Quintus of Smyrna

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Quintus von Smyrna, Posthomerica I 1–22 in a manuscript written by Konstantinos Laskaris in 1496. Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana , Vaticanus Ottobonianus graecus 103, fol. 5r

Quintus of Smyrna ( Latin Quintus Smyrnaeus ) was an ancient Greek poet of the 3rd century . He wrote a preserved epic Τὰ μεθ 'Ὅμηρον ( ta meth' Homeron , " post-Homeric ", often quoted under the Latin title Posthomerica ), in which he processed subjects from the Trojan saga.

life and work

Almost nothing is known about the life of Quintus de Smyrna. He probably lived in the 3rd century; however, this dating is uncertain. The Byzantine scholars Eustathios of Thessalonike and Johannes Tzetzes as well as the Scholien zu Homer attest to his name . That he came from the city of Smyrna in Asia Minor (today Izmir ) is deduced from an autobiographical section of his epic, according to which he tried his hand at the art of poetics when he was young when he saw sheep near the temple of Artemis in the area of Smyrna guarded. Perhaps it is a poetic fiction, because Smyrna is supposed to have been Homer's home too. Quintus' description of himself as a “shepherd” is perhaps a literary topos for which Hesiod could have served as a model.

Quintus 'epic Τὰ μεθ' Ὅμηρον is his only surviving work, is one of the follow-up works to the lost Greek epic-Cyclus about Troy and describes in 14 books or 8772 verses the legendary material following Homer's Iliad up to the onset of the Odyssey . The work is divided into many successive, more or less independent individual narratives and each of its individual books is relatively self-contained.

The first book of the Posthomerica begins with the events after Hector's death. After the mourning of the Trojans over the death of their hero, it tells of Penthesileia , the queen of the Amazons , who rushes to the aid of the Trojans, but is finally killed by the Greek hero Achilles . The arrival, heroic deeds and death of Memnon , son of Eos , are described in the second book, while the third deals with the end of Achilles, who is struck down with an arrow shot by the god Apollon . Books 4 and 5 continue the story with the depiction of the funeral games in honor of Achilles, the quarrel between the great Ajax and Odysseus over Achilles' weapons and the madness and suicide of Ajax after his defeat. The first five books of the Posthomerica thus have the same subject matter as the lost, much older Aithiopis , which is attributed to Arktinos von Milet .

After the arrival of Eurypylos in Troy to support the besieged city is reported in the sixth book , the seventh book describes the arrival of Achilles' son, Neoptolemus , who was fetched from the island of Skyros , who finally kills Eurypylos, as the eighth book explains. The return of Philoctetes to war after his long, lonely exile on Lemnos is part of the subject of the ninth book, followed in the tenth by the death of Paris and the suicide of Oinone , who Paris had not wanted to cure. After the report on the last unsuccessful attempt to storm Troy by the Greeks in the eleventh book, the twelfth tells the story of the building of the Trojan horse and the thirteenth tells of the conquest and destruction of the city. The epic closes with the reconciliation of Helena and Menelaus shown in the fourteenth book and the departure of the Greeks for their homeland, where they are afflicted by a sea storm and little Ajax sinks into the sea.

With the progress of the epic, an artistic maturation of its author can be registered. Quintus 'rhetorical training is particularly evident in the long speeches placed in his characters' mouths. The literary style is sober and straightforward, the language is essentially based on Quintus' model Homer, but there are also traces of the use of expressions by later poets. In the course of the plot, characters with contrasting characters appear several times, such as the intelligent and cunning Odysseus and the genuinely brave great Ajax; the madness of the Amazon queen is also contrasted with the moderation of Memnon. In the place of Homer's Achilles, the main character is Neoptolemus, who is portrayed as an idealized hero. Contrary to tradition, some heroes are portrayed as glorified in character. The idea of ​​divine justice enthroned above everything runs through the entire work.

The question of which sources Quintus of Smyrna relied on for the composition of his epic is difficult to answer and has led to partly controversial results. Presumably he did not use the old poems of the epic Cyclos, but among other things a mythographic manual, as suggested by many similarities in content with the library of Apollodorus, which falls into the same category . Quintus used mythography to create a rough grid and filled this with various Greek poets such as Sophocles , Euripides , Apollonios of Rhodes and perhaps other Hellenistic poets. In the case of many details, material contact with the depiction of the Trojan War attributed to Dictys Cretensis can be ascertained. It is still not clear whether Quintus also used Roman poets such as Virgil , Ovid and Seneca directly or whether the content of some passages of their works was based on the use of common Greek models. So z. B. the description of the use of a testudo at the siege of Troy to be formed after the representation in Virgil's Aeneid , as well as various scenes of the 12th and 13th books of the Posthomerica according to corresponding passages of the second book of the Aeneid .

Quintus of Smyrna was in turn read by several subsequent poets and served above all Tzetzes as an important source for his posthomerica . The only surviving manuscript of Quintus' epic was discovered in 1450 by Cardinal Bessarion in Otranto in Calabria and the Editio princeps of the work 1504/05 was arranged by Aldus Manutius .

Text output, comments and translations

Posthomerica , 1541
  • Quintus Smyrnaeus: The Fall of Troy . Greek and German, ed., Trans. and come by Ursula Gärtner . 2 volumes, Darmstadt 2010.
  • Kevin Hargreaves Lee , Alan W. James: A Commentary on Quintus of Smyrna, Posthomerica V. Brill, Leiden 2000 (= Mnemosyne Supplements, 208).
  • Quintus Smyrnaeus: The continuation of the Iliad . German in the verse of the original by Johann Jakob Christian Donner . 5 volumes, Stuttgart 1866–1867. (Multiple editions)
  • Arthur S. Way (Ed.): The Fall of Troy . London 1913. (Reprint, Cambridge (Mass.) Et al. 2006), (With English translation)
  • Albert Zimmermann (Ed.): Quinti Smyrnaei Posthomericorum libri XIV . Leipzig 1891. (Reprint, Stuttgart 1969), (Text-critical edition)

literature

  • Silvio Bär: Quintus Smyrnaeus “Posthomerica” 1. The rebirth of the epic from the spirit of the Amazonomachy. With a commentary on verses 1–219 (= Hypomnemata . Volume 183). Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-525-25293-2 (also dissertation, University of Zurich 2008).
  • Manuel Baumbach , Silvio Bär (ed.): Quintus Smyrnaeus. Transforming Homer in Second Sophistic epic. de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2007, ISBN 978-3-11-019577-4 .
  • Manuel Baumbach, Silvio Bär: Quintus von Smyrna. Posthomerica. In: Christine Walde (Ed.): The reception of ancient literature. Kulturhistorisches Werklexikon (= Der Neue Pauly . Supplements. Volume 7). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-476-02034-5 , Sp. 783-790.
  • Ursula Gärtner: Quintus Smyrnaeus and the Aeneid. On the aftermath of Virgil in the Greek literature of the imperial era (= Zetemata . Issue 123). CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53133-4 (also habilitation thesis, University of Leipzig 2000).
  • Ursula Gärtner: Fate and freedom of choice with Quintus Smyrnaeus. In: Philologus . Volume 158, 2014, pp. 97-129.
  • Rudolf Keydell : Quintus of Smyrna. In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume XXIV, Stuttgart 1963, Col. 1271-1296.
  • Rudolf Keydell: Quintus 1. In: The Little Pauly (KlP). Volume 4, Stuttgart 1972, Sp. 1311-1313.
  • Calum A. Maciver: Quintus Smyrnaeus' Posthomerica. Engaging Homer in late antiquity. Brill, Leiden et al. 2012, ISBN 978-90-04-23020-0 .
  • Peter Schenk: Plot structure and composition in the Posthomerica of Quintus Smyrnaeus. In: Rheinisches Museum für Philologie . Volume 140, 1997, pp. 363-385.
  • Georgios P. Tsomis: Quintus Smyrnaeus. Originality and reception in the tenth book of the "Posthomerica". A commentary (= BAC - Bochum Ancient Science Colloquium, Vol. 103). Scientific publishing house Trier 2018, ISBN 978-3-86821-752-0 .

Web links

Wikisource: Quintus of Smyrna  - Sources and full texts

Remarks

  1. ^ So Francis Vian in the edition of the Posthomerica. Vol. 1, 1963, pp. Xix-xxii.
  2. ↑ Quintus of Smyrna, Posthomerica 12, 306-313.
  3. ↑ Cf. Hesiod, Theogonie 22 f.
  4. ^ Quintus of Smyrna, Posthomerica 11, 358-408.
  5. ^ Virgil, Aeneis 9, 503-520.
personal data
SURNAME Quintus of Smyrna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Quintus Smyrnaeus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek epic
DATE OF BIRTH 2nd century or 3rd century
DATE OF DEATH 3rd century or 4th century