Book Review: The Fall of Troy by Quintus of Smyrna

The Fall of Troy by Quintus Smyrnaeus
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is a gap of epic happenings between Homer’s two masterworks, in Ancient Greece there were smaller epics that complete the story but were lost in time then one man rose to the challenge to bridge the gap. The Fall of Troy by Quintus of Smyrna is the rescued remnants of the lost epics between Homer that detail the end of the Trojan War constructed into a single work.

Writing a millennium after the probable date of the first time The Iliad was first written down, Quintus decided to fill in the gap between funeral for Hector and the fall of the Troy by salvaging what was left of the little epics to complete the coverage of the war. Quintus’ quality is nothing compared to Homer, but obviously he knows it and doesn’t try to be Homer just to complete the war. Quintus achieves his goal and frankly the rating of the book is based on his decision to even write the book, what could have improved the book is if the publishers of this edition would have had either footnotes or endnotes but just as a general reader it doesn’t really ruin things it just would have enhanced it.

The Fall of Troy finishes the war that ancient western world obsessed about for a millennium and gives readers today a view of how it ended how it ended.

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