Tree similes and Trojan land-escape in Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica

Similes have long been recognised as a powerful way of drawing connections between different entities and world experiences. They are also a fundamental, constitutive feature of ancient epic poetry. This article considers how the simile device is mobilised by Quintus of Smyrna, a Homeric-impersonating Greek poet from the third century C.E., to articulate the dynamic and volatile relationship between the human and non-human world in the mythic space of Troy. Quintus’ poem is less well known than many of the more conventionally ‘canonical’ works discussed in this issue. However it offers a significant and provocative example of the poetic redrafting of the Homeric tradition in Late Antiquity, and shows how Homer’s foundational response to the Trojan landscape (as outlined in Edith Hall’s contribution) becomes for later authors a resource to be extracted, carved up and reassembled in disorienting new ways. During the relentless teleological progression of his narrative, Quintus uses several intricately crafted similes centred on trees to disperse and undercut the fast-paced and linear human action, and to invite reflection on the wider consequences of that action which extend beyond the human domain. The heroes and the trees are united in Quintus’ Troy through and only through the story world of the simile, where they become momentarily enmeshed as actors grappling with the effects of cyclical violence and destruction. Through a close analysis of several of these moments, I aim to show how Quintus’ tree similes offer a micro-commentary on the tenuous borders between agency and inevitability, continuity and change, annihilation and hope in the distant landscape of mythological Troy which resonates loudly in many more contemporary positions in time.