Beginning at the End in Imperial Greek Epic

Abstract:Greek epic has a notoriously ambiguous relationship to authorship, with composers from Homer to Nonnus finding covert, creative ways to construct their identities in relation to their models, origins, or sources. In this essay, I look at three Greek works from the imperial period: Quintus's Posthomerica, Triphiodorus's Sack of Troy, and Colluthus's Abduction of Helen. These poems display a highly paradoxical approach to literary origins. They maintain a hyper-close relationship to Homer, adopting his language, style, and Trojan subject. And yet they also include signals which disavow these Homerizing claims: philological quirks, contemporary references, and later literary allusions. By focusing not, as is usual for recent imperial epic scholarship, on these poems' programmatic openings, but rather on their highly complicated ends, I argue that they all put forth an alternative mode of response to originality and canonicity. Opening up Homer's poems as they close their own, they continue the epic canon in a non-linear fashion: returning to its deep, foundational past, and also treating it as inherently open and unfinished—ripe for correction, expansion, and ultimately re-embodiment.