Triphiodorus, a Greek poet and grammar teacher living in Egypt in the third century c.e., gets his due in M.-C.’s book dedicated to the only work of his that survives, the 691-line mini-epic The Sack of Troy. Recently scholars have renewed their interest in this poem about the Achaeans’ taking of Troy, in part because of a groundswell of research on imperial Greek poetry, though this commentary's wide range of learning also means that many Classicists, Hellenists and Latinists will find numerous fascinating and fruitful connections between their objects of study and Triphiodorus. The book includes a general introduction to Triphiodorus in addition to the advertised line-by-line commentary, the twofold purpose of which is to introduce readers to the broad questions about Triphiodorus and to provide a detailed commentary for those who work on Triphiodorus specifically and imperial Greek literature more generally. She succeeds admirably on both counts.
In the first part M.-C. deals with the big questions about Triphiodorus, including his date; metrical style; other, now lost, works; his relationship with predecessors, contemporaries and successors in the epic genre; and a close thematic analysis of the work itself. The real meat of the book is the commentary that forms the second part, which is the first full commentary on the work in English, and even the other major commentaries on the poem by Gerlaud in French (Triphiodore. La Prise d'Ilion [1982]) and Dubielzig in German (Triphiôdorou Iliou halôsis – Triphiodor, Die Einnahme Ilions. Ausgabe mit Einführung, Übersetzung und kritisch-exegetischen Note [1996]) are somewhat dated. A major strength of M.-C.’s book in general and the commentary in particular is her synthesis of a variety of sources and viewpoints, from the oldest scholarship on Triphiodorus in the sixteenth century to German, French, Spanish and English scholarship in the twenty-first, and for this reason her work is an excellent place to get a sense of the status quaestionis on a particular issue or passage.
A persistent mystery about The Sack of Troy is its purpose and structure – why did Triphiodorus write a short epic on a traditional subject? In her 2008 book (Poems in Context. Greek Poetry in the Egyptian Thebaid 200–600 ad) M.-C. suggested that Triphiodorus, who was after all a teacher of grammar, wrote the work as an ethopoeia, a typical school exercise in rhetoric, on the pattern of the bard Demodocus’ rendition of the fall of Troy in Odyssey 8. She furthers this argument here by claiming that the poem's overall purpose ‘was playfully to reconstruct Demodocus’ song’ (p. 464) as ‘a learned but accessible narrative’ (p. 17). Thus it is a model (p. 121) for Triphiodorus, who uses many of the same structural elements but also shapes Homeric images and phrasings in ways that embody his own vision and place in reception history. The poem's self-professed brevity, then, stems not only from the usual suspect Callimachus, but also, somewhat ironically, from an element within the Homeric poems themselves.
Given the poem's subject matter, metre and connection with Demodocus’ song, Homer is the most obvious and consistent intertext, but M.-C. points out that Triphiodorus often does not reproduce Homeric diction, phrases or lines exactly (she uses words like ‘re-phrase’, ‘avoid’ and variatio) but instead creates diction ‘inspired by’ (e.g. p. 254) parallels in the Iliad and/or Odyssey. In this connection M.-C. notes that Triphiodorus makes use of Homeric hapax legomena and engages with the scholia on the Homeric poems on several occasions like his epic predecessor and model Apollonius of Rhodes.
M.-C. presents us with a poet creating a vision of the Trojan War through archaic, Classical, Hellenistic and contemporary imperial lenses through his interaction with a wide variety of authors and genres, from Hesiod to Euripides to the Palatine Anthology to Oppian. Given the intense period of Homeric reception in the imperial period – witness Dictys of Crete's novel, Dio Chrysosotom's rhetorical showpiece ‘Trojan Discourse’, Philostratus’ dialogue Heroicus and, of course, Quintus of Smyrna's fourteen-book epic the Posthomerica – M-.C.’s most interesting comments concern Triphiodorus’ relationships with his imperial contemporaries. The most debated of these connections has been with the third-century epic poet Quintus of Smyrna, which scholars sometimes characterise as the influence of the latter on the former, but M.-C. is cautious here, rejecting instances where others have seen reception (e.g. p. 317). This depends on the very controversial dating of both poets, as some think that Triphiodorus should be dated to the fourth rather than the third century, but M.-C.’s judiciousness in this matter means that even advocates of an earlier dating for Quintus might find themselves agreeing with her observations. M.-C. makes fascinating connections between The Sack of Troy and other imperial texts, such as a poem about Hadrian's Antinous on a late-third century papyrus and pseudo-Oppian's Cynegetica, which refute ‘the supposed isolation of the late antique epic genre’ (p. 353). M.-C. also discusses the reception of Triphiodorus by later Greek writers including Nonnus, Gregory of Nazianzus, Musaeus, Colluthus and Paul the Silentiary. Even though she focuses understandably on Triphiodorus’ relationships with poetry, she also devotes some space to consideration of the influence of prose texts on the poem, such as, for example, historiography on the descriptions of the fates of Troy's inhabitants and rhetorical treatises on the lengthy ecphrasis of the wooden horse.
The relationship between Greek and Latin texts in the imperial period is a notoriously thorny issue but is nevertheless important in determining how Greeks shaped their identities in relation to Romans who both admired Greek culture but were also politically powerful. In recent years scholars have explored the Posthomerica’s engagement (or lack thereof) with Latin literature (e.g. A.W. James’ 2007 exploratory chapter ‘Quintus of Smyrna and Virgil – a Matter of Prejudice’, in M. Baumbach & Silvio Bär [edd.], Quintus Smyrnaeus. Transforming Homer in Second Sophistic Epic, pp. 145–57 and U. Gärtner's 2005 book, Quintus Smyrnaeus und die Aeneis. Zur Nachwirkung Vergils in der griechischen Literatur der Kaiserzeit, are devoted to the subject), and this issue is just as important if not more so for The Sack of Troy, which covers similar narrative territory as Aeneid Book 2. From her close comparison of Virgil and Triphiodorus, M.-C. concludes that there is a strong possibility that the latter knew the Aeneid and engaged with it in a similar manner to the Iliad and Odyssey as a text which he followed and from which he creatively swerved (p. 66). An illustration of this is M.-C.’s analysis of the characterisations of the Achaeans as driven but also brutal and the Trojans as childish. While Virgil makes his Sinon's performance to the Trojans as plausible as possible, Triphiodorus’ Sinon is not particularly convincing to the external audience (p. 277). Triphiodorus depicts Aphrodite saving Aeneas so that his descendants can found Rome in a perfunctory five lines (651–5), nor does Triphiodorus emphasise Aeneas’ warrior qualities. Both of these demonstrate Triphiodorus’ desire to compose ‘a poem so Greek that it could be imagined as coming from the mouth of Demodocus’ (p. 70) and therefore to become Roman while staying Greek, in G. Woolf's formulation. This raises the further issue of how Triphiodorus connects the pasts of Greece and Rome in the Trojan War to his audience's present, and M.-C. makes some fascinating connections between the poem and its contemporary audience's experience of the world; for instance, she compares the arrival of the wooden horse into Troy with the arrivals of Roman dignitaries (p. 301), and Statius’ depiction in Silvae 1.1, in which an equestrian statue of Domitian is compared to the Trojan horse.
M.-C. has produced a useful tool for Classicists in a variety of sub-fields: Greek and Latin, archaic, Classical, Hellenistic and imperial, prose and poetry – all will benefit from the wide scope of the material presented here. A handsomely-produced and accessible volume, M.-C.’s commentary is a veritable treasure trove of new directions for Classical scholarship, and her book is sure to be the definitive treatment of Triphiodorus for years to come.
