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The Fall of Troy1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

K. W. Gransden
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Extract

Fragments and summaries are all that survive of the two primary epics which originally covered the fall of Troy: the Little Iliad of Lesches and the Iliou Persis of Arktinos. I shall also be referring to the late Post-Homerica of Quintus Smyrnaeus. Certain details in Virgil's narrative imply that he and Quintus knew the same source material, though for my purpose here Quintus is chiefly used to indicate another possible mode of narrative treatment, particularly of the relation between the Sinon and Laocoon stories.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , April 1985 , pp. 60 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1985

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References

NOTES

2. For the surviving fragments see Bethe, E., Homer, Dichtung und Sage, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1922), pp. 167–81Google Scholar, and Zintzen, C., Die Laocoon Episode bei Vergil (Mainz, 1983)Google Scholar. For information on Proclus' Chrestomathy, a chronicle of post-Iliadic events which seem to have been based on the epic cycle, see Huxley, G. L., Greek Epic Poetry (London, 1969), pp. 123–6, 144–7Google Scholar.

3. See Campbell, Malcolm, A Commentary on Quintus Smyrnaeus, Post-Homerica XII (Leiden, 1981)Google Scholar. I shall not be concerned with the question of whether Quintus knew Virgil; if he did, as Campbell remarks, he forgot or ignored almost all that is remarkable in Virgil's narrative.

4. For this story see Griffin, J., JHS 97 (1977), 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I discuss the passage in detail in connection with the pseudo-Virgilian Helen episode and the version in Quintus: see below.

5. In Triphiodorus' Capture of Troy, a brief text of less than seven hundred lines which, like Quintus' poem, must have used cyclic as well as Hellenistic material, Sinon also appears after the debate has started. See the Bude edition by B. Gerlaud (Paris, 1982).

6. Ecce occurs eight times in book 2, more often than in any other book of the Aeneid. It signals the appearance in the narrative of Sinon, the snakes, Hector, Panthus, Cassandra, Polites, Creusa, and the flames round the head of Iulus.

7. This point was made in the late fifteenth century by the renaissance scholar Rudolph Agricola in his De Inventione Dialectica, which includes a detailed and extremely modern reading of the Sinon episode.

8. Homer (Odyssey 8) says it was built with the aid of Pallas herself (cf. Virgil's, dona Mineruae, 189)Google Scholar.

9. On this question, and on the Helen episode, see further Goold, G. P., HSCP (1970), 101–68Google Scholar.