Abstract The poetic investiture scene in Quintus’ Posthomerica (12.308–13) is the only passage in which this epic’s narrator speaks about himself in the first person. These lines have often been commented upon from an intertextual and metaliterary perspective, but the specificity of the geographical markers mentioned by Quintus has not been adequately explained. This article proposes that Quintus places his Homer specifically at the site of the old city of Smyrna, which is not the same as that of the Roman (and modern) city. Other elements of the investiture scene allude precisely to the legend which, in the Imperial age, ascribed to Alexander the Great the relocation of the city from its old site, nearer the Hermus river, to the new, near the Meles. Local legends and traditions help to explain several details of the investiture, from its placement in the precinct of a temple to the presentation of Quintus’ young Homer as a shepherd. The article also explores the ideological implications of the poem’s return to the distant, pre-Ionian past of Smyrna and its appeal to the city’s ancient history and legends, from the suggestion that Quintus may be de-Romanizing his poem to the relevance of Homer in a rapidly Christianizing third-century Smyrna.
Fotini Hadjittofi (Wed,) studied this question.