On the cover of F.'s delightful study of Achilles' improbable career as a romantic hero is a detail from a famous painting of the taking of Briseis from the atrium of the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii. Phoenix looks sceptically at Achilles; Achilles looks furiously at Patroclus; Patroclus looks gently at Briseis; and Briseis looks tearfully at us. F. sets out to explain how Homer's version of this scene, which is rooted in the gift economy of archaic heroism and kingship, came to be charged with such intensity of inner feeling. He does not survey every minor romantic episode in the mythical biography of Achilles, but restricts himself to those which made a substantial impact on ancient literature. Even so, many of the texts under examination are fragmentary or consist of little more than fleeting references. The intertextual methodology employed is therefore not so straightforward to implement. Fortunately, F. brings to the task an uncommon skill in carefully unravelling complex literary traditions.
F.'s expertise in Hellenistic and Roman poetry and in Greek tragedy will be well known to many readers, and in this book he demonstrates that he has an equal gift for interpreting Homer and Homeric scholarship. It is because his interests go towards the later, post-Homeric poetic tradition that he pays close attention to those aspects of the scholia that an orthodox Homerist might dismiss as simply erroneous or misguided and sees in them valuable clues to the many deformations of Achilles that came after. F. brings to this project an ambidextrous facility in treating the Greek and Latin traditions as equals, never over-simplifying one to serve as a foil for the other. This book is also noteworthy for making excellent use of evidence from the visual arts, especially where the literary tradition is fragmentary. For example, the tears of Briseis shown by the Pompeian painter do not come from Homer, but are part of a later tradition evidenced also by Propertius and Ovid (pp. 175–85; I think they all reflect the same painting in Rome).
After an introduction, the book is organised into four chapters, each of which deals with a major figure with whom Achilles was said, by some authors, to have had an important emotional and erotic bond. The first of these is Deidamia. F. begins by putting together the early evidence for the story of Achilles on Scyros (perhaps underestimating the primacy and impact of Polygnotus). The payoff comes soon afterwards, in a brilliant line-by-line reading of a short Hellenistic fragment on Achilles and Deidamia attributed to the circle of Bion (pp. 43–58). F. draws upon his unrivalled expertise on ancient pastoral in general and on Bion in particular to bring out its surprising subtlety: its allusions to Sappho, its debate with Lycophron and its links to Theocritus. It is a tour de force of interpretation.
We then travel with Deidamia to Rome, to Ovid's Ars amatoria and the Achilleid of Statius. Even though he acknowledges that there are two sides to the Achilleid, the heroic and the erotic, F.'s interpretation is slightly hampered by an odd insistence upon Statius' project as a ‘dignification’ of the hero (pp. 71, 88, 92 and again at 263). But Statius is the one who made a disgraceful spectacle of him on Scyros and put him in such desperate need of dignification in the first place. F. has many excellent things to say about the prophetic speech of Calchas at Aulis, and he acutely points out that, as a vates, Calchas is not only a prophet, but also a poet: a figure representing the canonical epic tradition, calling Achilles back where he belongs. He then insists, less convincingly, that this Calchas-vates must therefore be a stand-in for none other than the poet Statius himself (p. 88). But Statius stands outside his own poem, weaving together the strands that pull Achilles away from Troy and those, like Calchas, that pull him back.
The next two chapters are on Briseis and Patroclus, and the major difference here is that they, unlike Deidamia, are present in the Iliad. Hence these two central chapters rely heavily upon F.'s superb ability to read the sometimes rebarbative polemics of the Homeric scholia with sympathy and even-handedness. Ancient readers who understood Achilles' relationship with Briseis and Patroclus as sentimental, erotic liaisons necessarily relied upon tendentious and partial readings of Homer. F. starts by clearly affirming the anachronistic and erroneous nature of these interpretations; he then tries to understand what the ancient exegetical tradition can tell us about these interpretative strategies. The payoff comes when we move past the scholia to poetic traditions that were informed by them. It is no longer news to say that the Latin epic tradition was heavily influenced by Hellenistic scholarship on Homer; F. convincingly shows that this was no less the case for the treatment of Briseis in Latin elegy.
The question of a sexual relationship between Achilles and Patroclus has a long and well-known history, which F. surveys authoritatively. Once again the major payoff comes on the Latin side of the tradition, providing a particularly rich backdrop for an interpretation of the Nisus and Euryalus episode in Virgil's Aeneid and the episode of Hopleus and Dymas in Statius' Thebaid. The book concludes with a brief chapter on Penthesileia. In addition to considering the Amazon's role in the cyclic Aethiopis, Propertius, Quintus of Smyrna and Nonnus, F. wonders why the hero of the Aeneid did not fall in love with her Italian counterpart, Camilla. Perhaps Aeneas already had, in a way. It is precisely while Aeneas is gazing intently at a painting of Penthesileia in the Temple of Juno that Dido makes her first appearance. Both are women who dared to vie, in different ways, with men (Aen. 1.493 with Austin ad loc.).
In the end, we discover just how many ancient writers blithely disregarded Horace's command to represent Achilles always as impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer, which may be a hint that Horace's po-faced prescriptivism was, as often in the Ars poetica (121), meant ironically (contra pp. 10–12). F. demonstrates several clear lines of development from early debates about the Iliad to sentimental representations of the character of Achilles in later poetry. This is not the sort of argument that lends itself to a tidy, unified thesis; hence the book ends without an explicit conclusion. It is rather a work whose value lies in the quality of the individual details. The extremely subtle interpretations and the surprising intertextual juxtapositions contained in this book will make it essential reading for anyone interested in the post-Homeric Achilles, and perhaps even to Homerists as well. Indeed, anyone who enjoys reading literary criticism of the highest calibre will find this book a great pleasure.
