In this monograph B. explores the poetics of giants in Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica against the background of a diachronic study of giant figures in Homer, Hesiod, Apollonius of Rhodes and Valerius Flaccus. The volume illustrates the intricate networks of intratextual and intertextual connections that surround Posthomeric giant figures, making them apparent as paradigmatic sites of the ambivalence of the poem's heroes and Quintus’ sophisticated play with the literary tradition. Thus, it takes position among recent studies, such as C. Maciver's Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica. Engaging Homer in Late Antiquity (2012) or T. Scheijnen's Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica. A Study of Heroic Characterisation and Heroism (2018), and joins their endeavour of moving Posthomeric scholarship beyond the confines of Quellenforschung. In addition, the monograph contributes fresh insights to the long-standing scholarly engagement with epic similes, while also offering a valuable case study to broader examinations of ancient giants, such as, most recently, P. Chaudhuri's The War with God. Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry (2014). Particularly useful in this context are B.'s detailed appendices, including catalogues of relevant passages and distribution maps. There is one main detraction from the volume's quality: its otherwise commendable focus on close textual discussions at times obscures their argumentative relation and larger significance, especially in the absence of concluding sections. A relatively high number of typographical errors additionally challenges readers.
The monograph begins with a brief introductory Chapter 1. Alongside a helpful opening discussion of the (Post)Homeric Typhon, the chapter details the topic, approach and methodology of the present study. One of its key objectives is a (re-)consideration of epic giant figures in light of modern literary theory (p. 28), with a view to providing a robust toolkit for future scholars (pp. 35–6). Wolfgang Iser's reader-response criticism proves particularly valuable in this regard: in a series of textual close readings, B. explores their semantic potential for a reader's understanding of giant figures in the epic tradition with remarkable comprehensiveness. He also fruitfully engages with other theoretical approaches, including narratology and intertextuality as well as the more recent perspectives of geopoetics and what B. terms ‘Hybridität’. Chapters 2 and 3 have an introductory function in this regard: they are to offer ‘kurze theoretische Reflexionen’ (p. 34) on the final two approaches and demonstrate their application to the study of ancient giants.
Regrettably, Chapter 2 lacks such theoretical considerations. Rather than introducing, or indeed employing, ‘Hybridität’ as a theoretical approach, B. focuses instead on the descriptive values the term allows. This, however, he does very successfully. Using the word ‘hybrid’ in its German dual sense, as both ‘hubristic’ and ‘hybrid’, he persuasively argues that giant figures are closely associated with both states: they are ‘hybride Figuren im doppelten Sinne’ (p. 49) – and frequently even more hybrid than that. As B.'s analysis of Hesiod's Typhon reveals, they exist in a complex web of intertextual and intratextual references that signals the literary hybridity of the work as a whole and the hybrid reception that giant figures and their works may invite. Oscillating between attraction and repulsion, they cause ‘fascination’ in their audiences (pp. 65–6). In this light, B. intriguingly reads the Hesiodic Typhon as a microcosmic foil for the Theogony's fascinating literary hybridity (p. 69). The metaliterary potential of giants’ ‘Hybridität’ is explored further in the remainder of Chapter 2: especially in the metaphorical Typhon of Plato's Phaedrus (2.2) and the works of Lucian, which B. identifies as a nexus between Second Sophistic, imperial and late antique thought (2.3). Unfortunately, Section 2.3 only briefly discusses Lucian's Contemplantes, leaving important aspects of its metaliterary parody of Homer's Aloadae unaddressed. When B. observes, for instance, that the dialogue's interlocutors, just like their literary creator, strive to outdo the Homeric ‘Himmelssturm’, he fails to note Lucian's belittling treatment of Homer's giants: contrary to their epic size and splendour, Lucian's Aloadae are mere βρεφύλλια (Cont. 4) – a diminutive ironically deflating the Homeric giants alongside their poet. This omission is particularly notable since B. later considers the Posthomeric Aloadae in light of Lucian's parody (pp. 191–2).
Chapter 3 addresses the geopoetics of giant figures. After a helpful theoretical introduction (3.1), B. conducts a geopoetic reading of archaic (3.2), Hellenistic (3.3) and imperial (3.4) epic, focusing especially on Homer's Odyssey, Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica and Valerius Flaccus’ Roman Argonaut epic. Appendices 1 and 2 offer valuable support to this chapter and an excellent resource for future scholars. They catalogue giant mentions across all these epic texts and map their literary topography, which visualises the chapter's argument: while archaic epic largely excludes giant figures from the literary world (even the Odyssean Cyclops or Laestrygonians are confined to the vague and ‘atopic’ spheres of Odysseus’ apologue), Hellenistic and imperial epics re-incorporate them into the knowable world while expanding its boundaries. In both a literal and a literary sense, Homeric ‘atopoi’ become the precise landmarks that the Argonauts travel beyond (p. 146). B. traces the continued presence of giants, for instance, in the aitia of Apollonius (p. 149) and Valerius Flaccus (p. 166), and he detects an additional, imperial strategy of re-incorporating giants through similes. While yielding fascinating readings, especially of Valerius Flaccus’ Typhon, the relationship between the symbolic spatiality of B.'s ‘Gleichnisraum’ (p. 180) and his geopoetic topography remains slightly underexplored: how do we map ‘simile space’?
This question extends to the fourth and final chapter, where the discussion of Posthomeric giant similes takes centre stage. Part of a complex ‘Gleichnisgeflecht’ (p. 215), which links giant figures in and beyond the Posthomerica, these similes both signal and multiply the ‘Hybridität’ of their heroic carriers. These become ‘literarische Mischwesen’ (p. 344) whom the Quintean reader is challenged to decode. The Aloadae simile in Posthomerica 1.515–22 (Section 4.1) is an excellent example – of the heroic ambivalence that Posthomeric similes illustrate, here for Achilles and Ajax, and the skill of the present study in teasing out their complex intratextual and intertextual connections. Section 4.2 proceeds to formulate the chapter's core argument, albeit, regrettably, without explicit signposting: as the simile catalogues of Appendices 4 and 5 and the helpful distribution tables on pages 216–20 corroborate, giant similes are predominantly ascribed to heroes of the older, Iliadic generation. The transgressive ‘Hybridität’ that these heroes share with their giant alter egos (p. 216) prompts their successive geopoetic removal from the literary world, with the significant exceptions of Odysseus and Aeneas. This argument underpins, in varying explicitness, the remaining Sections 4.3 to 4.5 and resurfaces on the final pages 349–51 with the quasi-Hesiodic end of the heroic age that colours the conclusion of the Posthomerica.
Chapter 4 attests, once more, to the volume's particular strengths and weaknesses. As in earlier chapters, the former clearly include its lucid textual readings. In Chapter 4 they reveal the complex poetics of Posthomeric giants, spanning both intradiegetic and extradiegetic narratological planes. Thus, B. traces the role of giants as challengers of the Olympian order from extradiegetic heroic similes to the Titanomachy depicted on Achilles’ helmet, which roots the theme in the intradiegetic world (Q.S. 5.102–9). Finally, its interpretation through Nestor (Q.S. 8.452–77) provides, in B.'s compelling account, a metadiegetic foil for the extradiegetic reader invited to appreciate the ambivalence and literary hybridity of Quintus’ giant-like heroes (pp. 266–7). I. de Jong and M. Bal's concept of focalisation (Narrators and Focalizers [1987]; Narratology [1997]), which is notably absent from B.'s narratological toolkit (p. 28), could have enriched these considerations, for instance by nuancing B.'s treatment of similes as generally extradiegetic. The Aloadae simile of Q.S. 1.515–16 (Ἁργεῖοι δ᾽ ἐχάρησαν, ἐπεὶ ἴδον ἄνδρε κραταιὼ | εἰδομένω παίδεσσιν Ἁλωῆος μεγάλοιο) supports this point: governed by the Argives’ joy, it is focalised through their perspective. If we take εἰδομένω as supplementary after ἴδον (Smyth §2110, contra B., p. 186), the simile expresses even more clearly an intradiegetic view: ‘the Argives rejoiced as they saw the two strong men resemble the sons of great Aloeus’. Finally, in the dense analyses of similes in Chapter 4, the volume's scarcity of concluding remarks and argumentative signposting becomes particularly apparent. There is little comprehensive evaluation, for instance, of how and why the ambivalence ultimately noted for all Posthomeric giant similes differs between individual heroes; nor does B. offer a final assessment of the comic hyperbole he repeatedly observes in giant episodes (pp. 205–6, 300–2, 352–3). These omissions are particularly acute since, contrary to B.'s introductory remarks (p. 35), there is no ‘kurzes Abschlusskapitel 5’ to conclude the volume.
This lack of argumentative explicitness and conclusion is a regrettable shortcoming in an otherwise excellent publication that promises to enrich future scholarship on the topic.
