Background
Quintus Smyrnaeus was born in Greece. The dates of Smyrnaeus's life are controversial, but they are traditionally placed in the latter part of the 4th century AD.
(Quintus was a poet who lived at Smyrna some four hundred ...)
Quintus was a poet who lived at Smyrna some four hundred years after Christ. His work, in fourteen books, is a bold and generally underrated attempt in Homer's style to complete the story of Troy from the point at which the Iliad closes. Quintus tells us the stories of Penthesilea, the Amazonian queen; Memnon, leader of the Ethiopians; the death of Achilles; the contest for Achilles' arms between Ajax and Odysseus; the arrival of Philoctetes; and the making of the Wooden Horse. The poem ends with the departure of the Greeks and the great storm which by the wrath of heaven shattered their fleet.
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Quintus Smyrnaeus was born in Greece. The dates of Smyrnaeus's life are controversial, but they are traditionally placed in the latter part of the 4th century AD.
According to his own account (xii. 310), he tried his hand at poetry in his early youth, while tending sheep at Smyrna. His epic in fourteen books, known as Posthomerica, takes up the tale of Troy at the point where Homer's Iliad breaks off (the death of Hector), and carries it down to the capture of the city by the Greeks. The first five books, which cover the same ground as the Aethiopis of Arctinus of Miletus, describe the doughty deeds and deaths of Penthesileia the Amazon, of Memnon, son of the Morning, and of Achilles; the funeral games in honour of Achilles, the contest for the arms of Achilles and the death of Ajax. The remaining books relate the exploits of Neoptolemus, Eurypylus and Dei'phobus, the deaths of Paris and Oenone, the capture of Troy by means of the wooden horse, the sacrifice of Polyxena at the grave of Achilles, the departure of the Greeks, and their dispersal by the storm. The poet has no originality; in conception and style his work is closely modelled on Homer. His materials are borrowed from the cyclic poems from which Virgil (with whose works he was probably acquainted) also drew, in particular the Aethiopis of Arctinus and the Little Iliad of Lesches.
(Quintus was a poet who lived at Smyrna some four hundred ...)