Smyrnaeus QuintusBesprekingen

There is a gap of epic happenings between Homer’s two masterworks, in Ancient Greece there were smaller epics that complete the story but were lost in time then one man rose to the challenge to bridge the gap. The Fall of Troy by Quintus of Smyrna is the rescued remnants of the lost epics between Homer that detail the end of the Trojan War constructed into a single work.

Writing a millennium after the probable date of the first time The Iliad was first written down, Quintus decided to fill in the gap between funeral for Hector and the fall of the Troy by salvaging what was left of the little epics to complete the coverage of the war. Quintus’ quality is nothing compared to Homer, but obviously he knows it and doesn’t try to be Homer just to complete the war. Quintus achieves his goal and frankly the rating of the book is based on his decision to even write the book, what could have improved the book is if the publishers of this edition would have had either footnotes or endnotes but just as a general reader it doesn’t really ruin things it just would have enhanced it.

The Fall of Troy finishes the war that ancient western world obsessed about for a millennium and gives readers today a view of how it ended how it ended.

In case you've ever wondered where we got the information for the Fall of Troy after the events in Homer's Iliad, this book details the events up to and including the destruction of Troy. Smyrnaeus gathered together ancient accounts still extant in approx. 375 AD and wove a story trying, and doing so poorly, to imitate Homer. Still, it is entertaining and ties up loose ends. Here is Achilles battling and killing the Queen of the Amazons, Achilles's death, the contest over his armor between Odysseus and Ajax and the Trojan Horse. Worth reading.

There seems to have been a more recent translation than this Loeb classical Library edition . A.S. Way was probably an accurate rather than a lively translator. And it was prior to 1913 when completed this continuation of the Iliad. It fills in the gaps. I don't think I've seen a movie version of the Trojan War that gives Smyrnaeus his due.½

Agreed but I think there's also a major problem in the translation as periods are missing at the end of several sentences and the like--gives Quintus a bad rap...½

An interesting book, filling in the Troy Story between the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's difficult to tell whether the problem is in the original or the translation, but the quality of the writing doesn't seem especially good. (I'd guess the problem is mostly in the original -- there are scenes repeated from the Iliad that not only add nothing to them, they aren't even done as well, even when trying to account for potential translation problems.) Still, it's good to read the parts of the Troy Story that one knew was there but had never really seen: Penthesileia, the death of Achilles, the suicide of Aias, the retrieval of Philoctetes, the Trojan Horse and the fall of Troy. The best moment, I thought, was the death of Thersites. He insults Achilles, and brutish Achilles isn't satisfied to beat him up as Odysseus did; he just kills him, to general rejoicing, and Thersites is buried separately from everyone else who had fallen. And that's pretty much the last thing Achilles does before he gets killed himself.