Quintus Calaber, more usually called Quintus Smyrnaeus, is a writer
of perhaps the fourth century of our era. About him nothing, or next
to nothing, is known. He told, in so late an age, the conclusion of
the Tale of Troy, and (in the writer's opinion) has been unduly
neglected and disdained. His manner, I venture to think, is more
Homeric than that of the more famous and doubtless greater
Alexandrian poet of the Argonautic cycle, Apollonius Rhodius, his
senior by five centuries. His materials were probably the ancient
and lost poems of the Epic Cycle, and the story of the death of
OEnone may be from the Little Iliad of Lesches. Possibly parts of
his work may be textually derived from the Cyclics, but the topic is
very obscure. In Quintus, Paris, after encountering evil omens on
his way, makes a long speech, imploring the pardon of the deserted
OEnone. She replies, not with the Tennysonian brevity; she sends him
back to the helpless arms of her rival, Helen. Paris dies on the
hills; never did Helen see him returning. The wood-nymphs bewail
Paris, and a herdsman brings the bitter news to Helen, who chants her
lament. But remorse falls on OEnone. She does not go


"Slowly down
By the long torrent's ever-deepened roar,"


but rushes "swift as the wind to seek and spring upon the pyre of her
lord." Fate and Aphrodite drive her headlong, and in heaven Selene,
remembering Endymion, bewails the lot of her sister in sorrow.
OEnone reaches the funeral flame, and without a word or a cry leaps
into her husband's arms, the wild Nymphs wondering. The lovers are
mingled in one heap of ashes, and these are bestowed in one vessel of