used the noun ‘trumpet’ from his own times, since that noun is not found among the ancients” (ἀπὸ τῶν ἰδίων χρόνων ὁ ποιητὴς ὠνόμακε τὴν σάλπιγγα, ἐπεὶ οὐδέπω ηὕρητο παρὰ τοῖς παλαιοῖς); Aristonicus echoes that criticism, adding that the trumpet is problematic “because he himself knew of trumpets, but he does not introduce the heroes using them” (αὐτὸς μὲν οἶδε σάλπιγγα, οὐκ εἰσάγει δὲ ἥρωας εἰδότας).4 This noun does appear one more time in the Homeric poems, when the narrator compares the sound of the gods in battle to a trumpet: “They fell on one another with a great noise, and the wide earth made a loud sound, and the great sky around trumpeted” (σὺν δ’ ἔπεσον μεγάλῳ πατάγῳ, βράχε δ’ εὐρεῖα χθών,/ἀμφὶ δὲ σάλπιγξεν μέγας οὐρανός, Il. 21.387–8); a scholiast also lamented this line. Unlike the other instance of a trumpet to describe Achilles’ appearance above the Achaean trench, there is no simile in these verses, and so perhaps Homer simply did not have occasion to mention trumpets, as G. S. Kirk argues.5 A few lines before the trumpeting sound of divinities in combat comes another simile that scholiasts objected to. The event that kickstarts that theomachy is a god injuring another god, when the queen of the gods asks her son Hephaestus to help Achilles by boiling a river. That river, the Scamander that winds through the Trojan plain, is, of course, on the Trojans’ side and becomes enraged at how Achilles has littered him with the bodies of Trojans. Scamander responds by rising up, threatening to drown Achilles, and Hera is so afraid for her favorite that she sends Hephaestus to stop Scamander. To do this, Hephaestus does what he does best and heats the river with fire: . . . ἀνὰ δ’ ἔφλυε καλὰ ῥέεθρα. ὡς δὲ λέβης ζεῖ ἔνδον ἐπειγόμενος πυρὶ πολλῷ κνίσην μελδόμενος ἁπαλοτρεφέος σιάλοιο πάντοθεν ἀμβολάδην, ὑπὸ δὲ ξύλα κάγκανα κεῖται, ὣς τοῦ καλὰ ῥέεθρα πυρὶ φλέγετο, ζέε δ’ ὕδωρ· (Iliad 21.361–365) His lovely streams were boiling up. As a cauldron boils, a lot of fire licking it, melting the fat of a plump pig, bubbling up from all sides, and dry wood lies beneath. In this way his lovely streams were burning, and his water was boiling. Aristonicus complained about this simile “because he knows about boiling meat, but he does not represent the heroes doing it” (ὅτι οἶδεν ἕψησιν κρεῶν, χρωμένους δὲ τοὺς ἥρωας οὐ παρεισάγει).6 Similarly infrequent are Quintus’ Roman ruptures, which has led to charges that they were mistakes. For instance, in his translation of Quintus’ epic into English, Alan James characterized Quintus’ “success” at “avoid[ing] anachronisms”–that is, Quintus meant to replicate the Homeric epics, and temporal ruptures would have stunted his effort.7 Rather than labeling these instances “anachronisms,” I call them “temporal ruptures,” because, as Tim Rood, Carol Atack, and Tom Philips point out, the word “anachronism,” with its implication that the composer erred unintentionally in including material from a “wrong” era, does not apply to what

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Homer and his successors do in their epics; such instances are part and parcel of the poetic enterprise. What we perceive as anachronisms are another way of impugning verses as “non-Homeric,”8 as, for instance, Aristarchus did.9 The three ruptures that this chapter discusses are not only non-Homeric, in the sense that they disrupt Quintus’ Homeric narrative, but also imperial – that is, they pull the audience’s gaze to the Roman world. There are numerous temporal ruptures of the Homeric narrative throughout the PH, from athletic events to torture,10 but these are not as easily perceived by Quintus’ third-century audience. No scholia survive to identify similar instances of “anachronistic” similes Quintus’ epic, but modern scholars have filled that gap. In his exemplary translation of the PH, James pointed to the athletic competitions at Achilles’ funeral in Book 5 as problematic, since events like the long jump, pancratium, and horseback-riding do not appear in either of the Homeric poems.11 We must distinguish between anachronisms like these, which might be anachronistic from the standpoint of the eighth century b.c.e. and, as the Homeric scholia suggest, might have been perceived as such by imperial audiences, and anachronisms that third-century c.e. audience would have recognized as stemming from an imperial context. The first kind of temporal interruptions would have been perceived as part of the mixture of heroic epic, where the second kind would have stood out. What’s in a Name? Even before audiences are immersed in the content of Quintus’ poem, the title and name of the epic’s author gives them pause. Though the circumstances of time and place in which the title and author’s name were first attached to this epic are controversial – and are likely to remain so – one of the earliest attestations of these pieces of information is a sixth-century scholiast on the Iliad. Commenting on Book 2 of that epic, the scholiast tells us about the Achaean warrior Thersites’ fate after the Iliad, citing Κόϊντος ὁ ποιητὴς ἐν τοῖς μεθ’ Ὅμηρον, “Quintus the poet in The Events After Homer.”12 This comes several hundred years after the PH was composed, but it is the earliest attestation we have for the title of this epic and the poet’s name, and, though it is not accepted in all quarters,13 I believe that these ascriptions were part of Quintus’ reception by audiences in the third century. These are Gérard Genette’s “paratexts” that “create texts . . . manage them . . . fill them with many of the meanings that we associate with them [texts].”14 The name Κόϊντος and the title τὰ μεθ’ Ὅμηρον generated two responses from imperial audiences. On the one hand, the title’s prepositional phrase μεθ’ Ὅμηρον implied that this epic would be like the Iliad and Odyssey, an impression confirmed by Quintus’ extensive Homericizing. Audiences would also recognize the phrase from another imperial reception of the Homeric epics, the first-century marble relief Tabula Capitolina, one of the Tabulae Iliacae. That tablet’s inscription ΚΑΤΑ ΟΜΗΡΟΝ, “according to Homer,” is a sign to its audience that its visual depictions of the Trojan War hewed closely to the Homeric depictions.15 The preposition κατά denotes quotation,16 while μετά refers to “succession” in a sequence, like the phrase μετὰ ταῦτα, “after this” or “next,” in Proclus’ summaries of the Epic Cycle

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poems. On the other hand, the author’s name, a Roman praenomen written in the Greek alphabet, draws imperial audiences’ gaze past the Homeric epics of archaic Greece and into the contemporary moment of Roman Greece. Though much has been interpreted about the author of the PH on the basis of the name “Quintus,” not much can be derived from it. The most that can be said is that it was in use as early as the third century b.c.e. by Quintus Fabius Pictor, a Roman who wrote in Greek and appears frequently in inscriptions from the second century b.c.e. onwards.17 This generic-ness is frustrating from a chronological point of view, as Κόϊντος cannot help us determine which century the PH was composed, but from another point of view generic-ness is precisely the point: for imperial audiences the name Κόϊντος evoked Rome, whereas the title evoked Greece. Calchas’ Prophecy Taking place in the tenth year of the war, the Iliad establishes Aeneas as an important, if secondary, character. He is a Trojan himself and a member of the royal family, though more removed from the palace than his cousins Hector and Paris, who consequently play a larger role in Homer’s poem. Nevertheless, Aeneas is on the front lines of battle, going toe-to-toe with the likes of Diomedes and Achilles. Similar to the latter, Aeneas is a demigod, his mother being the goddess Aphrodite, who whisks him away from combat when things look grim for her son in his battle against Diomedes in Book 5. Several books later, it is not Aphrodite but her uncle Poseidon who saves Aeneas, this time in his monomachia with Achilles. The god of the sea has intervened for the Achaeans, taking human form to give them an extra boost, but he stops to address the other gods when he sees Achilles getting the upper hand against Aeneas: ἀλλὰ τί ἢ νῦν οὗτος ἀναίτιος ἄλγεα πάσχει μὰψ ἕνεκ’ ἀλλοτρίων ἀχέων, κεχαρισμένα δ’ αἰεὶ δῶρα θεοῖσι δίδωσι τοὶ οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἔχουσιν; ἀλλ’ ἄγεθ’ ἡμεῖς πέρ μιν ὑπὲκ θανάτου ἀγάγωμεν, μή πως καὶ Κρονίδης κεχολώσεται, αἴ κεν Ἀχιλλεὺς τόνδε κατακτείνῃ· μόριμον δέ οἵ ἐστ’ ἀλέασθαι, ὄφρα μὴ ἄσπερμος γενεὴ καὶ ἄφαντος ὄληται Δαρδάνου, ὃν Κρονίδης περὶ πάντων φίλατο παίδων οἳ ἕθεν ἐξεγένοντο γυναικῶν τε θνητάων. ἤδη γὰρ Πριάμου γενεὴν ἔχθηρε Κρονίων· νῦν δὲ δὴ Αἰνείαο βίη Τρώεσσιν ἀνάξει καὶ παίδων παῖδες, τοί κεν μετόπισθε γένωνται. (Iliad 20.297–308) “Why does this innocent man now suffer hardships in vain on account of others’ pains, though he always gives gifts pleasing to the gods who possess wide heaven? Come now, let us lead him away from death, for fear that Cronus’ son might get angry should Achilles kill this man. It is destined for him to escape in

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order that Dardanus’ race not be destroyed and disappear without issue, Dardanus, whom Cronus’ son loves among all his children who were born to him by mortal mothers. He hates the race of Priam already, but as it is the mighty Aeneas will in fact rule the Trojans and their children’s children, who will be born after.” This passage demonstrates that Aeneas transcends the usual categories, with a bloodline that is biologically divine via his mother Aphrodite as well as his grandfather Dardanus, and with sacrifices to the gods, both of which position him beyond the usual distinctions between Achaeans and Trojans made by the gods. Indeed, after Hera agrees with Poseidon’s speech, the god whisks Aeneas away from his combat with Achilles. This is remarkable because Poseidon usually favors the Achaeans, and Aeneas’ defeat by Achilles would deal a tremendous blow to the Trojans’ ability to resist the Achaeans. The god’s change of heart comes about because of his forebodings of Aeneas’ bright future as ruler of the Trojans after the fall of the city. This tradition was developed by Greeks as well as Romans in succeeding centuries, and so there are various non-Homeric traditions about Aeneas that Quintus might have consulted as he composed the PH. These include Aeneas’ flight from Troy in the Epic Cycle poem the Iliou Persis, which pinpoints his and his followers’ destination as Mount Ida, and Roman sources, like Virgil’s own reception of the Iliad in his Aeneid, which has the wandering Aeneas’ group eventually arrive in Italy. Ancient commentators on the Iliad 20 passage predictably connect Homer’s verses with the future rise of Rome out of the ashes of Troy, such as by Aristonicus, which does by changing the wording of the vulgate ὡς προθεσπίζοντος τοῦ ποιητοῦ τὴν Ῥωμαίων ἀρχήν, “because the poet was foretelling the empire of the Romans.”18 Not all imperial writers agreed with Aristonicus’ assessment, though, like the first-century Strabo. He asserts that Aeneas fled to Lyrnessus, a region near Mount Ida, claiming that this information appears in the Iliad, for which he cited not Poseidon’s speech but a taunt that Achilles made some lines earlier that Aeneas had escaped to Lyrnessus during one of their earlier duels. Strabo then mentions a number of other traditions about where Aeneas went after the fall of Troy, including the Roman tradition that Iliad 20 scholiasts report.19 Strabo’s skepticism about these traditions comes from his conceptualization of Homer as “an ideal historian,” per Lawrence Kim.20 “But Homer,” Strabo remarks at the end of his catalogue of non-Homeric traditions about Aeneas’ departure, “does not seem to advocate for either of these.”21 The Greek geographer begins and concludes his discussion of Aeneas traditions with Homer, highlighting his Homerocentric interpretation of Aeneas’ future. This stance parallels Quintus’ Homericizing several hundred years later, though he does so with non-Homeric diction. Calchas prophesies about Aeneas in PH book 13, as the Greeks are sacking Troy. Whereas the Iliadic Hera has to remind the Homeric audience that Aeneas’ future will happen after the events of the Iliad (in lines 315–316 she foretells Troy’s burning at the hands of the Greeks), her forecast becomes actualized in the PH.

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Though Calchas is not created by Quintus, the PH inverts the poet’s and audience’s relationship with Iliad 20 by having a mortal, rather than a god, foretell Aeneas’ future once again. Quintus creates further parallels between his Calchas and Poseidon, for both figures are aligned with the Greeks. This makes the specificities of the prophecy stand out all the more prominently: Καὶ τότε δὴ Κάλχας μεγάλ’ ἴαχε λαὸν ἐέργων· ἴσχεσθ’ Αἰνείαο κατ’ ἰφθίμοιο καρήνου βάλλοντες στονόεντα βέλη καὶ λοίγια δοῦρα. τὸν γὰρ θέσφατόν ἐστι θεῶν ἐρικυδέι βουλῇ Θύμβριν ἐπ’ εὐρυρέεθρον ἀπὸ Ξάνθοιο μολόντα τευξέμεν ἱερὸν ἄστυ καὶ ἐσσομένοισιν ἀγητὸν ἀνθρώποις, αὐτὸν δὲ πολυσπερέεσσι βροτοῖσι κοιρανέειν· ἐκ τοῦ δὲ γένος μετόπισθεν ἀνάξειν ἄχρις ἐπ’ Ἀντολίην τε καὶ ἀκάματον Δύσιν ἐλθεῖν. καὶ γάρ οἱ θέμις ἐστὶ μετέμμεναι ἀθανάτοισιν, οὕνεκα δὴ πάις ἐστὶν ἐυπλοκάμου Ἀφροδίτης. καὶ δ’ ἄλλως τοῦδ’ ἀνδρὸς ἑὰς ἀπεχώμεθα χεῖρας, οὕνεκά οἱ χρυσοῖο καὶ ἄλλοις ἐν κτεάτεσσιν ....................................... ἄνδρα σαοῖ φεύγοντα καὶ ἀλλοδαπὴν ἐπὶ γαῖαν, τῶν πάντων προβέβουλεν ἑὸν πατέρ’ ἠδὲ καὶ υἷα· νὺξ δὲ μί’ ἧμιν ἔφηνε καὶ υἱέα πατρὶ γέροντι ἤπιον ἐκπάγλως καὶ ἀμεμφέα παιδὶ τοκῆα (PH 13.333–349) Then Calchas stopped the army by shouting loudly: “Stop throwing grievous weapons and baneful spears at the head of mighty Aeneas. For it is fated by the gods’ will for him to go from the Xanthus to the wide-flowing Tiber to build a city sacred and wonderful to future people, and to rule mortals in many different cities. For this reason [it is fated] that afterwards his race will rule as far as Anatolia and go to the untiring setting of the sun. It is also right for him to be among the immortals, because he is indeed the son of lovely haired Aphrodite. Moreover, let us refrain from laying our hands on this man, because to him in other possessions of gold also [lacuna] might save a man fleeing even to a foreign land, before all of which he took thought of his father and son. One night has shown to us both a son marvelously kind to an aged father and a parent without blame to his child.” In both the Iliad and the PH, the Achaeans are stopped from attacking Aeneas, and Quintus parallels Homer with his diction, such as the infinitive ἀνάξειν (PH 13.340), which nearly replicates the verb ἀνάξει (Il. 20.307) and the adverb μετόπισθε (Il. 20.308). This intensifies the Homericizing of the PH while also erasing the history that intervenes between the Iliad and the PH.

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Scholars have often used Calchas’ Posthomeric prophecy to date Quintus’ epic. As early as the seventeenth century, Lorenz Rhodoman cited this passage as support for his argument for a late fourth or early fifth century date.22 In his critical edition of the PH published in the middle of the nineteenth century, Arminus Köchly agreed with Rhodoman’s assessment, and he further narrowed the PH’s date to the late fourth or early fifth century.23 At the turn of the twentieth century, in the first Loeb Library edition of the PH, Arthur Way agreed with Köchly with no further qualification,24 and Neil Hopkinson’s 2018 update generalized Quintus’ date to the Roman Empire.25 Chronological considerations aside, Fotini Hadjittofi employed this passage to argue that it is a way of incorporating Roman traditions about a Greek character into imperial Greek identities.26 In this, Hajitoffi aligns Quintus with Greg Woolf’s 1994 article about taking on Roman aspects but retaining a Greek identity. I take an altogether different angle on this passage: rather than indicating the date of the PH or smoothing the integration of Greek and Roman identities, Calchas’ prophecy reminds Quintus’ audience of their situatedness in the Roman Empire of the third century. In doing this, Quintus denies them the possibility of an escape into the narrative, an oblivion of their present moment. Quintus does not paraphrase the Iliadic Poseidon’s speech, though he is capable of doing just that, as we saw in Chapter 1. Instead, he defines the spatial and temporal boundaries of the Roman Empire in specific terms, interspersing Homeric diction with words that appear neither in the Iliad nor the Odyssey. In line 340, the Posthomeric Calchas describes the Roman Empire’s borders as stretching ἄχρις ἐπ’ Ἀντολίην τε καὶ ἀκάματον Δύσιν ἐλθεῖν. Though Ἀντολίη does not appear in Greek texts before the second century b.c.e., a related noun ἀνατολή, “rising,” does appear in the Homeric lexicon, in Odysseus’ description of Circe’s island as place where the sun rises (ἀντολαὶ Ἠελίοιο, Od. 12.4). This results in double vision for Quintus’ audience, who interpreted this Homeric word as Strabo did when he reported that the “island” Circaeum, which, even though a mountain and not an island per the Odyssey, the locals “associated with Circe,” was off the western coast of Italy.27 Quintus cast Italy in Homeric terms while also disavowing the third-century-ness of the PH’s audience. The same is true for the noun that Calchas uses to describe the opposite end of the world, δύσιν, “setting,” which also does not appear in either Homeric poem, first appearing in Greek texts in the sixth century b.c.e. Calchas’ description of Rome and the Romans is similarly imprecise. Other imperial poets writing in Greek used specific nouns that do not appear in either Homeric epic, like Ῥώμη, “Rome” (Dionysius Periegetes and Nonnus), Αἰνεάδης, “descendant of Aeneas” (Oppian, pseudo-Oppian, Dionysius Perigetes, Nonnus), and Αὐσονία, “Ausonia” (Dionysius Perigetes, pseudoOppian, Nonnus). Many of these words were in use before the imperial period, such as the five instances of Αὐσονία in the third century b.c.e. epic Argonautica. In addition to employing two of these specific, non-Homeric formulations, the third-century c.e. Triphiodorus also employs a Homeric periphrasis in his description of Aeneas’ flight:

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Αἰνείαν δ’ ἔκλεψε καὶ Ἀγχίσην Ἀφροδίτη οἰκτείρουσα γέροντα καὶ υἱέα, τῆλε δὲ πάτρης Αὐσονίην ἀπένασσε· θεῶν δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλὴ Ζηνὸς ἐπαινήσαντος, ἵνα κράτος ἄφθιτον εἴη παισὶ καὶ υἱωνοῖσιν ἀρηιφίλης Ἀφροδίτης. (Capture of Troy lines 661–665) Aphrodite, pitying the old man and their son, stole away Aeneas and Anchises and settled them in Ausonia, far from their native land, and the gods’ will was being fulfilled with Zeus’ agreement, in order that the children and grandchildren of war-loving Aphrodite have everlasting strength. These lines are spoken by the narrator, rather than by a character, and so perhaps we should not be surprised that Triphiodorus uses one of the same nouns as other imperial poets, Αὐσονία. Though that noun, referring to Italy in Greek texts and first used in the sixth century b.c.e., is not employed by Homer, Triphiodorus’ formulation of Aeneas’ descendants in line 655 as παισὶ καὶ υἱωνοῖσιν ἀρηιφίλης Ἀφροδίτης, “children and grandchildren of war-loving Aphrodite,” consists of words that do appear in the Iliad and Odyssey. In fact, the first word of this line recalls the Iliadic Poseidon’s description of Aeneas’ descendants as παῖδες, and the following words appear frequently in Homeric verses, though the Iliad’s and Odyssey’s Aphrodite is never paired with the adjective ἀρηΐφιλος.28 This combination of the Homeric mixed with the imperial present puts Triphiodorus in a similar category as Quintus. The Posthomeric Calchas’s description of Aeneas’ subjects as πολυσπερέεσσι βροτοῖσι, “mortals in many different cities,” does similar work in casting the present in Homeric terms, but Quintus avoids any words that telegraph his and his audience’s contemporary moment too precisely, like Triphiodorus’ Αὐσονία. Calchas’ first word appears twice in the Iliad and the second five times in both poems combined. “Rome” is ἱερὸν ἄστυ καὶ ἐσσομένοισιν ἀγητὸν/ἀνθρώποις, “a city sacred and wonderful to future people,” diction that supports Mario Cantilena’s contention that the PH was composed in the early third century to be performed for the preparations for the celebration of Rome as the capital city during the reign of Philip the Arab (244–249 c.e.),29 but Achilles also calls Troy a ἱερὸν ἄστυ during his rout of Trojans in Book 20 of the Iliad.30 This is the only time this formulation appears in Homer, and Troy had long been conceptualized as a “second Rome” by the third century. Quintus pairs this Homericizing phrase with the adjective ἀγητός that does appear (although infrequently) in Homeric poetry, though never modifying ἄστυ. As Calum Maciver has argued for the speeches delivered by Odysseus and Ajax in PH 5, Quintus’ wording in this passage could be due to emulation of hypotexts rather than a reflection of his and his audience’s contemporary reality.31 What I am contending in this chapter is that in such moments, Quintus encourages his audience to have double vision, to see both the Homeric and their own thirdcentury moment in Calchas’ prophecy. Calchas calls the river that Aeneas will journey to the Θύμβρις, a Greek transliteration of Tiberis, the Latin name for a prominent river that runs through Rome.

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The form Τίβερις would have been a more natural choice here because it was used commonly before the fourth century – Θύμβρις appears 49 times, and Τίβερις more than triples that count at 189 times! Perhaps this relatively low frequency of Θύμβρις is due to the fact that it is similar to the name of a city near Troy; as detailed by the Trojan spy Dolon in Iliad 10, Θύμβρη was a post fortified by contingents of Lycians, Mysians, Phrygians, and Meonians. According to Strabo, this place received its name from a nearby river called the Θύμβριος,32 a proper noun nearly identical to Θύμβρις. Quintus, then, chose Θύμβρις to echo his Homeric model. Moreover, both forms were in use in the imperial period, with the first-century Plutarch employing both words in different texts.33 The adjective εὐρυρέεθρον, “wide-flowing,” that the Posthomeric Calchas applies to the Tiber is Homeric, a hapax legomenon appearing only at Iliad 21.141 to describe Axius, a river god in the homeland of Trojan ally Asteropaeus. Of course both Calchas’ prophecy in the PH and the Iliadic narrator’s lament for the murder of a warrior at Achilles’ hands share a common topographical feature, but Axius is Asteropaeus’ grandfather, which lends an air of irony to the Posthomeric Calchas’ application of that same adjective to Aeneas’ destiny. The opacity of Calchas’ prophecy about Aeneas’ Rome is in one sense modeled on the hazy notions of geography in the Odyssey, but that was not the only geographical diction available to Quintus. Calchas’ Roman Empire will go to where Greek heroes have gone before – both in the sense of mythical time and in the sense of earlier books of the PH itself. The Posthomeric Calchas, even as he relates the future, which is the present of the audience, inscribes that prophetic discourse in terms of the past. This point is further supported by the fact that the Achaean prophet’s overwhelmingly Homeric language contrasts with other imperial Greek hexameters that describe Rome. It is not only the mere fact that there are no contemporary terms in Calchas’ prophecy, but more precisely the fact that the seer employs unique language that points to the Homeric poems. This passage does not allow its audience to escape into the heroic past, instead compelling them to confront the narrative past and their present moment. This contrasts with the approach taken by other writers composing in Greek in the imperial period. In a 1970 article, Ewen Bowie argued that these authors were nostalgic for the past of Greece, when it was still independent, in contrast to the present, when it was subordinated in the Roman Empire. Among the examples that Bowie adduced to support his argument was the mythographer commonly called Apollodorus. His approach to the heroic past was archaizing and amnesiac in the sense that, in Bowie’s view, he ignored potential connections between Greek myths and Rome, of which narratives about Aeneas are prominent examples. Similarly, James declared that Quintus was archaizing, looking back to Greek literature composed several centuries before his own in order to replicate the Homeric epics.34 Since this archaizing outlook appears in both Quintus’ and Apollodorus’ writings, which were both composed in Greek at the time of the Roman Empire, and since the flight of Aeneas appears in both the PH and the Library, it is fruitful to compare them.

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Writing in Greek at least a hundred years before Quintus,35 Apollodorus included a description of the fall of Troy in his mammoth work the Library, whose aim was to record every Greek myth that had ever existed. In this way, Apollodorus sought to replace other texts, including the Iliad and the Odyssey, as indicated by a prefatory epigram: αἰῶνος σπείρημα ἀφυσσάμενος ἀπ’ ἐμεῖο παιδείης, μύθους γνῶθι παλαιγενέας, μηδ’ ἐς Ὁμηρείην σελίδ’ ἔμβλεπε μηδ’ ἐλεγείην, μὴ τραγικὴν Μοῦσαν, μηδὲ μελογραφίην, μὴ κυκλίων ζήτει πολύθρουν στίχον· εἰς ἐμὲ δ’ ἀθρῶν εὑρήσεις ἐν ἐμοὶ πάνθ’ ὅσα κόσμος ἔχει.36 Draw for yourself the whole span of time from my education and know the ancient myths. Do not look at Homer’s pages nor elegy’s, not the tragic Muse, nor the lyric one. Do not desire clamorous cyclic poetry. After a glance at me you will find everything, as much as the universe holds. The only evidence that these verses prefaced the Library comes from one commentator several hundred years later, the ninth-century Photius, but that fact alone does not entirely dismiss the association. It could be that the epigram was written by Apollodorus but, for whatever reason, it dropped out of the manuscript’s transmission between the many years that intervened between the imperial period and the first manuscript that we possess from the thirteenth century. Another possibility is that it was written by someone other than the mythographer.37 Even so, the epigram does reveal how some readers used Apollodorus’ work as a “reader’s digest,” in the formulation of Monique van Rossum-Steenbeek.38 The phrase ἀπ’ ἐμεῖο παιδείης, “from my education,” in the first and second lines informs the reader that the Library is derived from its author’s pedagogical journey, of the sort that was discussed in Chapter 1 and aligning with the miscellany genre that enjoyed a renaissance in the Roman Empire (Chapter 3’s “Introduction”). But the Library’s epigram assures its audience that they do not need to do the same. Readers are enjoined not to peruse the pages of the Iliad and Odyssey, as one would do in a classroom setting (see Chapter 1), but instead to “look at me” (εἰς ἐμὲ δ’ ἀθρῶν, line 5) – that is, at the Library itself – and become educated through their own efforts absorbing this handbook, as the middle voice of ἀφυσσάμενος makes clear.39 In this way, Quintus’ and Apollodorus’ aims could not be more different: the first seeks to use strategies that he learned at school to supplement the Homeric epics, while the latter wants to replace the Iliad and Odyssey entirely. The mythographer devotes one sentence to Aeneas: Αἰνείας δὲ Ἀγχίσην τὸν πατέρα βαστάσας ἔφυγεν, οἱ δὲ Ἕλληνες αὐτὸν διὰ τὴν εὐσέβειαν εἴασαν, “Aeneas lifted up his father Anchises and fled. The Greeks left him alone because of his piety.”40 Aside from the obvious differences in length, Apollodorus’ account of Aeneas’ leaving Troy has several parallels with the PH 13 version: in both Aeneas flees Troy (ἄστυ λιπὼν, PH 13.316) with his father (. . . πατέρα . . . φορέεσκε/. . .

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ἐφεσσάμενος . . . , PH 13.317–318) and is spared by the Greeks (τοῦδ’ ἀνδρὸς ἑὰς ἀπεχώμεθα χεῖρας, PH 13.344) on account of his respect for his family (πάντων προβέβουλεν ἑὸν πατέρ’ . . . , PH 13.347). In his prophecy in the Iliad, Poseidon declares that he is moved to save Aeneas from his single combat with Achilles because Zeus favors the Trojan hero in contrast to Priam. He is not motivated by Aeneas’ εὐσέβεια, a noun which can refer to one’s reverence for the gods or for one’s ancestors. In this way, Quintus crafts a version that is both compatible with Homeric and non-Homeric traditions, but Apollodorus’ version fits in with only the non-Homeric traditions. Neither does Apollodorus’ version indicate that Aeneas will rule over anyone, whether the Trojans of Iliad 20 or the Romans of non-Homeric traditions. Similarly, Leyla Ozbek points out that the Posthomeric narrator links him to Zeus via similes in Book 11, in an acknowledgement of the Homeric reason for the divine favor of Aeneas in the Iliad, as well as of his future status as a founder of Rome.41 In Bowie’s interpretation, Apollodorus excludes Aeneas’ Italian future on purpose because he does not want to acknowledge his imperial present. Whether or not this is the case, Quintus also made a conscious choice, but in the other direction, mentioning Aeneas’ illustrious future. The Calchas of PH 13 seems to be Quintus’ own addition to the narrative of Aeneas’ fleeing, since his part in stopping the Greeks from attacking Aeneas does not appear either in Apollodorus’ version or any other version. Indeed, at one point the narrator describes how the Greeks’ ἔγχεα καὶ βέλε’ ἀνδρῶν/πῖπτον ἐτώσια πάντα κατὰ χθονὸς, “spears and flying weapons/ missed their marks and all fell on the ground” (PH 13.330–332); the audience assumes that this is due to the influence of Aeneas’ mother Aphrodite, who just a few lines earlier helps her son and his family leave the city. So there is no reason Calchas needs to stop the Greeks at this point, and Quintus could have bypassed his prophecy about Rome altogether, but he did not, to echo the Iliad. His Calchas in this way erases the separation between Homer and the imperial period, impelling the third-century audience to experience unity with the Homeric poems and separation from them at the same time. The Sands of the Arena A simile that compares Agamemnon, Menelaus, and their Trojan foes to animals killing slaves in an arena is another instance of temporal rupture. Whereas Calchas’ prophecy includes Rome, arenas had only been part of the Greek world for a few hundred years by the time of the third century and were not a part of the Homeric narrative universe. After some early successes against the Trojans, the Achaeans are in a tight spot in PH 6. Their pre-eminent champion Achilles has been killed, their second-best warrior Ajax has committed suicide, and Eurypylus, a grandson of Heracles, has come to aid the Trojans and succeeded in rallying their spirit. At this low ebb, the Achaeans are beaten back, though they do manage a brief rally, emboldened by the successes of Locrian Ajax, Menelaus, and Agamemnon. Eurypylus wounds Ajax, forcing him to retire back to the ships, and at this moment Agamemnon

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and Menelaus are isolated in a sea of Trojans. To heighten the desperation of this moment, the narrator employs a remarkable simile that compares them, battling terrible odds, to slaves ripped apart by animals in an arena: Καὶ τότ’ ἄρ’ οἰώθησαν ἀγακλειτοὶ βασιλῆες Ἀτρεῖδαι· περὶ δέ σφιν ὀλέθριος ἵσταθ’ ὅμιλος βαλλόντων ἑκάτερθεν ὅ τι σθένε χερσὶν ἑλέσθαι· οἳ μὲν γὰρ στονόεντα βέλη χέον, οἳ δέ νυ λᾶας, ἄλλοι δ’ αἰγανέας. Τοὶ δ’ ἐν μέσσοισιν ἐόντες στρωφῶντ’, εὖτε σύες μέσῳ ἕρκεϊ ἠὲ λέοντες ἤματι τῷ ὅτ’ ἄνακτες ἀολλίσσωσ’ ἀνθρώπους, ἀργαλέως δ’ εἰλῶσι κακὸν τεύχοντες ὄλεθρον θηρσὶν ὑπὸ κρατεροῖς, οἳ δ’ ἕρκεος ἐντὸς ἐόντες δμῶας δαρδάπτουσιν, ὅ τίς σφισιν ἐγγὺς ἵκηται· ὣς οἵ γ’ ἐν μέσσοισιν ἐπεσσυμένους ἐδάιζον. (PH 6.527–537) Then the glorious kings, the two sons of Atreus, were abandoned, and around them a mob bent on destruction stood, throwing from each side whatever they could grab. Some were showering groan-inducing spears, others stones, and others javelins. While they were in their midst they kept turning, as boars or lions in the middle of an enclosure, on the day when magistrates gather people together, and they enclose them with difficulty, contriving evil ruin by means of strong beasts. Those that are within the enclosure rip apart slaves, whoever comes close to them. In this way they cut them off as they rushed in the middle. Similes appear frequently in both Homeric poems, and so they are also frequently employed by Quintus. Tine Scheijnen’s study of the PH notes that Quintus’ epic employs more of them than his Homeric hypotexts: she counts 431 similes in the 15,693-line Iliad (8.6% of the total text), 219 in the 12,111-line Odyssey (3.5%), and 429 in the 8,772-line PH (16.7%).42 This aspect of the PH was praised by the nineteenth-century critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who called it “plus homérique qu’Homère,”43 though it was often criticized by later scholarship as overly imitative. Quintus’ use of similes is due, on the one hand, to a tendency that Emma Greensmith has observed throughout imperial literature;44 on the other, it indicates his Homericizing, a conscious highlighting of his stylistic adherence to his predecessor, as Calum Maciver argued.45 In the context of this chapter, the greater number of similes in the PH versus the Homeric epics indicates Quintus’ desire to connect his PH to Homeric aesthetics in the eyes of his audiences. Both in the Homeric epics and in Quintus’ poem, similes have a variety of functions for audiences that Mark Edwards aptly characterizes as pausing the narrative and heightening its tension.46 They are also often passages between the world of the narrative and the world of the audience. They compare two unlike things, and in

Roman Ruptures 111 the process, they help audiences connect their contemporary experience to another world. Edwards provides an example of this function with the following simile: Ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἀπ’ Οὐλύμπου νέφος ἔρχεται οὐρανὸν εἴσω αἰθέρος ἐκ δίης, ὅτε τε Ζεὺς λαίλαπα τείνῃ, ὣς τῶν ἐκ νηῶν γένετο ἰαχή τε φόβος τε, (Iliad 16.364–366) As when a cloud comes from Olympus into the sky from the bright air, whenever Zeus creates a storm. In that way there arose shouting and fear from the ships. A scholiast on this passage remarks that ὁ γὰρ Ὅμηρος ἀπὸ τῶν γινωσκομένων πᾶσι ποιεῖται τὰς ὁμοιώσεις, “Homer constructs similes from things known to everyone.”47 A storm is a phenomenon that is relatable to all of Homer’s audience members, whereas the martial content of the narrative of Iliad 16 might not be. “[S]imiles speak of the world of familiar and recurrent events,”48 bridging the temporally distant narrative world with the poet’s and audience’s present. Power Dynamics The PH 6 simile is usually identified as referring to an arena show, but the details are often overlooked in favor of dating Quintus’ epic. Much like the Posthomeric Calchas’ prophecy, this simile has been used for chronological precisions, but it only establishes that Quintus’ epic was composed after 186 b.c.e., the date when beast hunts became a regular element in Roman arena shows. Some commentators point to the Roman emperor Augustus’ introduction of arena shows to Asia Minor in the first century c.e. as the earliest date,49 but that position assumes that the author of the PH was writing about a phenomenon that he and his audiences had witnessed in the Greek East rather than the Roman West. Others argue that this simile creates an even more precise chronological delimitation for the PH in the second half of the fourth century, before Roman emperors began imposing bans on arena shows.50 This assumes that Quintus is representing, or even wants to represent, his and his audience’s historical reality. This simile’s δμῶας are not gladiators, who were typically matched against other gladiators and not “torn apart” (δαρδάπτουσιν, line 536) by animals.51 The Posthomeric δμῶας are not depicted as having any skills or weapons in contrast to realworld beast hunters. Oppian, for instance, describes a beast hunter as θηροφόνων . . . δεδαημένος ἔργων, “skilled in killing animals.”52 This leaves execution shows as the most likely referent of the PH 6 simile. Perhaps Quintus’ simile refers to slaves as fodder for the arena, or perhaps they are attendants, responsible for such mundane tasks as seeing to the needs of animals, inciting them to enter the arena,53 and bringing in condemned criminals as in the second-century Zliten mosaic.54 In

112 Roman Ruptures any event, the PH 6 simile actualizes what Nicholas Kauffman identifies in the rest of the epic as the spectacularity of violence.55 The grim tone of this simile is produced by the low status of the slaves contrasted with the high status of Agamemnon and Menelaus. The Trojans surrounding the sons of Atreus are δμῶας, while Agamemnon and Menelaus are σύες ἠὲ λέοντες, animals that are often compared to heroes in the Homeric epics. The situation that this simile describes could not be farther from what Helen Lovatt describes as “the glory of the arena” that appears in many Roman epics.56 Such similes often feature gladiators and stress the equality of the opponents with words like the Latin adjective par.57 This appears in Roman epics, even those whose genre is not Homeric, like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of whose similes compares Achilles to a bull in an arena:58 Haud secus exarsit quam circo taurus aperto, cum sua terribili petit inritamina cornu, poeniceas vestes, elusaque vulnera sentit. (Metamorphoses 12.102–104) He flared up not at all differently from a bull in an open circus, When he seeks a goading purple cloth with his terrible horns And feels wounds that have been avoided. This passage and the PH 6 simile are, on the surface, similar: they both feature comparisons of Achaean warriors to animals in an arena, and they both rupture a Homeric narrative by referring to contemporary society. Sophia Papaioannou has analyzed this simile as part of Ovid’s satire of Achilles: the Achaean’s battlefield behavior becomes “comical” when compared to a captured animal who futilely attacks a beast hunter.59 Her conclusion is also helpful for our understanding of what Quintus is doing with his simile. The Metamorphoses simile implies a power differential between the bull and his attacker in the arena, who goads the former and injures it. The tools that the beast hunter uses, poeniceas vestes and an unspecified weapon that causes vulnera, indicate that this individual is, in Donald Kyle’s analysis of the participants in arenas, a “professional” with “specialized weapons,”60 as opposed to the non-professional δμῶας of Quintus’ simile. Even professional beast hunters had servile status,61 but Ovid does not mention this element, which preserves the human-as-powerful aggressor and animalas-powerless victim dichotomy. Whereas the Posthomeric δμῶας are depicted as pitiful victims of the vicious animals of the arena, the Ovidian beast hunter has absolute power over the bull. The audience reads this power dynamic back onto the vehicle of this simile, Achilles, an enemy of the proto-Roman Trojans. Like Agamemnon and Menelaus in the PH 6 simile, Achilles is often compared to animals in Homeric verses, but in Ovid’s formulation, he becomes a victim of a Roman cultural institution. In a similar way, the Posthomeric Agamemnon and Menelaus attack proto-Romans in the narrative frame, but their bestial counterparts also maim anyone “who gets too close,” as opposed to Ovid’s

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bull, who vainly attacks the purple cloth. Ovid’s simile also differs from Quintus’ in its teleology. The Metamorphoses opens with the beginning of the universe and ends with the apotheosis of the Roman dictator Julius Caesar. Homeric narrative is included in this macro-scale universe, as it is in Nestor of Laranda’s own Metamorphoses.62 By contrast, Quintus’ epic is focused on the micro-scale Trojan War. The arena ruptures the PH’s narrative, whereas it is proleptic in Ovid’s epic, looking forward to Julius Caesar’s building of a wooden amphitheater for beast hunts in Rome in the first century b.c.e. Homericizings: Animal Similes and Ithacan Maids Of the twenty-three words that make up the Posthomeric simile, all appear in the Homeric lexicon, many of them hundreds of times. Two identifiable intertexts emerge from this Homericizing, though: animal similes and the execution of the Ithacan maids. In his monumental edition of the PH in the 1960s, French scholar Francis Vian paralleled the PH 6 simile with a scene from the Iliad,63 in which Odysseus is similarly abandoned by his Achaean comrades among the Trojans and compared to a boar: Οἰώθη δ’ Ὀδυσεὺς δουρὶ κλυτός, οὐδέ τις αὐτῷ Ἀργείων παρέμεινεν, ἐπεὶ φόβος ἔλλαβε πάντας· ὀχθήσας δ’ ἄρα εἶπε πρὸς ὃν μεγαλήτορα θυμόν· ὤ μοι ἐγὼ τί πάθω; μέγα μὲν κακὸν αἴ κε φέβωμαι πληθὺν ταρβήσας· τὸ δὲ ῥίγιον αἴ κεν ἁλώω μοῦνος· τοὺς δ’ ἄλλους Δαναοὺς ἐφόβησε Κρονίων. ἀλλὰ τί ἤ μοι ταῦτα φίλος διελέξατο θυμός; οἶδα γὰρ ὅττι κακοὶ μὲν ἀποίχονται πολέμοιο, ὃς δέ κ’ ἀριστεύῃσι μάχῃ ἔνι τὸν δὲ μάλα χρεὼ ἑστάμεναι κρατερῶς, ἤ τ’ ἔβλητ’ ἤ τ’ ἔβαλ’ ἄλλον. εἷος ὃ ταῦθ’ ὥρμαινε κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν, τόφρα δ’ ἐπὶ Τρώων στίχες ἤλυθον ἀσπιστάων, ἔλσαν δ’ ἐν μέσσοισι, μετὰ σφίσι πῆμα τιθέντες. ὡς δ’ ὅτε κάπριον ἀμφὶ κύνες θαλεροί τ’ αἰζηοὶ σεύωνται, ὃ δέ τ’ εἶσι βαθείης ἐκ ξυλόχοιο θήγων λευκὸν ὀδόντα μετὰ γναμπτῇσι γένυσσιν, ἀμφὶ δέ τ’ ἀΐσσονται, ὑπαὶ δέ τε κόμπος ὀδόντων γίγνεται, οἳ δὲ μένουσιν ἄφαρ δεινόν περ ἐόντα, ὥς ῥα τότ’ ἀμφ’ Ὀδυσῆα Διῒ φίλον ἐσσεύοντο Τρῶες· (Iliad 11.401–420) Odysseus, glorious with his spear, was left alone, and no Argive stood by his side, since fear had taken them all. Troubled, he spoke to his courageous heart: ‘What is to become of me? It is a great evil if I fear greater numbers and run, but it is worse to be captured alone. The son of Cronus made the other Danaäns

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afraid. But why do I debate these things in my heart? I know that cowards flee from battle, while someone who excels in battle feels a great need to stand steadfast, whether he is struck or strikes another.’ While he contemplated these things in his heart and mind, ranks of shield-bearing Trojans drew near, and they penned him in the middle, putting a calamity among them. As when lusty, vigorous dogs set on a boar that comes from a deep thicket, whetting white teeth in gnashing jaws, and around him they rush. The noise of teeth is underfoot, and without fear they await the boar, though he is scary. In this way, Trojans were rushing around Odysseus, favored by Zeus. The lexical parallels between these two passages are only a handful – the verb οἰόω (PH 6.527 ~ Il. 11.401), the verb ἔλσαν (PH 6.534 ~ Il. 11.413), and the phrase ἐν μέσσοισι (PH 6.537 = Il. 11.413)–but the content is also parallel. Whether Quintus’ audiences were Maciver’s pepaideumenoi or constituted a broader element of the population,64 they would be able to recognize in the PH 6 simile a reflex of the common Homeric device of the animal simile, as in the one that Vian adduces. These intertexts with animal similes should also be considered with the fact that the noun ἕρκος appears in none of Homer’s animal similes but twice in the PH 6 simile. ἕρκος is Homeric, appearing thirty-five times, often with the meaning “enclosure” (though, of course, never in the sense of “arena”). Quintus’ arrangement of these Homeric words and content takes his audiences down divergent paths, but, as Emma Greensmith has argued, throughout the PH and especially in the similes, Quintus mixes together several passages from his Homeric hypotexts.65 In this instance, ἕρκος adds to the Homeric intertexts of animal similes and the battlefield the deaths of the Ithacan maids in the Odyssey. Like ἕρκος, the noun δμῳὰς, “slaves,” makes frequent appearances in the Iliad and Odyssey, but these two nouns are collocated only in one passage in the Homeric epics. In Odyssey Book 22, Odysseus and his son Telemachus punish several maids of Ithaca’s palace because the latter alleges that they have had sexual relationships with the suitors. Father and son march the maids from the palace and hang them with a ship’s cable in the courtyard. δμῳὰς ἐξαγαγόντες ἐϋσταθέος μεγάροιο, μεσσηγύς τε θόλου καὶ ἀμύμονος ἕρκεος αὐλῆς, εἴλεον ἐν στείνει, ὅθεν οὔ πως ἦεν ἀλύξαι τοῖσι δὲ Τηλέμαχος πεπνυμένος ἦρχ’ ἀγορεύειν· “μὴ μὲν δὴ καθαρῷ θανάτῳ ἀπὸ θυμὸν ἑλοίμην τάων, αἳ δὴ ἐμῇ κεφαλῇ κατ’ ὀνείδεα χεῦαν μητέρι θ’ ἡμετέρῃ, παρά τε μνηστῆρσιν ἴαυον.” ὣς ἄρ’ ἔφη, καὶ πεῖσμα νεὸς κυανοπρῴροιο κίονος ἐξάψας μεγάλης περίβαλλε θόλοιο, ὑψόσ’ ἐπεντανύσας, μή τις ποσὶν οὖδας ἵκοιτο. ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἢ κίχλαι τανυσίπτεροι ἠὲ πέλειαι ἕρκει ἐνιπλήξωσι, τό θ’ ἑστήκῃ ἐνὶ θάμνῳ,

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αὖλιν ἐσιέμεναι, στυγερὸς δ’ ὑπεδέξατο κοῖτος, ὣς αἵ γ’ ἑξείης κεφαλὰς ἔχον, ἀμφὶ δὲ πάσαις δειρῇσι βρόχοι ἦσαν, ὅπως οἴκτιστα θάνοιεν. (Odyssey 22.458–472) They led the slaves out of the well-built hall between the round house and the courtyard’s excellent enclosure, and they penned them up in a confined space, from which escape was impossible. Telemachus began to speak: “Let me not end these women’s lives with a clean death, since they insulted me and mother, and they slept with the suitors.” He spoke, and he threw a decorated ship’s cable around a pillar of the great round house and fastened it there, Stretching it out high up, so the ground would not support their feet. As when long-winged thrushes or pigeons in their return flight to their roost fall into a trap that has been set up in the shrubs, and a wretched resting-place receives them. In this way the maids held their heads in a row. Nooses were around all their necks, in order that they might die in a very piteous way. This passage shares three points of contact with the PH 6 simile: ἕρκος (twice! – lines 459 and 469), δμῳὰς (line 458), and εἴλω (line 460). In the Odyssey, the maids die an unclean death, the opposite of the death of a hero, as argued by Laurel Fulkerson,66 and so through intertextual analogizing, Quintus’ audiences conclude that the Posthomeric slaves are unheroic as well. Imperial Greek Arenas The PH’s intertext with the Odyssey Homericizes, but the “arena” meaning of ἕρκος in Quintus’ simile also ruptures his Homeric representational surface. Other words that mean “arena” were available to Quintus that were used by imperial Greek authors: θέατρον (used by, e.g., Lucian in the second century), ἀμφιθέατρον (e.g., Strabo), or στάδιον (e.g., Lucian). Unlike the proper nouns Ῥώμη and Αὐσονία discussed previously, neither θέατρον nor ἀμφιθέατρον fit into dactylic hexameter lines, which is a reason that Quintus did not use them, but στάδιον, as Louis Robert noted, does suit the epic meter, appearing in several Homericizing epitaphs for gladiators.67 Nevertheless, στάδιον does not appear in the Homeric lexicon. Quintus’ choice to use ἕρκος reinforces his Homericizing at the same time as it calls it into question. A closer comparison to Quintus’ strategy is a simile in the Halieutica. Oppian’s poem is both Homeric in its diction and similes and neo-Hellenistic in its didactic tone, recalling the oeuvre of Nestor of Laranda (discussed in the introduction to Chapter 4). The Halieutica is often cited as one of the PH’s models, especially in its similes,68 one of which combines the battlefield and the arena, just as the PH 6 simile does. Oppian compares an eel’s death in battle with a crayfish to the killing of a leopard in an arena: ἐν δ’ ἐπάγη σκώλοισι καὶ ὀξείῃσιν ἀκωκαῖς ὀστράκου, ὠτειλαῖς δὲ περιπλήθουσα θαμειαῖς

116 Roman Ruptures ὄλλυται αὐτοδάϊκτος, ὑπ’ ἀφραδίῃσι θανοῦσα. ὡς δ’ ὅτε θηροφόνων τις ἀνὴρ δεδαημένος ἔργων, λαῶν ἀμφιδόμοισιν ἐναγρομένων ἀγορῇσι, πόρδαλιν οἰστρηθεῖσαν ἐνὶ ῥοίζοισιν ἱμάσθλης ἐγχείῃ δέχεται ταναήκεϊ δοχμὸς ὑποστάς· ἡ δὲ καὶ εἰσορόωσα γένυν θηκτοῖο σιδήρου ἄγρια κυμαίνουσα κορύσσεται, ἐν δ’ ἄρα λαιμῷ ἠΰτε δουροδόκῃ χαλκήλατον ἔσπασεν αἰχμήν· ὣς ἄρα καὶ μύραιναν ἕλεν χόλος ἀφραδίῃσι δύσμορον, αὐτοτύποισιν ὑπ’ ὠτειλῇσι δαμεῖσαν. (Halieutica 2.347–358) It [the eel] is stuck fast on the sharp spines and points of its [the crayfish’s] shell, and swollen with close-set wounds it kills itself, dying through its own folly. As when someone skilled in killing wild animals, with people being assembled in a round marketplace, receives with his tall spear a leopard frenzied by a whip’s stings. The leopard catches sight of the sharp iron’s edge and seething savagely it rears up, and it snatches the bronze point in its throat, just like a spear stand does. In this same way anger seizes the ill-fated eel in its thoughtlessness, overcome by self-inflicted wounds. Both this simile and Quintus’ highlight their archaizing by using words for “arena” that appear in Homeric vocabulary but are not used in that sense outside their epics. Oppian chooses to render “arena,” not with Quintus’ ἕρκος, but with the equally Homeric noun ἀγορῇσι. He modifies that noun with ἀμφιδόμοισιν, an adjective that is not used in either the Iliad or the Odyssey, a combination that a scholiast feels the need to unpack: Ἀμφιδόμοισιν· ἀμφοτέρωθεν ἐχούσαις δόμους, ἀμφοτέρωθεν οἰκήματα ἐχούσαις, ἀμφίδομοι ἀγοραὶ λέγονται αἱ ἀμφοτέρωθεν ἔχουσαι τὴν οἰκοδομὴν, τουτέστιν αἱ περιφανεῖς καὶ κυκλοτερεῖς, ὥσπερ καὶ ἀμφιθέατρα παρὰ τὸ ἀμφοτέρωθεν θεᾶσθαι τοὺς ἑστῶτας. (scholiast on Oppian, hypothesis to book 2 scholion 351 lines 1–3) Ἀμφιδόμοισιν means that the marketplace has houses on one side and buildings on the other. A “round marketplace” is one that has structures on both sides, one that is clearly visible and circular, as in the case of an amphitheater that standing audience members can see from both sides. This scholiast reveals that Oppian’s ἀμφιδόμοισιν ἀγορῇσι is equivalent to a term for “arena” used by imperial authors, ἀμφιθέατρα. What Oppian has created here is a Homeric neologism to describe a contemporary event,69 possibly a beast hunt in a provincial town,70 but its relationship to its narrative is different from Quintus’. Whereas the Posthomeric ἕρκος expresses a desire to foreclose on the imperial present in favor of escaping into a narrative world as well as resistance to doing

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so, the Halieutica does not resist its narrative world. There is no narrative to resist! Oppian’s epic unfolds in the Roman present and is dedicated to the co-emperors Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus. Conclusion The Homeric epics themselves, as well as imperial texts like Apollodorus’ Library, allowed Quintus to archaize, to stay within the guardrails of a narrative world, and thereby to side-step Rome entirely. Quintus could have used a name that was still in use in the imperial period but did not point to his third-centuryness so aggressively, like, for instance, Chapter 4’s Nestor of Laranda or his son Pisander, both of whose names appear in the Homeric epics. He could have followed Homer’s rendition of Poseidon’s prophecy in the Iliad, which does not have to refer to Rome. The simile likening the brothers Menelaus and Agamemnon to animals in a spectacle show is completely optional, and so of the three temporal ruptures considered in this chapter, it is perhaps the foremost example of Quintus showing his audience that these temporal ruptures are conscious, purposeful choices that remind them of the position of the PH as a poem composed during the Roman Empire. Of the large number of similes in the Iliad and Odyssey, only the three discussed here were of concern to scholiasts for evoking practices that are not depicted in the Homeric epics. At the same time as temporal ruptures are infrequent in Homeric narrative, they are an important part of its evocation of the world of the heroes. Quintus incorporates this aspect into his own poem. PH 6’s simile draws the audience in with its Homericizing in order to weld the audience’s reality to the narrative world. It does so by employing words from the Homeric lexicon and putting them in a contemporary context. In seven lines, the PH 6 simile engenders a complex nostalgia that immerses its audience in the Homeric past even as it does not allow them to linger without considering the differences between Homeric past and Posthomeric present. This simile is, after all, only a brief, veiled reference to the Roman Empire. This brevity encapsulates Quintus’ project of evoking nostalgia for Homeric narrative while also reminding his audience of their present through brief ruptures in the PH’s representational surface. Though brief, such ruptures become more momentous for audiences given the Homeric frame and content of the PH. Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Dika 2003: 14. The following three instances are also discussed at Rood, Atack, and Philips 2020: 70. Edition: Erbse 1969–1988. Edition: Erbse 1969–1988. Kirk 1985: 9. Furthering this argument, Edwards 1987: 108 points out that the adjective ἀριζήλη, “clear,” describes both trumpet in the simile and, a few lines later, the sound of Achilles’ voice (ἀριζήλη φωνὴ . . . Αἰακίδαο) in the main narrative.

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6 Edition: Erbse 1969–1988. On the issue that this scholiast identifies, see Kim 2010b: 17 and Kim 2013. 7 James 2004: xvii. 8 Rood, Atack, and Philips 2020: 70. 9 See Nagy 2010: 66. 10 Athletic events: Glover 1901: 87 and James 2004: 288; torture: Vian 1963–1969: XXXIII. 11 James 2004: 288. 12 Edition: Heyne 1834. van der Valk 1963: 204 dates this scholiast to the sixth century. 13 See, e.g., Bär, Greensmith, and Ozbek 2022b: 2, who pinpoint the earliest secure attestation of these details six hundred years later, with the Byzantine commentaries of John Tzetzes on the Iliad. 14 Gray 2010: 6. 15 On the Tabula Capitolina’s “citations” of its “sources,” including the Homeric Iliad, see Squire 2011 passim and Petrain 2014: 93–102. 16 Liddell, Scott, and Jones 1996: 833 and 1109. 17 The name Κόϊντος appears in nearly every region covered by A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (Fraser and Matthews 1987). 18 Edition: Erbse 1969–1988. 19 Strabo discusses this issue in Book 13 section 53. 20 Kim 2010b: 47–84 discusses Strabo’s relationship with Homer. 21 Ὅμηρος μέντοι συνηγορεῖν οὐδετέροις ἔοικεν. Geography 13.1.53. 22 Indicated at Köchly 1850: IV. An important analysis of Rhodoman’s editorial work on the PH is Gärtner 2022. 23 Köchly 1850: IV–V. 24 Way 1913: viii. 25 Hopkinson 2018: ix–x. 26 Hadjittofi 2007: 358–366. 27 Geography 5.3.6. 28 See comments on this phrasing at Miguélez Cavero 2013: 458. 29 Cantilena 2001: 56. See Paschal 1904: 14 and James 2009: 365, who makes a case for the second half of the third century, partly on the basis of Calchas’ prophecy. 30 Il. 21.128. 31 On this argument, see, for example, Maciver 2012b. 32 Geography 13.35.1. 33 Θύμβρις in Otho 4.5 versus Τίβερις in Caesar 58.8; texts: Perrin 1926 and Ziegler 1968. 34 James 2009: 365. 35 Bowie 1970: 23 gives a range of the first or second century. 36 This epigram is recorded by Photius, Bibliotheca 186 (142b). 37 See Cameron 1995: 398–399. 38 For the phrase “reader’s digest,” see van Rossum-Steenbeek 1998. She discusses the epigram on pages XIV and 167–169. 39 Petrain 2014: 52 and Squire 2011: 102–110 connect this epigram to the two-line epigram inscribed on the reverse of the Tabula Capitolina, one of the Tabulae Iliacae, which were artifacts made by Greek craftsmen for Roman clientele. 40 Bibl. E. 5.21a. 41 See Ozbek 2018: 142–147. 42 Scheijnen 2018: 39–40. Because of the complexities involved in defining what a simile is, different scholars provide different figures: for instance, Maciver 2012a: 13 and 126 finds 350 similes in the Iliad as compared with 305 in the PH (see the similar count at Greensmith 2020: 141). Whatever the count of similes, one thing is clear: there are more similes in the PH than the Iliad, which in turn uses more similes than the Odyssey. 43 Sainte-Beuve 1857: 353

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60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

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Greensmith 2020: 139–141. Maciver 2012b: 126. Edwards 1991: 39, cited by Maciver 2012b: 129. Edition: Erbse 1969–1988. Edwards 1991: 35. See Keydell 1963, Vian 1963–1969: 88–89 n. 3, James and Lee 2000: 5, and James 2004: xviii–ix. Scholars who take this position include Glover 1901: 80, Paschal 1904: 14, and Way 1913: viii. Pace Lovatt 2013: 284. Hal. 2.347–358. This passage is considered more fully subsequently. E.g., Jennison 1937/2005: 160, who speaks about slaves that forced animals to enter the arena with burning straw, hot metal, and so on. See also Kyle 1998: 202 n 48 and MacLean 2014: 581–584. Brown 1992: 195 and 196, figures 9.5 and 9.6. Kauffman 2018: 647–648. On the Roman tradition of arena similes, see Leigh 1997: 231–291 and Lovatt 2013: 283–293 (quote on p. 285). See Ahl 1976: 56 and 86. As discussed in Chapter 3, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as its imperial namesake, Nestor’s Metamorphoses, have a predominantly Hesiodic voice. Papaioannou 2008: 70–72. For speculation about Quintus’ engagement with Ovid, see James and Lee 2000: 11 and the further references there. Curley 2013: 100–101 reaffirms the epic-ness of arena similes in the Metamorphoses, but he also connects them to tragedy. Kyle 1998: 80. As Kyle 1998: 78–79 points out, anyone who performed in an arena was considered low status by Roman society. See further analysis of Nestor in Chapter 4. Vian 1966: 88 n. 3. Maciver 2012a: 18. Greensmith 2020: 146–152. Fulkerson 2002. Robert 1971: 21. On the Homericizing aspects of these inscriptions, also see Carter 2009 and 2011. On Oppian’s treatment of Homeric similes, see Kneebone 2007. On his Homericizing, see Kneebone 2020. Bartley 2003: 267. Jennison 2005: 154 n. 2 adds that Oppian’s language suggests that this is a temporary installation built for a traveling performer.

Epilogue

“The story continues, but the story remains the same.”1 This common sentiment about sequels is rooted in the ideas that any textual multiplicity is “a textual leech, a formulaic financial format, and the assassin of ‘originality.’”2 This book has made the case that one such third-century textual multiplicity, Quintus’ Posthomerica, continues the story of the Iliad and is a prelude to the Odyssey but does not remain the same as those epics, whose style it imitates with differences in source citations, word choices, and temporal ruptures. This mixture of Homeric aesthetics with the imperial present nuances the audience’s nostalgia. Such nuancing is made possible by the fact that textual multiplicities can encourage, or at least reflect, societal changes through their close intertextuality with a hypotext. Quintus’ Posthomerica is unusual in this respect in the imperial period. Comparing Quintus with non-poetic texts has been a contentious issue. The Posthomerica’s convergences with, for instance, Dictys’ Journal of the Trojan War or Philostratus’ Heroicus have long been acknowledged, but until Silvio Bär’s 2010 article, such references were limited to specific contexts. That article gave further support to his argument that the Posthomerica should be understood in relation to prose texts as a “‘traditional response’ to . . . ‘innovative tendencies.’” In other words, our interpretations of Quintus’ epic are to be construed in the context of a culture of sophistic oratory. This was an important step towards a nuanced, holistic comprehension of the range of responses to Homeric narrative, though its dyadic conceptualization of that range obscures the complexities of Quintus’ project. This book has posited a continuum of receptions of Homeric narrative. This book has compared narrative receptions to the Posthomerica, regardless of the containing text’s genre, whether oratory, like Dio’s Trojan Speech; a novel, like Dictys’ Journal of the Trojan War; or a philosophical dialogue, like Philostratus’ Heroicus. While it is true that genre is important in how a reception is formed, all receptions of Homeric narrative need to be considered together. Imperial receptions of Homer are often not considered as a group because of the perception that prose is inherently “innovative” and poetry “traditional.” Tim Whitmarsh has shown that Greek prose written in the opening centuries of the Common Era was conceptualized by contemporaries as important for its ability to transmit vast amounts of knowledge.3 This characterization leads to the misperception, both in antiquity and today, that prose is “cutting edge” and poetry DOI: 10.4324/9781003378082-7

Epilogue 121 “conservative.” As Whitmarsh notes, though, even imperial Greek literature broke down this schema, shown by the production and transmission of Oppian’s Halieutica,4 and Chapter 1 presented a similar example in the case of Aelius Aristides’ Embassy to Achilles speech, even more Homeric than the Posthomerica. Post-classical reception, which values “rational” “scientific” works (often written in prose) over “irrational” “mythical” works (often written in verse), has preserved more prose works of imperial Greek literature for that reason. Such a rigid categorization also distorts the range of aesthetic choices used in poetry, from texts adopting the style of a predecessor to those angling to replace hypotexts. The status of sophists is typically high, both in ancient sources and in modern scholarship, and so if an author is given a sophist identity, their standing increases commensurately. For instance, Nestor of Laranda, who featured in the investigations of Chapter 4, was a much-lauded poet at the beginning of the third century, with fragments of his work extant, an entry in the Suda, and several inscriptions. All of the evidence associates him with poetry, as does Menander Rhetor, an imperial commentator on oratory. He notes that one of Nestor’s topics in his epic Metamorphoses, of plants and birds changing shapes, was treated both by “Nestor the poet and sophists” (Νέστορι ποιητῇ καὶ σοφισταῖς).5 The conjunction καὶ is disjunctive, contrasting Nestor with sophists: the former is not a sophist, though his poems should be considered in the same category.6 Menander Rhetor’s comment encourages us to think about imperial authors not in terms of whether they were sophists but in terms of their relationships to what Emma Greensmith has called the “cultural environment of mimetic re-animation and performance” of imperial Greek literature as a whole.7 Because the Homeric poems were ubiquitous in the Roman Empire, imperial audiences experienced a variety of nostalgias for Homer. This book has investigated nostalgia for Homeric poetry as expressed by receptions of Homer in classrooms and in popular venues. Those two modes had a variety of strategies for receiving Homeric narratives, and Quintus incorporates both elite and popular strategies into his own epic. In doing so, he engages with some central preoccupations of other Homeric receptions written in Greek during the Roman Empire. This more thorough understanding of Quintus’ project enables us not just to have a better appreciation for the Posthomerica but also to understand in a more nuanced way the imperial “cultural environment,” the continuum of Homeric receptions in the first through fifth centuries c.e. of the Roman Empire. Receptions that bring back something audiences have lost without any critical appraisal of that loss in the new historical and cultural context evoke what Svetlana Boym calls “restorative nostalgia.” Innovative receptions, by contrast, engender “reflective nostalgia,” compelling their audience to confront the loss with a forward-facing outlook. Silvio Bär associated the first kind of reception with “tradition” and the latter with “innovation,” but I position Quintus’ poem between tradition and innovation to appropriate part of the title of Hunter and Fantuzzi’s book. So-called “innovative” receptions, like Dio’s Trojan Speech, de-construct Homer, albeit lovingly. The Posthomerica, by contrast, is “traditional” in the opposite sense: Quintus does not de-construct the Homeric poems but rather re-enters

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their narrative world. Quintus’ epic is therefore maligned “for de-historicizing the past, for creating a timeless zone outside social change and historical analysis.”8 This book has made the case for viewing these receptions’ nostalgia through different lenses, and in that way, nostalgia is multifaceted. But “nostalgia” has been assessed negatively, especially in the cases of Frederic Jameson’s “nostalgia films.” In his view, these films idealize history for the audience, creating a hermeticallysealed world of a vanished past. The 1980 film Raging Bull directed by Martin Scorsese is such a film. A biography of boxer Jake LaMotta in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, it meticulously re-creates the look of those times on nearly every level, from the inside of the New York City Copacabana night club with its patrons lounging, laughing, and smoking, to the LaMottas’ living room with its small, blackand-white, rabbit-eared television set and furniture covered in clear plastic. These idealized images are ruptured throughout the film by stunning acts of violence, both in and outside the ring. Jake’s aggression in boxing parallels his aggression in his personal life; for instance, he physically assaults his wife on several occasions. This mixture of desire for a lost past and dissatisfaction with its social values results in a complex nostalgia that is both restorative and reflective, according to Film Studies scholar Pam Cook: “[Raging Bull] seems to me to be far from progressive . . . retreating into retrograde romanticism and anti-intellectualism. But it does raise crucial questions.”9 This peculiar kind of nostalgia, situated between Jameson’s “hermetically sealed” narrative world, alien to the audience, and reflective progress in the audience’s current reality, is the achievement of Quintus’ poem. Posthomeric reflective nostalgia appears at the end of the “autobiographical” passage of Book 12. In Chapter 3, we discussed Quintus’ investiture by the Muses; the final verse is a description of the place where Quintus herded his sheep before his transformation into an epic poet. The fateful meeting and subsequent metamorphosis happened οὔρεϊ οὔτε λίην χθμαλῷ οὔθ’ ὑψόθι πολλῷ, “on a hill not very low or very high” (Posthomerica 12.313). Much ink has been spilled over the meaning of this verse, but there has been one constant ever since Neil Hopkinson’s reading in 1994:10 the hill is metapoetic. It has been interpreted as Quintus’ embracing of Homeric style,11 his rejection of one aspect of Homeric style,12 and his navigation of the three types of speaking identified by writers in antiquity.13 I want to suggest another way that we can construe it in the context of this book’s arguments: οὔρεϊ οὔτε λίην χθαμαλῷ οὔθ’ ὑψόθι πολλῷ speaks to Quintus’ position in the middle of the continuum of receptions of the Homeric epics in the imperial Roman world, neither the “very high” style of revisionism nor the “very low” style of tradition. He evokes a nostalgia that is neither entirely “restorative” nor “reflective” but instead a combination of the two. Notes 1 Budra and Schellenberg 1998b: 7. 2 Jess-Cooke and Verevis2010b: 4 3 Whitmarsh 2006: 357–358.

Epilogue 123 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Whitmarsh 2006: 357. Περὶ ἐπιδεικτικῶν 393. Pace the suggestion of Ma 2007: 107 that Nestor was both. Greensmith 2020: 157. Cook 2005: 16. Cook 2005: 180. Hopkinson 1994a: 106: the line “impl[ies] that the poem is written in a middle style that avoids extremes . . . .” 11 Greensmith 2018: 269ff parallels Quintus’ description of the hill with Odysseus’ description of Ithaca as χθαμαλὴ, “low” at Odyssey 9.25 and 10.196. She concludes that Quintus is connecting his style to Odysseus.’ 12 Maciver 2020: 176 points out that a scholiast on Iliad 3 alleges that the adjective ὑψηλον characterizes Odysseus’ rhetorical style. This suggests that Quintus’ description of the hill as οὔθ’ ὑψόθι πολλῷ, “not very high” is a rejection of a particular aspect of Homeric style. By contrast, Bär 2010: 308–310 argues that Odysseus, particularly the Odysseus who delivers an agonistic speech in Book 5, is a “mise-en-abîme” of Quintus (Maciver 2012b refutes this point specifically). Contrast this with Quintus’ contemporary Triphiodorus, on which see Tomasso 2012: 386–389 and Maciver 2020: 174. 13 “der Kreation einer neuen Art von Epos” (Bär 2007: 60). See also Hopkinson 1994a: 106–107.

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