Examining carefully the Egyptian epic hexameter production from the 3rd to the 6th centuries AD, especially that of the southern region (Thebaid), this study provides an image of three centuries in the history of the Graeco-Egyptian literature, in which authors and poetry are related directly to the social-economic, cultural and literary contexts from which they come. The training they could get and the books and authors they came in touch with explain that we know so many names and works, written in a language and metrics that enjoyed the greatest esteem, being considered proofs of the highest culture. Laura Miguelez Cavero demonstrates that the traditional image of a "school of Nonnos" is not justified - rather, Triphiodorus, Nonnus, Musaeus, Colluthus, Cyrus of Panopolis and Christodorus of Coptos are just the tip of a literary iceberg we know only to some extent through the texts that papyri offer us.

The last full commentary on The Sack of Troy was published by Wernicke in 1819 and even the most recent analyses of the poem tend to see it as a quick halt in the evolution of epic poetry on its way towards Nonnus of Panopolis. This book offers a complete treatment of The Sack of Troy for its own sake. The introduction gathers all the information we have about Triphiodorus and his work, focusing on the reasons behind the election of topic, the outline of the poem, different forms of allusion, the use of the characterisation of individuals and groups to sustain plot development, the nature of the narrator and the value of speeches. This part is followed by a detailed analysis of Triphiodorus' literary universe: his different forms of engagement not only with Homer and other distant poets, but also with Imperial literature and the contemporary cultural production. The line-by-line commentary of the poem attends to the position of each episode in the poem and in the tradition of the Trojan War and offers a linguistic, formal and stylistic analysis. Each section or episode is preceded by a comprehensive introduction, always bringing in all the related bibliography but providing a fresh and reliable view on Triphiodorus.