This chapter treats allegory in the Posthomerica in light of late antique thinking on personification. Tracing Quintus’ deployment of the technique, it centres on the shield of Achilles, which contains the fullest personification allegory: the Mountain of Arete. Scholars have focused on the literary-philosophical aspects of this image. I argue that Quintus uses personification self-consciously as a literary device. Drawing on contemporary conceptions of personification from both the Greek and Latin traditions – rhetorical treatises, school exercises and literary works (particularly Prudentius’ Psychomachia, which applies personification full-scale into hexameter verse) –this chapter shows how the Posthomerica reflects ideas in these texts about the inherently duplicitous nature of this mode of writing. Highlighting the tensions in his allegorical configurations, Quintus reveals a sophisticated understanding of personification as a productive but problematic system of divergence and convergence between different worlds and perspectives. By so doing, he advertises limits and challenges of his own poetic creation – a text both rooted in the Homeric past and a product of its time.

This chapter discusses modern trends in the study of late antique Latin poetry, namely the aesthetics of the jeweled style and especially the scholarly discourse on ‘nonreferentiality’ in allusion, and seeks to apply the concepts underlying this scholarship to late antique Greek epic, in particular to Triphiodorus and Quintus of Smyrna. As a case study and the focus of the chapter, allusions to Apollonius’ Argonautica, previously noted but undiscussed in scholarship on Triphiodorus, are discussed at length. The chapter ends with a re-examination of the in-proem in Book 12 of Quintus’ Posthomerica, and argues, in a nuancing of recent scholarship, that the passage’s much-discussed allusion to Callimachus can be read as ultimately ‘nonreferential’ in function.