INTRODUCTION: A POETIC INVESTITURE AT SMYRNA
The Posthomerica, a (probably) third-century c.e. epic poem, begins with no proem: no invocation to the Muses, no assertion of poetic identity or statement of intent.Footnote 1 The narrator remains anonymous throughout, upholding the fiction that he is Homer, and speaks about himself in the first person in a single passage whose contents can also be ascribed to the real Homer.Footnote 2 The passage in question is the in-proem of Book 12, where the narrator asks the Muses to name for him the Achaean warriors who entered the Trojan Horse and then reminds them of their role in his poetic investiture (12.308–13):
Scholars have noted the interlaying of allusions to Homer (specifically the address to the Muses at Il. 2.484–92, before the catalogue of ships), to Hesiod (the narrator’s poetic initiation by the Muses at the foot of Mt Helicon while tending sheep at Th. 1–34), and to Callimachus (Aet. 2.1–2, where a ‘newly bearded’ [ἀρτιγένϵιος, as attested in a scholium] poet is transported in a dream to Mt Helicon to converse with the Muses).Footnote 4 Metaliterary and symbolic readings abound. The hill that is ‘neither too low nor very high’ has been read as an aesthetic cipher for Quintus’ ‘middle style’ within the genera dicendi.Footnote 5 Quintus’ self-presentation as a shepherd has been taken not only as a Hesiodic reference but also as an educational metaphor: the poet may have been ‘a schoolmaster using a conventional symbol for his pupils’.Footnote 6 The presence of Artemis’ temple has been seen either as a hint at the ‘pregnant’ belly of the Trojan Horse—Artemis being a goddess associated with childbirth—Footnote 7or as a means of reinforcing the Homeric identity of Quintus’ poem, given that the Homeric Hymn to Artemis says that the goddess passes through Smyrna, after watering her horses at the river Meles.Footnote 8
While the landmarks and other details mentioned here may carry metaphorical or programmatic weight, the locational specificity cannot be entirely explained by these hypotheses. The motivation behind Quintus’ selection of Smyrna as the background for his pseudo-autobiographical investiture is clear enough—this was one of the most celebrated cities that claimed to be Homer’s birthplace—but the level of geographical precision remains puzzling. The landmarks mentioned here must have been real places, evoking real connections, for Quintus’ third-century audience.Footnote 9 According to Pliny the Elder, the Hermus river, flowing roughly fifteen kilometres north of the city of Smyrna, formed a tract of plains which bore the river’s name.Footnote 10 These must be the plains where the narrator claims that he tended his flock (ἐν δαπέδοισι, 310) when he received inspiration from the Muses. The temple of Artemis and the garden of Freedom have not, thus far, been identified but must have been as easily recognizable as the Hermus to locals and also foreigners with access to Imperial and late antique works, in both verse and prose, narrating the mythical origins of Greek cities and their cults. Vian proposed a connection between the ‘garden of Freedom’ (Ἐλϵυθϵρίῳ ἐνὶ κήπῳ, 312) and the festival of the Ἐλϵυθέρια which is attested in (Pseudo-)Plutarch’s Parallela minora as being celebrated in Smyrna in commemoration of an event that took place in the times of Gyges.Footnote 11 The association of a garden with a temple has an analogue in a garden attached to the Smyrnaean temple of Ἀρϵτή, the goddess/personification depicted on Quintus’ shield of Achilles.Footnote 12
Yet these landmarks appear, at first sight, to be unlikely choices. Rather than place himself on the banks of the river Meles, a virtual trademark of the city of Smyrna with which Homer was closely linked, including on Smyrnaean coinage,Footnote 13 Quintus mentions the Hermus, which lies at a considerable distance to the north, and a shrine that would definitely not have been a major cultic centre—Smyrna’s most famous temple was the Nemeseion, in the city’s Agora.Footnote 14 While the countryside setting may partly be attributed to the poet’s self-representation as a shepherd, the emphasis on these landmarks seems hardly necessary in this context and must be ascribed to different motivations.
ALEXANDER’S DREAM AT SMYRNA
This article proposes that Quintus alludes to a tradition regarding the re-foundation of Smyrna by Alexander the Great: the poet places his ‘Homer’ specifically at the site of the old city of Smyrna, which is not the same as that of the Hellenistic and Roman city. Old Smyrna is modern-day Bayraklı, situated twelve kilometres to the north of the Hellenistic and Roman city, and only a couple of kilometres away from the river Hermus, which explains the oddly particular ‘three times as far from the Hermus as one can make oneself heard by shouting’ (311).Footnote 15 Knowledge of the re-foundation of the city during the Hellenistic period was very much alive in Roman times, when a legend attributed the relocation to a metaphysical experience of Alexander the Great, to which Quintus’ poetic investiture bears a set of striking resemblances. Our best source for this legend is the following account by Pausanias (7.5.1–3):
Σμύρναν δὲ ἐν ταῖς δώδϵκα πόλϵσιν οὖσαν Aἰολέων καὶ οἰκουμένην τῆς χώρας, καθ’ ἃ καὶ ἐς ἐμὲ ἔτι πόλιν [ἣν] καλοῦσιν ἀρχαίαν, Ἴωνϵς ἐκ Kολοϕῶνος ὁρμηθέντϵς ἀϕϵλόμϵνοι τοὺς Aἰολϵῖς ἔσχον· χρόνῳ δὲ ὕστϵρον καὶ Ἴωνϵς μϵτέδοσαν Σμυρναίοις τοῦ ἐν Πανιωνίῳ συλλόγου. Ἀλέξανδρος δὲ ὁ Φιλίππου τῆς ἐϕ’ ἡμῶν πόλϵως ἐγένϵτο οἰκιστὴς κατ’ ὄψιν ὀνϵίρατος· Ἀλέξανδρον γὰρ θηρϵύοντα ἐν τῷ ὄρϵι τῷ Πάγῳ, ὡς ἐγένϵτο ἀπὸ τῆς θήρας, ἀϕικέσθαι πρὸς Nϵμέσϵων λέγουσιν ἱϵρόν, καὶ πηγῇ τϵ ἐπιτυχϵῖν αὐτὸν καὶ πλατάνῳ πρὸ τοῦ ἱϵροῦ, πϵϕυκυίᾳ δὲ ἐπὶ τοῦ ὕδατος. καὶ ὑπὸ τῇ πλατάνῳ καθϵύδοντι κϵλϵύϵιν ϕασὶν αὐτῷ τὰς Nϵμέσϵις ἐπιϕανϵίσας πόλιν ἐνταῦθα οἰκίζϵιν καὶ ἄγϵιν ἐς αὐτὴν Σμυρναίους ἀναστήσαντα ἐκ τῆς προτέρας· ἀποστέλλουσιν οὖν ἐς Kλάρον θϵωροὺς οἱ Σμυρναῖοι πϵρὶ τῶν παρόντων σϕίσιν ἐρησομένους, καὶ αὐτοῖς ἔχρησϵν ὁ θϵός·
τρὶς μάκαρϵς κϵῖνοι καὶ τϵτράκις ἄνδρϵς ἔσονται,
οἳ Πάγον οἰκήσουσι πέρην ἱϵροῖο Mέλητος.
οὕτω μϵτῳκίσαντο ἐθϵλονταὶ καὶ δύο Nϵμέσϵις νομίζουσιν ἀντὶ μιᾶς καὶ μητέρα αὐταῖς ϕασιν ϵἶναι Nύκτα, ἐπϵὶ Ἀθηναῖοί γϵ τῇ ἐν Ῥαμνοῦντι θϵῷ πατέρα λέγουσιν ϵἶναι Ὠκϵανόν.
Smyrna, one of the twelve Aeolian cities, built on that site which even now they call the old city, was seized by Ionians who set out from Colophon and displaced the Aeolians; subsequently, however, the Ionians allowed the Smyrnaeans to take their place in the general assembly at Panionium. The modern city was founded by Alexander, the son of Philip, in accordance with a vision in a dream. It is said that Alexander was hunting on Mt Pagus, and that after the hunt was over, he came to a sanctuary of the Nemeses, and found there a spring and a plane-tree in front of the sanctuary, growing over the water. While he slept under the plane-tree it is said that the Nemeses appeared and bade him found a city there and to remove into it the Smyrnaeans from the old city. So the Smyrnaeans sent ambassadors to Clarus to make inquiries about the affair, and the god gave them this oracle:
So they migrated of their own free will, and believe now in two Nemeses instead of one, saying that their mother is Night, while the Athenians say that the father of the goddess [Nemesis] in Rhamnus is Ocean.Footnote 16
Quintus’ narrator recounts an interaction with the divine that partly reflects and partly inverts that of Alexander. The future poet—‘Homer’—is appropriately located at the site of Old Smyrna, near the Hermus, whereas Alexander’s hunting excursion takes him to the area where the modern city would be built, near the Meles. Alexander seems to have wandered off into the woods, ending up in the idyllic precinct of what must be imagined as a rural shrine—but one that would eventually become the cultic centre of New Smyrna. Quintus places his narrator in the precinct of a sanctuary that may have been central for the old city, but which would have been looked upon as peripheral by the epic’s third-century audience. Both men, however, have contact with female goddesses who transmit to them crucial knowledge or skills in landscapes that have the aura of a locus amoenus (a garden in Quintus; a spring and plane-tree in the foundation legend). Both epiphanies take place on ‘mountains’ that turn out to be hills: Quintus’ enigmatic οὔρϵϊ οὔτϵ λίην χθαμαλῷ οὔθ’ ὑψόθι πολλῷ (313) may well correspond to ‘Mt Pagus’ (τῷ ὄρϵι τῷ Πάγῳ). As the very name Πάγος suggests,Footnote 17 the ‘mountain’ on which Alexander would experience the epiphany of the Nemeses is essentially a hill, with an elevation of roughly 200 metres. This hill would serve as the acropolis for New Smyrna. Quintus locates a similar hill at the old city (perhaps also its ancient acropolis?). Artemis’ temple must have been a known landscape marker in Old Smyrna, but was probably chosen both to reflect Alexander’s hunting activities prior to the dream and to evoke the Nemeseion, that is, the temple of the two Nemeses in New Smyrna, since in Roman times there was a close connection between Nemesis and Artemis.Footnote 18
The historical validity of Smyrna’s re-foundation specifically by Alexander has been questioned: although the Hellenistic-period relocation of the city is a historical fact, the account that is probably closer to the truth is the one recorded by Strabo (14.1.37), who has Alexander’s successors, Antigonus Monophthalmus and Lysimachus, initiate a synoikismos of the scattered inhabitants of Old Smyrna at the new site.Footnote 19 The re-foundation by Alexander and the dream in which he received the epiphany of the city’s double Nemeses must have been manufactured in the Imperial period in the context of fierce competition for precedence (prôteia) and privileges between the cities of Asia Minor, especially Smyrna and Ephesus.Footnote 20 The legend provides a historically important ruler as the city’s founder—a ruler highly admired by both Greeks and Romans.
While no author mentions Alexander as the founder of New Smyrna before Pliny the Elder (HN 5.118), in the second century the legend about the city’s illustrious founder (οἰκιστής, in Pausanias) is enthusiastically broadcast by the Smyrnaeans. The city prints a representation of Alexander’s dream on its coinage for the first time during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (139–61), who helped to rebuild Smyrna after a catastrophic earthquake. Aelius Aristides, who considered Smyrna his favourite city and who lamented its destruction by the earthquake in a Monody (Or. 18), alludes to this legend in three discourses (Or. 19.4, 20.5, 21.4), while the same oracle reported by Pausanias is found on an inscription from the second half of the second century.Footnote 21
In Quintus’ third-century context, the legend is found again on Smyrnaean coins issued under Gordian III (238–44) and Philip I (244–9).Footnote 22 Bonanno prints and describes one such coin: ‘we see a languid Alexander alone under the shade of a tree, leaning on his shield. Two divine figures stand over him and face each other, wearing a chiton and himation, and covered with headdresses. A bucranium—as it has been interpreted—seems to suggest a sanctuary setting as well as the performance of sacrificial rites that must have accompanied the founding of the new city.’Footnote 23 All the salient features of Pausanias’ account are present: the idyllic setting, the shrine and the solitary encounter with the two goddesses in a dream. In Quintus’ day, the legend must have carried as much weight in the self-projection of Smyrna as it had carried in the second century, but what is it that may have prompted this poet to connect a city foundation myth with the investiture of his narrator, ‘Homer’?
The answer may encompass a range of factors, some more speculative than others. First, the legend as told by Pausanias emphasizes the plane tree and its precise position near a spring, ‘growing over the water’ (πηγῇ … καὶ πλατάνῳ … πϵϕυκυίᾳ δὲ ἐπὶ τοῦ ὕδατος, 7.5.2.5). This might be because the specific plane tree would have been a local landmark (it is also depicted on the Smyrnaean coins), but the coincidence with the setting of Plato’s Phaedrus is notable (there, too, the plane tree is emphasized and under it flows the water of a spring),Footnote 24 and it may have prompted notions of Alexander as not only a highly successful general but also a man of letters concerned with philosophy and literature.Footnote 25 Secondly, and as a continuation of the first point, Alexander was a known aficionado of Homer. In one anecdote, the poet is closely linked with the foundation of another important city by the Macedonian king. His choice of the site opposite the island of Pharos for the foundation of Alexandria was, according to Plutarch, the result of a ‘wonderful vision’ (ὄψιν … θαυμαστήν, Alex. 26.5) in a dream. As he was pondering the most appropriate location for his future city, an old man appeared to him in his sleep and recited the lines from the Odyssey that refer to Pharos (4.354–5). Alexander immediately understood where he was meant to build his city and praised Homer as ‘the wisest architect’ (σοϕώτατος ἀρχιτέκτων), recognizing him as the old man that he had seen in the dream.Footnote 26 The Alexander of this foundation myth is thus in direct contact with Homer, and the oracle that he receives from the poet’s mouth is not only in dactylic hexameters (as is the one given to the Smyrnaeans) but is even a verbatim citation from the Homeric epics.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the foundation legend takes us back to the old, pre-Roman city (the ideological consequences of which will be explored in the section below) and sets up young Homer’s experience as the typological pattern upon which Alexander’s subsequent vision would be ‘modelled’.Footnote 27 Smyrna’s iconic foundation myth, that is, turns out to be a ‘late’ instantiation of the same phenomenon that had conferred upon Homer his prodigious poetic skill. The legend that had been manufactured looking forward to the privileges that Smyrna’s association with Alexander could confer on it in the contemporary Roman world is thus reconceptualized and projected into the distant past as an archetype which is not only thoroughly Greek and local but specifically Homeric, representing the very birth of literature.Footnote 28
The poetic investiture of Quintus’ narrator is inextricably linked not only with Smyrna’s claim to have been Homer’s birthplace and with the city’s concrete landmarks—this much was always obvious—but also with Smyrnaean history and legends. These local connections may explain a further detail of the investiture: the presentation of Quintus’ young Homer as a shepherd. While not discounting the literary influence from both Hesiod and Callimachus on this point,Footnote 29 the pastoral activity ascribed by Quintus to the young poet was probably already part of a local, Aeolian version of Homer’s poetic initiation, which Quintus’ audience could be expected to recognize.
Old Smyrna was originally an Aeolian city. Knowledge of this fact had not faded in Roman times: when Pausanias, for example, introduces the city, he immediately says that it was ‘one of the twelve Aeolian cities’ (ἐν ταῖς δώδϵκα πόλϵσιν οὖσαν Aἰολέων) before it was invaded and taken over by the Ionians. In the Archaic and Classical periods, these two communities apparently championed different, competing accounts of Homer’s life. In his detailed study of the biographical traditions on Homer, Grossardt has identified two distinct myths, one Ionian and one Aeolian, concerning the poet’s fabled blindness.Footnote 30 In the Ionian version, this is inflicted on the poet as a result of Helen’s wrath and postdates the composition of (at least) the Iliad: the heroine appeared to Homer in a dream and asked him to burn ‘his poetic creations’.Footnote 31 Because he could not bring himself to do so, he either became or remained blind.Footnote 32 The Aeolian myth, on the other hand, is an account of poetic investiture. As transmitted in Hermias’ commentary on the Platonic Phaedrus, this legend says that Homer was a shepherd ‘who tended his flock near the tomb of Achilles’ (ποιμαίνοντα παρὰ τῷ τάϕῳ τοῦ Ἀχιλλέως, 75.3–4), where he would offer libations and garlands requesting an epiphany of the hero. Achilles duly appeared in his brilliant armour, its divine radiance costing Homer his eyesight. The only other source to transmit this legend, an anonymous Life of Homer known as the Vita Romana, provides the conclusion left implicit in Hermias’ account: it was this experience that turned Homer into a poet, as ‘Thetis and the Muses took pity on him and honoured him with the gift of poetry’.Footnote 33
Grossardt convincingly traces the origins of this latter legend to the Aeolian island of Lesbos.Footnote 34 From there it would have spread, at least in the first instance, to other Aeolian communities in the general region of the Troad and north-western Asia Minor where the cult of Achilles flourished, including the mainland cities of Sigeion, where the tomb of Achilles was thought to be, and, further to the south, Smyrna.Footnote 35 Quintus may not restage this myth per se—there would have been no tomb of Achilles near Smyrna for his young Homer to frequent—but he does retain a detail, Homer’s pre-inspiration life as a shepherd, which may have held special significance in the traditions attaching to the old, Aeolian city. When Roman-period authors evoke the Aeolian past of Smyrna, it is either to speak of Old Smyrna (as Pausanias, above) or to create a recherché, antiquarian impression.Footnote 36 By making his ‘Homer’ a shepherd and thus alluding to the poet’s Aeolian Dichterweihe, Quintus is perhaps reinforcing both the locational specificity of this event in Old Smyrna and also its chronological distance in the remote, pre-Ionian past of the city.
IDEOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES?
This return to the distant past of Smyrna and the appeal to the city’s history and legends are clearly motivated by Quintus’ conceit that the narrator of the Posthomerica is (a Smyrnaean) Homer. Yet the very placement of the in-proem at this specific point in the epic’s plot affects the ideological positioning of the poem. Bär has recently suggested that Quintus’ authorial intervention in this passage (before the catalogue of men who hid inside the Trojan Horse) is antagonistic to the homodiegetic voice of Aeneas in the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid: Quintus enlists Homer’s Muse-inspired authority to adumbrate the credibility of his own all-knowing version vis-à-vis Aeneas’ limited, subjective perspective in narrating the same events.Footnote 37 For Bär, the investiture scene is thus part of a nexus of strategies that would allow the contemporary audience to interpret the poem as a de-Romanized re-write of the Aeneid.
Even without assuming such a close and competitive relationship with Virgil and the Latin literary tradition, however, the passage may allow or indeed invite politicized and ideological readings through its structure and vocabulary. A detail of the investiture landscape that has not been examined thus far may offer some clues. If Homer’s poetic initiation as described here indeed alludes to Alexander’s dream in a similar landscape in the same region, then the enigmatic ‘garden of Freedom’ (Ἐλϵυθϵρίῳ ἐνὶ κήπῳ, 312) may be broadly reminiscent of Alexander’s mission to ‘free’ the Greek world. Diodorus Siculus reports that Alexander appealed to the Greek cities of Asia Minor by ‘granting them independence and exemption from taxation’ (ποιῶν αὐτὰς αὐτονόμους καὶ ἀϕορολογήτους, 17.24.1) and assuring them that he took up the war against the Persians ‘for the liberation of the Greeks’ (τῆς τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἐλϵυθϵρώσϵως ἕνϵκα).Footnote 38 Arrian similarly mentions that, after encamping by the Hermus and occupying Sardis, a city to the east of Smyrna, Alexander granted the Sardians the right to use their ancestral laws and proclaimed them free (ἐλϵυθέρους, Anab. 1.17.4.7).Footnote 39 In the local context of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, Alexander would have been perceived as having headed a campaign of liberation against the Persian barbarians. His dream under the plane tree, as depicted on the Smyrnaean coinage, might thus have signified in an additional, Homeric, manner: Calchas’ prophecy at Aulis as recounted in Iliad 2 also takes place beneath a plane tree and by a stream of water (καλῇ ὑπὸ πλατανίστῳ ὅθϵν ῥέϵν ἀγλαὸν ὕδωρ, 2.307). Alexander’s epiphanic dream and Calchas’ prophecy thus both stand at the beginning of successful ‘Greek’ expeditions against similar ‘barbarians’.Footnote 40
Did Quintus craft the Alexander-like Dichterweihe of his Homer to imply a literary campaign of liberation from Rome and the Latin poetic tradition? Is the poetic investiture at Old Smyrna another subtle way of reinforcing Greek identity within the contemporary Roman context, in the spirit of much Second Sophistic literature?Footnote 41 There is no straightforward answer to these questions. Anti-Roman sentiments in the Smyrnaean political context seem unlikely. Already in the Republican period Smyrna proved to be a staunch ally of Rome and was therefore granted the status of ‘free city’.Footnote 42 The Smyrnaeans built the earliest shrine in Asia to the goddess Ῥώμη, and the city received the privilege of an imperial Temple Wardenship (neôkoria) a total of three times (under Tiberius, Hadrian and Caracalla).Footnote 43 The foundation legend to which Quintus alludes was leveraged in the competition for precisely such privileges, and Aelius Aristides praised the Roman emperors who helped to rebuild Smyrna after the earthquake as ‘founders more glorious and greater’ than Alexander.Footnote 44 In Smyrna’s most important temple, the Nemeseion, the Roman emperor was worshipped alongside the two Nemeses—the goddess, in her single or double form, had been enlisted into the service of the Roman state empire-wide, becoming the patroness of the characteristically Roman spectacles of the gladiatorial games and the uenatio.Footnote 45
Yet the concrete positioning of the poetic initiation in what would have been the abandoned old city, far from the more conspicuous landmarks of contemporary Roman Smyrna—far from the Meles, the temple to Homer and the Nemeseion with its imperial cult—points to a deliberate distancing from dominant ideology, as well as from dominant literary trends. Quintus writes in Homeric verse, not in prose, the more fashionable option in the Second Sophistic; he affirms and continues Homer rather than contesting him, as some of his notable contemporaries did by means of irreverent and revisionist attacks.Footnote 46 The choice of Artemis over the (Romanized) Nemeses may mark out the Posthomerica as a traditionalist, intellectually unfashionable work.Footnote 47
‘Freedom’, however, may evoke more than Alexander and his campaign. The festival of the Ἐλϵυθέρια, suggested by Vian as a possible local reference for the garden of Freedom, is also linked with a Smyrnaean legend which suggests a further ideological dimension. Our source for this festival is the following passage from the (Pseudo-)Plutarchan Parallela minora (312E–13A), which in turn derives its information from Dositheus’ Lydiaka (FGrHist 290 F 5):
Σαρδιανοὶ πρὸς Σμυρναίους πόλϵμον ἔχοντϵς πϵρὶ τὰ τϵίχη ἐστρατοπϵδϵύσαντο, καὶ διὰ πρϵσβέων ἔπϵμψαν, μὴ πρότϵρον ἀναχωρῆσαι, ἐὰν μὴ τὰς γυναῖκας συνϵλθϵῖν αὐτοῖς συγχωρήσωσι. τῶν δὲ Σμυρναίων διὰ τὴν ἀνάγκην μϵλλόντων πάσχϵιν κακῶς, θϵραπαινὶς ἦν μία τῶν ϵὐσχημόνων, ἣ προσδραμοῦσα ἔϕη τῷ δϵσπότῃ Φιλάρχῳ δϵῖν τὰς θϵραπαίνας κοσμήσαντας ἀντ᾽ ἐλϵυθέρων πέμπϵιν. ὃ δὴ καὶ ἔδρασαν. οἱ δὲ κοπωθέντϵς ὑπὸ τῶν θϵραπαινῶν ἑάλωσαν. ὅθϵν καὶ νῦν παρὰ Σμυρναίοις ἑορτὴ λέγϵται Ἐλϵυθέρια, ἐν ᾗ αἱ δοῦλαι τὸν κόσμον τῶν ἐλϵυθέρων ϕοροῦσιν· ὡς Δοσίθϵος ἐν τρίτῳ Λυδιακῶν.
The people of Sardis, when they were engaged in war against the people of Smyrna, encamped round about the walls, and sent word through ambassadors that they would never withdraw unless the people of Smyrna would agree to send their wives to consort with them. The Smyrnaeans, because of the compelling necessity, were about to suffer grievously; but there was a certain comely maidservant who ran up to her master Philarchus and said that they needed to dress up the maidservants and send them in place of free-born women. And this, in fact, they did. The men of Sardis were quite exhausted by the maidservants, and so were taken captive; whence even now the people of Smyrna have a festival called Eleutheria in which the slave women wear the adornments of the free. So Dositheus in the third book of his Lydian History.Footnote 48
This attack by the Sardians on the Smyrnaeans has been dated to the times of Gyges (mid-seventh century b.c.e.) and is, therefore, yet another piece of local history (or legend) that attaches to Old Smyrna, which was destroyed by Alyattes and abandoned in c. 588 b.c.e.Footnote 49 According to (Pseudo-)Plutarch and his source, then, the festival of the Ἐλϵυθέρια was established to commemorate Old Smyrna’s salvation through the trick of the enslaved women who were disguised as the free-born wives of the Smyrnaeans and sent to deceive the Sardian army.Footnote 50 The festival, therefore, may have taken place in, or otherwise have been associated with, Old Smyrna, having a specific site (the garden?) dedicated to it. The Roman equivalent to the Smyrnaean Ἐλϵυθέρια, the ancillarum feriae, presented in the Parallela minora immediately following Dositheus’ account (313A–B) but also described elsewhere in Plutarch’s corpus (Rom. 29, Cam. 33),Footnote 51 provides information that can strengthen the hypothesis of the festival’s celebration in a garden.
In the Roman story, taking place in the context of a war between the Romans and Latins (fourth century b.c.e.), the slave woman who initiates the stratagem to save the Roman free women from a humiliating union with the Latins has a particularly active role in the later development of the trick.Footnote 52 In the middle of the night, when the other slave women have already stolen away the swords of the Latins, she climbs upon ‘a wild fig-tree of great height’ (ἐρινϵῷ μϵγάλῳ, Cam. 33.4) and signals to the Romans with a torch that the time has come for them to attack.Footnote 53 The festival, then, has the slave women not only dress as if they were free but also run out of the city to participate in a mock battle and then feast in the shade of fig-trees.Footnote 54 Now, we have no such information regarding the Smyrnaean festival, and what happened in Rome is not necessarily an exact reflection of what happened at Smyrna but the fanciful nature of the two stories suggests that they are legends constructed to explain the origin of a custom, and the close parallels between them, together with the fact that the Roman festival is the far better attested, may mean that Roman-period Smyrnaeans manufactured (or revamped) another local legend to enhance the city’s appeal to Roman eyes. This can in turn imply an alignment between the kind of place where the festivals would be celebrated: outside the (contemporary) city, under the shade of trees.Footnote 55 Besides, the Roman feast centred on the tree upon which the slave woman climbed and which gave the festival day its alternative name—Capratine Nones, from the Latin for ‘wild fig tree’, caprificus,Footnote 56 whereas Quintus’ ekphrasis of Achilles’ shield has as its highlight another female figure who mysteriously appears on top of a tree: the personified Ἀρϵτή whom mortals try to reach stands atop a palm tree which grows upon a mountain.Footnote 57
In any case, the Smyrnaean Ἐλϵυθέρια as described in the Parallela minora presents a clear Saturnalia-like structure, involving a temporary reversal of fortunes as the city’s enslaved women dressed and behaved as if they were free for a fixed period of time.Footnote 58 That Quintus’ Homer would receive poetic inspiration in a garden associated with such a period of temporary and fictive liberation from the shackles of slavery may be significant. Just as the enslaved women of Smyrna enjoyed a temporary respite in the Ἐλϵυθέρια, Quintus’ audience could experience a momentary escape from their own reality through the fictive potential of Homeric epic. Whereas many of Quintus’ Second Sophistic contemporaries accused Homer of having made up tall tales,Footnote 59 this poet harnesses the make-believe qualities of Homeric poetry as a path to freedom. What the Muses grant Homer—the capacity to create poetry and fiction—is precisely what allows a momentary stepping away from the realities of contemporary society and of Roman hegemony. Without ever negating these realities and indeed while affirming Roman rule in another passage,Footnote 60 Quintus suggests that Homeric poetry can create a space where the fiction of Greek liberty and direct continuity with the glorious past can be safely indulged, at least for a while.
CONCLUSION: QUINTUS IN ROMAN SMYRNA
Quintus’ likely references to the Alexander foundation legend and the Ἐλϵυθέρια create an ambivalent tension within the Dichterweihe of his ‘Homer’. Both these pieces of local lore serve to place Homer in, and draw attention to, Old Smyrna, transporting us to the remote past, before the city’s relocation to Mt Pagus—back to when it was closer to the Hermus than the Meles. By alluding to the historical fact of the re-foundation, however, the poem points directly to the distance between its own (post-Alexandrian, post-Roman) temporality and that of the original Homer.Footnote 61 The geographical interval between Old and New Smyrna, that is, maps onto a chronological distance between old and new Homeric poetry. Ironically, while making sure that his narrator is identical to the real Homer, Quintus also shows us that he is looking back to this real Homer from the post-Alexandrian vantage point of Roman Smyrna.
The Alexander legend that explained (and glorified) the re-foundation of the city was heavily promoted in Imperial times to appeal to Smyrna’s Roman rulers. Perhaps a similar development pertained to the aetiological legend of the Ἐλϵυθέρια—the identical twin of a Roman festival. Quintus’ allusion to these legends cannot possibly aim to subvert Roman rule per se. The reference frames of both the Alexander myth (the starting point of a campaign of liberation) and the Ἐλϵυθέρια (sanctioning a temporary release from slavery) may give rise to politicized readings, but these very local legends functioned and took shape within the globalized world of the Roman empire. They would have been sources of civic pride, in a context where competitive rivalry would be aimed not so much at Rome but at other Greek cities that equally vied for titles of precedence (prôteia). A graffito scribbled on the walls of the basilica of the Smyrnaean agora read ‘to the first of Asia’ (Ἀσίας πρώτοις). The Smyrnaean boast would quickly be hijacked, as another hand inserted in smaller letters ‘to the Ephesians’ (Ἐϕϵσίοις).Footnote 62 Such quarrels between Greek cities were not atypical and did not leave ‘the common people’ indifferent.Footnote 63 Assuming the widest possible audience for the Posthomerica means that at least some would have simply received the poem’s investiture scene as yet another arrow in the Smyrnaeans’ civic quiver.
If the third-century dating for Quintus’ poem is correct, and if the allusions to Smyrnaean geography and traditions reflect a close connection to this city, Quintus would have written his epic in turbulent times, possibly in a city where tensions between religious communities were already having an impact on cultural life, including on the city’s close allegiance to Homer. Smyrna was not only a hub for the Second Sophistic intellectuals, but it was also home to one of the earliest Christian communities. By the end of the first or early second century, it was already a Christian centre important enough for one of the letters of the Revelation to be addressed to the Smyrnaean ekklêsia.Footnote 64 In the late second or early third century, the basilica in the agora of Smyrna also displayed Christian graffiti—a fact remarkable for the pre-Constantinian era.Footnote 65
The legacy of Homer in third-century Smyrna was not entirely disentangled from the religious and ideological controversies that engulfed the city. A third-century hagiographical text recounts the martyrdom of Pionius, a Smyrnaean presbyter.Footnote 66 At his trial, when Pionius addresses the pagan crowd of ‘Hellenes’, he begins by mocking their boastful association with Homer, ‘the son of Meles, as you claim’.Footnote 67 Pionius goes on to accuse his pagan audience of not heeding ‘your teacher Homer, who advises that it is not right to gloat over those who are dying’Footnote 68—a clear echo from the Odyssey.Footnote 69 Pionius might claim to be a better reader of Homer than his Hellene compatriots, but he does not see Homer as his—Pionius had other, better teachers; Homer is ‘yours’ (ὑμῶν). To choose to become Homer, to place the ancient poet at the heart of Smyrna’s civic legends and to continue his work cannot be an ideologically neutral act in this context. The Posthomerica may or may not be invested in a literary campaign of liberation from the poetic traditions of Rome, but it definitely posits continuity between the culturally and religiously fraught third-century world and the customs, modes and language of the Homeric, glorious past—a continuity that would have been a source of pride for some, but possibly a polemical move for others.
Open access
