This collection of papers offers a useful examination of the relationship between late Greek epic and the Latin tradition (with a focus on Latin epic), favouring reader-response models and attempting to sidestep the question of direct allusions by Greek poets to their Latin predecessors. As the editors state, ‘there is no way to determine if really a single Greek poet read and imitated a specific Latin model … but the coup de grace is the possibility that analogies between Greek and Latin texts derive from a common (Greek) model’ (p. 3). Most contributions, thus, aim to perform comparative readings of late Greek and Latin poetry – and to this extent the collection can be read as the continuation of another recent volume: B. Verhelst and T. Scheijnen (edd.), Greek and Latin Poetry of Late Antiquity: Form, Tradition, and Context (2022).
U. Gärtner opens the collection with ‘Latin and Later Greek Literature: Reflections on Different Approaches’. This is a largely methodological paper with Quintus of Smyrna as its main focus, but it also does double duty as an introduction to the volume, since it provides a summary of the rest of the chapters (pp. 23–4). Gärtner offers some sobering observations on the inherent difficulties of such a comparative project. As she points out, most of the overlaps between Greek and Latin epics occur in relation to themes that were among the best known and frequently used in antiquity (for example, themes deriving from the Troy cycle; the myth of Phaethon; Hero and Leander etc). Gärtner also identifies the crucial problem with interpretations that rest on a reader-response approach: at first this approach seems to circumvent the question of what the historical author was in fact alluding to, ‘but the author returns as a construct of the recipient’ (p. 25), that is, the reader would always imagine an author who deliberately alluded to specific models; this notional author becomes, then, just as much of a problem as the historical author, and the critical question regarding the knowledge of Latin poetry has simply been transposed from the author to the reader.
Carvounis's contribution, ‘The Poet as Sailor: Claudian between the Greek and Latin Traditions’, expertly avoids such conundrums by examining a poet who composed in both Greek and Latin and was, by definition, immersed in both literary traditions. Carvounis takes a close look at the prefaces to the Greek Gigantomachia and the Latin De raptu Proserpinae and shows how these programmatic passages are used to different effect, even though they both imagine the poet as sailor. The Greek text echoes Hesiod and emphasises a competitive performance context; in the Latin praefatio, however, the poet inscribes himself in the Virgilian tradition and expresses his ambition to ascend through the hexametric genres in a Virgilian manner. In this case, the comparative reading usefully throws into relief the divergences between the Greek and the Latin traditions.
S. Bär's ‘Sinon and Laocoon in Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica: a Rewriting and De-Romanisation of Vergil's Aeneid?’ is based on a narratological observation: in describing the fall of Troy, Virgil's Aeneas is a homodiegetic and thus limited narrator; Quintus’ narrator, on the other hand, is heterodiegetic and hence omniscient. This is rather simplistic and overlooks those aspects of the Virgilian narration that mysteriously and intriguingly turn Aeneas into a near-heterodiegetic narrator (e.g. how exactly did he know which Achaean heroes came out from the Horse if everybody in Troy was asleep at the time?). Bär may have a valid point, however, when he argues that Quintus removes the Romanitas of the Virgilian scene by inserting an authorial first-person voice precisely at the point of narrating the catalogue of the heroes in the Horse. This is a markedly Homeric voice, claiming inspiration on a hill near Smyrna (Homer's traditional birthplace), which thus stakes a claim for Greek authority in all things literary. This chapter explicitly evokes a reader-response model, arguing that ‘at least some contemporary readers will have perceived the PH [Posthomerica] through the prism of Vergil's Roman epic’ (p. 58). This approach proves difficult to sustain, and in the subsequent pages Bär attributes to the poet an intentional relationship between the Posthomerica and the Aeneid: he states, for example, that ‘Quintus exposes in his narration what the Vergilian Aeneas may be hiding’ (p. 62); he also sees inconsistencies in Sinon's speech in Quintus as ‘deliberate textual gaps that invite the reader to read the Posthomeric account … against that of the Aeneid’ (p. 64). As Gärtner had warned, the figure of the author will always return.
E. Greensmith's ‘Odysseus the Roman: Imperial Temporality and the Posthomerica’ argues that Quintus removes the Aeneid from his narrative, turning both Calchas’ prophecy about the glorious future of Rome and the invention of the testudo in Posthomerica 11.358–296 into Odyssean rather than Virgilian moments. This is a well-argued contribution, recasting points made in Greensmith's recent monograph, The Resurrection of Homer in Imperial Greek Epic: Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica and the Poetics of Impersonation (2020, Chapter 7).
Equally well argued, as well as remarkably original, is Scafoglio's ‘Triphiodorus and the Aeneid: from Poetics to Ideology’. This contribution begins with a slightly tendentious point regarding a partial convergence on poetics between Triphiodorus and Virgil: Triphiodorus’ aesthetics of brevitas, most clearly expressed in the proem, is indebted to Alexandrian poetics but mediated through the small-scale epic of the fall of Troy that is Aeneid 2. Scafoglio then builds up to a far stronger case about Triphiodorus’ intertextuality with Virgil. Triphiodorus’ Priam sounds as if he is responding directly to the Virgilian Sinon's complaint about missing his home by telling him that he will not be taken over by nostalgia (vv. 286–7). Triphiodorus’ Sinon makes a strange claim that the Achaeans will leave for good if the Trojans welcome the Horse into their city but that the city will be taken if they do not (implying that the Achaeans will return). As Scafoglio argues, this must be based on (a misunderstanding of?) Virgil's Sinon (Aen. 2.176–82), who says that, on the advice of Calchas, the Achaeans returned home in order to seek omens (reflecting the Roman custom of the repetitio auspiciorum and thus envisioning a return). Triphiodorus’ Cassandra may also be indebted to Virgil's Laocoon: she enters the scene running, out of her mind, and addressing three-line indignant questions to her fellow citizens. Finally, Triphiodorus’ Aeneas can productively be read as a response to his Virgilian counterpart, with a veiled dissent by the Greek author, who makes his Aeneas flee the city without resistance or any act of heroism, transplanted by his mother directly to Ausonia (v. 653). Although steering clear of presenting Aeneas as a traitor, responsible for the fall of Troy (a version sanctioned in the Epic Cycle and accepted by later historians), Triphiodorus is seen here as making a political stance, bordering on opposition to Roman ideology.
M. Kersten's ‘ἄντρα περικλυτά: Revisiting Mythical Places in the Orphic Argonautica’ does not aim to show that Ps.-Orpheus necessarily knew or emulated specific passages from Latin epic poetry. The chapter, rather, focuses on the mythical places of the Orphic Argonautica that are frequently revisited and constitute a ‘detached otherworld’ (p. 126) principally in the Latin epic tradition. According to Kersten, the localisation of the cliff of the Sirens and their transformation into stone recall both their specific location and their remarkable silence in Latin epic. Other examples include the cave of Orpheus, which was not common until Virgil's Georgics (4.507–10) made it popular, and that of Chiron, which is a common feature in Flavian poetry, most notably described in Statius’ Achilleid (1.106–18); as Kersten notes (p. 135 n. 59), however, it was also well known in Greek literature (outside epic), as it is attested in Pindar and Antisthenes. The precise relationship between the Orphic Argonautica and the Latin texts mentioned remains quite vague, and Kersten is led to wonder if we should ‘take Ps-Orpheus’ route as a sort of conflation of different geographical accounts or as a deliberate reworking of Flavian narratives’ (p. 147).
Papaioannou's ‘Pantomime Games in the Dionysiaca and Vergil's Song of Silenus’ is a largely convincing and thought-provoking contribution, focusing on the pantomime contest between Silenus and Maron in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca (19.136–286) and its engagement (whether direct or indirect) with poetological themes stemming from Virgil's Eclogue 6. As Papaioannou points out, the very name of Maron may evoke Virgil, who in the East was better known by that name. The Virgilian Silenus’ song – ‘a profoundly complex yet clear statement of epigonic poetics’ (p. 161) – integrates a variety of genres and embodies a transformative poetics, which accompanies the reinvention of bucolic poetry in Rome. Nonnus’ equally transformative poetics in the pantomime contest as well as in the epic as a whole shares many affinities with this Virgilian epigonality. Silenus’ song in Virgil, only reported as an echo (imago vocis), suggestively evokes visuality, and indeed an ancient testimony (by Servius on Ecl. 6.11) has it that this poem was staged as a pantomime. The popularity of pantomime across the Empire makes the thesis of interaction between Nonnus and Virgil particularly attractive. Even for resistant readers who will refuse to contemplate such interaction in the absence of specific echoes, at the very least it is intriguing that the Sileni of both Nonnus and Virgil end their performance in an elusive manner: the former by transforming into water and the latter by never completing his open-ended song (p. 172).
Strangely, H. Lovatt's ‘Nonnus’ Phaethon, Ovid, and Flavian Intertextuality’ does not make more of the possible connection between the Greek and the Latin Phaethon traditions through the common link of pantomime, although this was pointed out briefly in Papaioannou's chapter (pp. 171–2). Instead, Lovatt argues for a certain ‘kinship’ (p. 179) between Ovid and Nonnus, with an emphasis on the two poems’ focus on succession, playfulness, poetic jouissance, ecphrastic framings and creative reworkings of the tradition. Lovatt also sees Nonnus as close in spirit to the complex tactics of Flavian intertextuality (including tangential referentiality, reversal and ironic avoidance). The chapter is hugely erudite and poses a set of interesting questions (do differences ‘reflect self-conscious correction or deliberate variation?’ [p. 202]; ‘what do we gain from reading Ovid and Nonnus together as part of the wider Greco-Roman literary tradition, alongside Flavian epic?’; and ‘should we only privilege ancient readers?’ [p. 203]), which will likely inspire further research.
The volume is carefully proofread; typos and other errors are minimal. Some material on the knowledge of Latin in the Greek-speaking world in the Imperial period is repeated across different chapters (pp. 11, 32, 57–8, 103) – this repetition might grate on those who will read the book cover to cover, but the reality is that most readers will read individual chapters rather than the whole. Taken as a whole, this volume offers new perspectives for the study of late Greek epic, increasing the complexity of the literary environment in which this poetry was written and received, and asking us to consider a more expansive and playful model of interaction.
