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Laura Miguélez-Cavero. Triphiodorus, The Sack of Troy. A General Study and a Commentary . Texte und Kommentare, 45. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Pp. xii, 536. $182.00. ISBN 978-3-11-028520-8.
The Sack of Troy of the Egyptian Triphiodorus is a poem of 691 verses, telling the story of the Trojan horse and the destruction of the city. It coincides with large sections of the second book of the Aeneid and with books 12-13 of Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica. For many years, the Halosis Iliou was considered a pure example of "Nonnian" poetry, that is, a product of the fifth century A.D. or even later, until Alan Cameron demonstrated on metrical grounds that it should be dated before Nonnus-which was then brilliantly confirmed by a third- or fourth-century papyrus, moving the poem to the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth century. Its style is entirely Late Antique: smooth rolling hexameters filled with long epithets.
A commentary on Triphiodorus has long been a desideratum: the only large commentary on this poem was that of Wernicke, a glorious but old-fashioned product of Hermannian philology (1819). Triphiodorus has been edited by E. Livrea and by the late B. Gerlaud (both 1982), and more recently (and wildly) by U. Dubielzig (1996): both Dubielzig and Gerlaud offered various...