e serious than any of those from the Cyclic poets. And the
strange thing is, that each of these deviations is a manifest
detriment to the perfection of his poem; in each of them the
writer has missed, or has rejected, a magnificent opportunity.
With regard to the slaying of Achilles by the hand of Apollo
only, and not by those of Apollo and Paris, he might have pleaded
that Homer himself here speaks with an uncertain voice (cf.
"Iliad" xv. 416-17, xxii. 355-60, and xxi. 277-78). But, in
describing the fight for the body of Achilles ("Odyssey" xxiv. 36
sqq.), Homer makes Agamemnon say:

"So we grappled the livelong day, and we had not refrained
us then,
But Zeus sent a hurricane, stilling the storm of the battle
of men."

Now, it is just in describing such natural phenomena, and in
blending them with the turmoil of battle, that Quintus is in his
element; yet for such a scene he substitutes what is, by
comparison, a lame and impotent conclusion. Of that awful cry
that rang over the sea heralding the coming of Thetis and the
Nymphs to the death-rites of her son, and the panic with which it
filled the host, Quintus is silent. Again, Homer ("Odyssey" iv.
274-89) describes how Helen came in the night with Deiphobus, and
stood by the Wooden Horse, and called to each of the hidden
warriors with the voice of his own wife. This thrilling scene
Quintus omits, and substitutes nothing of his own. Later on, he
makes Menelaus slay Deiphobus unresisting, "heavy with wine,"
whereas Homer ("Odyssey" viii. 517-20) makes him offer such a
magnificent resistance, that Odysseus and Menelaus together could
not kill him without the help of Athena. In fact, we may say
that, though there are echoes of the "Iliad" all through the
poem, yet, wherever Homer has, in the "Odyssey", given the
outline-sketch of an effective scene, Quintus has uniformly
neglected to develop it, has sometimes substituted something much
weaker--as though he had not the "Odyssey" before him!

For this we have no satisfactory explanation to offer. He may
have set his own judgment above Homer--a most unlikely hypothesis:
he may have been consistently following, in the framework of his
story, some original now lost to us: there may be more, and longer,
lacunae in the text than any editors have ventured to indicate: but,
whatever theory we adopt, it must be based on mere conjecture.

The Greek text here given is that of Koechly (1850