History-Makers: Quintus of Smyrna and the Fall of Troy

Why is it that the Iliad and the Odyssey don't actually cover the Fall of Troy? Seems relevant to the narrative, no? Well as it happens that story was recounted in a series of smaller epic poems, but they were lost to time at the end of the Classical Period. Thankfully, one storyteller who actually gave a crap was able to preserve the story of Troy's final fall, so let's investigate the PostHomerica of Quintus Smyrnaeus.

SOURCES & Further Reading: Loeb Classical Library "PostHomerica" and supplemental notes as edited by Jeffrey Henderson, "Heroes and heroism in Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica" by Tine Scheijnen, "Stuck in the Middle with You: Quintus of Smyrna’s Reception of Homer", Quote from page 731 of Easterling, Pat and Bernard Knox edd. 1985. "The Cambridge History of Classical Literature". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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[billywarren]

Troy Story, giving us great lines like “There’s an arrow in my heel” and “YOU ARE A TROJAN!!!!”

[margaretwalters]

We did almost lose Shakespeare's works! From just after his death until the restoration of the monarchy, Shakespeare faded into history. It was only after the restoration that his works started to get read and produced again. This was a deliberate promotion of a monarch-funded/patronized playwrite to build patriotism and promote pro-monarch ideas. It wasn't so long of a gap that most of his plays couldn't be recovered, but if it had lasted a little while longer we probably would not have so many.

[arcticdino]

I love the "Equestrian War Crime" joke, OSP's jokes in general are great

[mutantmaster]

'Aristotle's gang of nerds' sounds like a DnD group name made entirely of Wizards

[BlakeTheDrake]

Ah yes, Quintus of Smyrna... the Patron Saint of Fanfic-Writers. Like, the GOOD ones. The self-insert wish-fulfillment crew have to make do with Dante.

[CS-dciq]

Yknow, writing a pagan book on basically the eve of christianisation has to be the most unlucky thing ive ever seen. No wonder it took 1600-ish years for it to resurface

[jinxcat]

Homeric scholars are harsh to Quintus of Smyrna. "He was just a lousy aspiring wannabe."
Me: "He tried! What do you think most writers start out as?"
Now off to hunt this down to read

[danilooliveira]

this episode feels like a very strange overlap between red's and blue's work, I could imagine both of them talking about this

[merrittanimation]

Adding onto why certain pieces of Greek literature survived, here's the answer for Greek tragedies. In the Hellenistic period certain plays for each of the major Attic tragedians were codified for the purposes of teaching rhetoric and such to students. Of these seven were selected for Aeschylus and Sophocles, and ten for Euripedes because I guess the Alexandrian scholars of the period liked him more. So these are the plays we have the most copies of because even when actually staging most of* these plays fell out of fashion there were still students using them into the Medieval period. Euripides also got an extra nine surviving plays because a volume of his collected works got copied in the Byzantine period. So that's basically why we only have tragedies for about three people from that period (depending on which ones may be falsely attributed at least)

*three plays by Euripides; Orestes, the Phoenician Women, and Hecuba; were regularly staged during Byzantine times. This did not really affect how many plays we have because they were already with his codified works. I guess they weren't Sophocles fans

[SivakAurak]

Quintus managed to stitch together an old epic cycle and throw it far into the future right before the window closed on it forever. Absolutely insane clutch move.

[TomLuTon]

So in other words, imagine in a thousand years after at least one apocalypse, trying to put together the story of Batman with only a handful of comics and prose stories and a few animated and live action DVDs

[barleysixseventwo]

The very first recorded instance of everyone slagging some perfectly valid fan fiction

[Vespuchian]

I love the preamble about how the greatest threat to literary preservation is apathy, turning the phrase “who reads Sappho?” into “who _can_ read Sappho?”

[edit] of course, it doesn’t help if you’re relying on Romans to preserve anything they don’t like or care about.

[grungeguy]

"Long term preservation of knowledge is a function of our archiving standards and how much we care." As an archivist, so much YES to this comment! The historical record seems to exude a kind of authoritative mystique at times, but it's also incredibly partial and biased simply due to the fact that people need to appraise what is worthy of documenting and preserving in the first place. It is an enormous privilege to 1) have the capability to create a record, 2) have it recognized as something valuable by others, and 3) be identified as possessing enduring value and preserved accordingly. Resources that don't meet these standards consistently usually end up as archival "silences" that only resurface as a result of means like cross-references, inferences, pure coincidence, or deliberately reparative work.

[PakBallandSami]

Quintus intends to close the chronological gap between the events that had been recounted in the Iliad and those described in the Odyssey. He therefore mimics Homer in terms of vocabulary, language, syntax, meter and rhythm, parables, narrative style and construction. Like Homer, Quintus also focuses on the people, their dialogues and actions.
Evidence that would allow conclusions to be drawn about the topography of the city

[pathfindersavant]

Everyone always talks about "oh no Alexandria burning down was so terrible!" Yet no one ever mentions the sacking and destruction of other major repositories of knowledge, such as the annihilation of the archives at Ctesiphon during the fall of the Sasanid Empire. I mean, the Sasanids used to have Air Conditioning and central heating, then almost over night nearly all that knowledge was lost!

[TheMosv]

I love the idea of going to IKEA and picking up a flat-pack Trojan Horse

[otakuemi]

"Describing his work as an episodic retread of a better poet's work"
So kinda like that thing Disney did with every fairy tale story they got their hands on?

[scripsiabiete]

Everytime I see something about Troy, I keep thinking about my brother (who's name is Troy). "The ancient texts of Troy" sounds so funny when you can imagine it as some sort of grease-stained fan fiction/homework.

[PakBallandSami]

"Poseidon himself tore open
The bowels of the earth and caused a great upward gush of water
Together with slime and sand. With all his might he shook
Sigeion, making the beaches rumble, and Dardania
From its foundation. So that enormous fortress vanished
Under the sea and sank down into the ground
When it yawned asunder. Only sand could still be seen,
When the sea had retreated"

--Quintus,