There are not many of the fourteen books of Quintus’ Posthomerica left without a recently published commentary. T. adds his study of Book 10, his Habilitationsschrift, to that number. The poem's tenth book has long caught the attention of readers seeking to discover the events surrounding Paris’ death at the hands of Philoctetes and the version whereby the Trojan returns to his first wife Oenone (one thinks of Tennyson's The Death of Oenone: the poet refers to Quintus’ version, which he follows, as ‘somewhat lazily handled of old’). As T. points out in his justification for choosing this book for commentary (pp. 28–9), the absence of an early poetic treatment (he does not discuss Ovid in detail until an excursus on Quintus’ likely knowledge of Heroides 5 in an appendix, pp. 280–7) makes Oenone's role in Paris’ final moments all the more worthy of comment. N. Hopkinson's excellent anthology of Greek Poetry of the Imperial Period (1994) includes sections of Book 10 with useful literary notes, but T. is the first to dedicate a single study to the whole book. The approaches of T. and of Hopkinson are very different: T.’s commentary is cast in the more traditional, (exhaustively) philological mould, designed for the Quintan initiate, whereas Hopkinson is keen to give a flavour of the Posthomerica to whet the appetite. Both summarise Book 10 very differently too: for T. Book 10 is representative of the Posthomerica as a whole, whereas Hopkinson (who is surely right) sees the epyllion-like nature of the Paris and Oenone tale and its tone as ‘not typical of the poem as a whole’ (p. 108).

In his introduction (pp. 9–35) T. dedicates space to the same arguments that have occupied most scholars of the Posthomerica: the dating of the poem, the identity of Quintus, his sources (Did he have the Epic Cycle to hand? Had he read Virgil or Ovid?) and the more recent negative reception by critics in the twentieth century. T. does not shed new light on these matters, but above all follows M. Baumbach and S. Bär's influential introduction to their edited collection (Quintus Smyrnaeus [2007]) and the introduction to Bär's Book 1 commentary (2009), especially in attempting to situate the Posthomerica’s identity and production within the zeitgeist of the so-called Second Sophistic. For T. Quintus had access to the Epic Cycle and knew Virgil's Aeneid (he does not offer new rationale but follows the established arguments). Included, too, are explorations into intertextuality and narratology and how T. applies these concepts in his methodology. The usual suspects are quoted (Gerard Genette, G.B. Conte, Stephen Hinds and Joseph Pucci, to name a few) in T.’s extrapolation of Quintus’ intertextual technique, but T. is perhaps more wedded to the traditional approach of Pasquali, whom he foregrounds at the beginning of his discussion (p. 29 n. 60) and with whose distinctions of imitatio and aemulatio he ends (p. 31). Short but useful discussions are offered, too, of the metrical particularity of Book 10 (p. 36) and of the Posthomerica’s textual transmission (pp. 37–8).

Of the 352 pages of T.’s study 207 are dedicated to commentary of the 489 lines of Book 10 (one of the poem's shortest books). This is acute and detailed analysis in the mould of Bär's similarly meticulous examination of a section (lines 1–219) of Posthomerica 1 (2009). T. provides a Greek text with apparatus (derived from the editions of F. Vian [1963–9] and G. Pompella [2002]). A list of divergencies from those editions would have been helpful. The commentary itself breaks up Book 10 into sections with brief overviews of the content and literary and thematic features, but for the most part T. engages in line-by-line discussion of lexical choice and matters textual-critical. To give a sense of the depth of the approach offered: in discussing line 13, T. highlights ἐπιβάντες and notes that the verb occurs only eight times in early Greek epic (it occurs once more in the Posthomerica at 12.163). Its use with the dative in Quintus is unlike earlier practice (with the genitive in the sense ‘climb upon’, as found in Moschus, Europa 113 and twice in the Iliad, and with the accusative in early Greek epic, an archaic peculiarity). A typical example of T.’s textual criticism can be illustrated from his coverage of line 150: T., as is his wont in this commentary, follows the MSS, in this case by reading αἰχμὴ ἀνιηρή (T. unfortunately prints αἰχμή as oxytone in both the text and commentary), convincingly arguing that the spearpoint is the subject of διελαύνω, line 149, contra Vian and M.L. West (cited in Vian's apparatus), and that the dative with subject of the verb implied is unnecessary, given the parallels he adduces from both Homer and Quintus. T.’s diversions from Vian's text are on the whole infrequent and, when offered, are on the whole uncontroversial. The book is capped by two short excurses, one on Paris in Homer and Quintus, and the other on Oenone in Quintus and Ovid. The index locorum is very large and reflects the level of detail in the commentary.

T. is to be commended for providing a useful referential tool for scholars of Imperial Greek poetry.