The tragedy of Lost Ancient Knowledge is a well-regarded trope in the historical space,
but the actual process of its untimely demise is rather less dramatic than one might assume. The
Library of Alexandria is widely cited as the single greatest bank of knowledge to be lost
in world history, but while it was inadvertently burned by Julius Caesar in 48 BC, it stayed open
and busy for many centuries after. Sure, the fire took out some 40,000 scrolls according to Livy,
but that's out of hundreds of thousands in the full collection – and a vast majority
of those lost scrolls could be readily replaced by a copy from the libraries of Rome, Ephesus,
or Constantinople; maybe not with fancy originals, but still replaced. In a complex and dispersed
society like Greece or Rome, it's hard for any one disaster to wipe out all their accumulated smarts.
So if not that, how are all these ancient texts getting lost? Sappho survives in sparkling
fragments rarely more than 10 words long, Sophocles leaves 7 of the over one hundred plays
he wrote, and while we have more Aristotle than is probably good for us, it's suspected those
were just his students' lecture notes rather than his own (allegedly very good) writing – Meanwhile,
Plato and Virgil made it through almost completely unscathed. What gives? In Sappho's case,
one culprit was her Aeolic dialect of Greek, which imperial-era poetry fans found difficult to parse
and translate – resulting in a low supply of new manuscripts as well as little active readership,
so Greeks very well might have stopped reading her works entirely before the scrolls were even
lost. That’s not the universal experience, but it’s a very representative example.
Because the issue here isn't just passive Preservation and hoping
Caesar doesn't roll into the port of Alexandria with a barrel of napalm,
but also by consistently Participating-In and Renewing it. Go look at your bookshelf
and try to tell me any of our poor defenseless paperbacks would survive 700 years of the way
we treat them – just like we all need new copies of our favorite beat-up books, so
too did the ancient world require a steady flow of fresh manuscripts to meet demand.
Likewise, imagine a world where Shakespeare just kinda fell off the map for a century:
sure we'd still be studying his best 5 or so plays in English classes today, but would all 37 have
made it through? Eh, it’s easy to imagine Taming of the Shrew coming to us a little fragmentary.
And that's why the library of Alexandria could survive a little old fire but didn't survive the
shift away to the Byzantines' newfound interest in Christianity. By the time the Renaissance came
along a thousand years later and scholars got big into the classics again, a staggering majority
of ancient texts were gone, because uncared-for manuscripts tend towards not-existing, and many
more would have stayed lost forever if not for the rich literary tradition of the Islamic world,
where the classics never went out of fashion in the first place. Long-term preservation of
knowledge is a function of our archiving standards and how much we care: whichever is weaker.
But what might it look like if we interrupted this process, stopped the literary-atrophy,
and even reversed it? That question takes us to the High Roman Empire and into the exquisite work
of one Quintus of Smyrna, also titled with the Latin ending "Smyrnaeus". Quintus was a poet
living in western Anatolia, and depending on whose logic you find convincing, active sometime between
the late 200s to the early 400s AD, right around the Christianization of the Empire. While Greek
and Latin literature at the time was building on trends in everything from History to Poetry to
Philosophy to Theology, Quintus was looking quite a ways further back for inspiration:
devoting his literary career to the PostHomerica, an epic poem in the style of the Iliad and Odyssey
that bridges the narrative gap between them. The challenge, of course, was that this intervening
slice of the Trojan War had been lost in the thousand-plus years since it was first written
down. But what exactly was Quintus trying to replicate, and what sources were still available
to draw from? Well, let’s jump back to the very start, Do Some History, and see where it takes us.
The Epic Cycle was an evolving oral tradition that stretched from the late Bronze Age in the
generations after the Trojan War down 4 centuries into the Archaic Period and the dawn of the Polis
Age. By this point, the overall tale of the Trojan War grew to comprise dozens of small
individual stories, and most performing bards would sing one or a few in any given sitting.
The approximate scholarly consensus is that Homer was one such bard in a line of thousands, but his
versions of the stories were so highly prized that they were chosen to be codified soon after
the Greeks adapted the preexisting Phoenician alphabet to create their own Greek alphabet.
My further interpretation of the evidence is that Homer’s title of Rhapsode refers to a “stitcher
of stories”, implying that he took smaller self-contained tales from the Trojan War and
combined them into larger epics with primary focus on one particular character. This is why the Iliad
is all about the rage of Achilles and the Odyssey is about the arduous journey home by Odysseus,
and why each of them are 24 “books” long and clock in over ten thousand lines—far
too much for any single recital session, but perfectly suited to the new written medium.
Of course, the Iliad and Odyssey alone aren’t the entire story, as astute readers will
recognize that the Iliad opens 9 years into the war and ends before the sack of Troy,
while the tale of Odysseus only includes his infamous wooden-horse-fake-surrender-strats in
a flashback, depriving us of everyone’s favorite Equestrian War-Crime. To be fair to Odysseus,
Athena did sign off on it, so maybe her villainous portrayal in Sophocles’ Ajax
isn’t so off-base. See, Homer’s epics were only the first to get the Papyrus treatment,
as subsequent rhapsodes in the century after took smaller episodes from the war
and codified them into little epics of their own, ranging from 2 to 5 books each, with one
11-book-long outlier. Taken together, these 8 epics tell the complete story of the Trojan War,
from the Judgement of Paris that incited the conflict to the Heroes’ final returns home,
comprising a codified Epic Cycle: 8 poems, 77 books between them.
But although having a big fancy literary canon is great for preservation, after a
certain point it does get a bit unwieldy, so the smaller, self-contained stories from Troy
lived on in popular imagination and eventually had their big moment in Theatre. The golden age
of Athenian Tragedy saw playwrights devoting dozens of dramas to fleshing out the Iliad’s
supporting cast — standout examples being the suicide of Ajax by Sophocles, Euripides account
of Hecuba’s grief after the war, and Aeschylus exploration of the war’s consequences back home
with the murder of Agamemnon and the ensuing Oresteia trilogy — a subject that, oddly enough,
all three of these playwrights have written about in some capacity. Aristotle specifically argues
that the Homeric epics work so well because their scope is defined by their protagonists,
while the shorter epics are so dispersed that there are multiple tragedies nestled within each,
so they work better when further broken down into the Tragedies. Endless diatribes on the apparently
very early death of originality in media aside, these plays strike the balance of Homer’s primary
focus on character with the comfortable scope of very contained stories, and due to the communal
nature of theater they had a far broader audience than all the written epics but the
Iliad and Odyssey. Ultimately, this disparity in popular engagement explains part of why many
Trojan Tragic plays survived the next several centuries while the written epics withered away.
And that’s the approximate state of epic literature in the High Roman Empire. We
know about the lost poems of the Epic Cycle from later prose renditions and encyclopedia summaries
of the originals. And we gained a mirror to the Odyssey with Virgil’s composition of the Aeneid,
featuring a Trojan hero’s journey — but while I do consider this a vital epilogue to the Epic Cycle,
the focus lies quite squarely on Rome, so we can set that aside for right now. By the High
Imperial Era, the canon had almost reverted back to its original state before Homer:
with a series of individual stories floating in a void, some poems here, some plays there,
dancing around the same subject with overlapping characters, but largely independent.
And so enters, in the third act of this video, the actual subject of the video.
In a surprisingly-similar process to the original codification of the epics,
Quintus of Smyrna drew on his available sources to stitch together one consolidated narrative
of the war’s conclusion. Much of his work was original poetry, while much was clever allusion to
and even direct quotation of extant sources, resulting in a multi-century poetic pastiche
of Homeric interpretation to present the story as the Greco-Roman world collectively understood it,
rather than the narrow perspective of one author. And here’s what that looks like in practice: The
PostHomerica picks up immediately after the end of the Iliad, with the Trojans mourning the death
of Hector. They get two waves of reinforcements, whom Achilles handily murderizes before he himself
is killed by an arrow-shot. Odysseus and Ajax compete for the slain hero’s armor, and Ajax’
loss and subsequent shame leads to his extremely tragic suicide. Quintus plays with the order of
operations a little bit in the back half of the epic, but the next 7 chapters continue with the
military back-and-forth as originally recounted in the Little Iliad, ending with the Trojan Horse’s
flat-pack assembly in book 12. He rounds out the story with the brutal sack of Troy and the
Achaean heroes’ victorious departure home, only to be scuttled by a storm, thus leading into the
beginning of the Odyssey. Quintus actually makes the deliberate choice to skip everyone’s returns
as outlined in the Nostoi, leaving out storylines like Agamemnon’s murder by his wife Clytemnestra
and the ensuing Oresteia. And I take this as Mr Of Smyrna understanding his charge: deliberately
expanding some sections and trimming others to create the most focused story possible. The front
half is strongly centered on Achilles and his legacy, while Odysseus steps into the spotlight
after our favorite speedyboi’s death — so the end of the war marks the handoff of protagonism.
Of course, while Quintus wrote in Greek and did an impressive job of emulating Homer’s old
and extremely Weird style of Greek, he is still distinctly Roman, and that informs his poetry.
The dialogue sounds like all the characters studied in Latin Oratory school, which makes
the long discussions of honor and glory sound satisfyingly weighty. This also affects his
perspective on the war itself, being a citizen of Trojan-descended Rome as well as a Greek;
so he deliberately mirrors scenes lamenting several dead heroes, both in the walls of Troy
and in the Achaeans’ camps, and finally the scattering of the Achaean ships in
a storm is Athena’s retribution for their pointed cruelty during the sack of Troy.
Quintus makes it abundantly clear that Troy is one big slow-rolling tragedy for everyone involved.
Yet, for all the reasons I’m praising the PostHomerica, it was remarkably unlucky in
its reception, coming in right on the eve of Pagan literature’s suppression under Byzantine
Christianity, and staying cooped up in the library of Constantinople until its first Latin
publication in the 1500s. And while the Iliad and Odyssey were republished in the 1300s and
found popular appeal a couple centuries later, the PostHomerica only came back on the radar
in the 1900s. And even still, modern scholarship is unnecessarily cruel to Quintus, comparing him
quite unfavorably to his Homeric counterpart, as just an episodic retread of a better poet’s work.
Jeez, I’d like to see how good of an epic they could write. But even still,
this is nothing Quintus himself was not perfectly aware of, as his invocation to the Muses in book
12 makes mention of his living on a hill “neither too high nor too low”, symbolically not unworthy
of supplementing the Epic Cycle, nor too proud to suggest he’s superior to Homer. And his poetic
choices bear this out: sticking as closely as possible to the spirit and structure and
sometimes quotes of the surviving narrative, while drawing on a range of Homeric interpretations from
the contemporary Roman conscience. Although his source material is pointedly unoriginal,
his characters grapple with questions of heroism and honor in a completely novel way, tapping into
the broader themes that Homer was most intrigued by and actively adding to the story’s meaning.
There’s a real skill in making over a thousand years of epic storytelling fit cohesively,
as well as the commendable selflessness in spending his career working to preserve an
endangered but vital piece of his culture. Because the point of all this was to revive a tradition of
epic poetry and echo the lost originals as best as someone in the 300s-ish AD possibly could,
so the fact that it’s also really good is a bonus that we are apparently rather ungrateful for.
And I think it’s nothing short of amazing that one person who really gave a shit was able to provide
Greek literature with a worthy entry into the Epic Cycle — not a hollow copy of what was lost,
but a celebration of the epics, molded by his predecessors’ reception and reimaginings of
those stories over a millennium. Coming in at the eve of the Greco-Roman world’s uneasy
transformation, there’s no better swan song for the oldest story in the Aegean.
Thank you so much for watching. This video proves once again that I am an absolute slut
for Epic Poetry — and if I do my job correctly, so might you! In the meantime I would like to
thank our amazing community of patrons who allow Red and I to do what we love so much. And if you
liked the subject of this video, stay tuned, because we’ll see you all in the next ones.