Although Statius promises in his Achilleid to tell the ‘whole’ story of the hero (per omnem … heroa, 4–5), even the bits Homer left out, for many critics the unfinished poem amounts to a playfully erotic ‘counter-epic’, taking its aesthetic lead from elegy, comedy and Ovid’s gender-fluid poetics of the Metamorphoses rather than martial epic. By focusing on Achilles’ feminine masquerade and stirrings of desire for Deidamia, whom he rapes while still in female dress, the Achilleid stages a scandalous divergence from epic norms, which the projected rest of the poem must seek to ‘redress’ after our hero bursts out of his disguise and sails for Troy. The text breaks off with Achilles’ tantalising refusal to recount his shameful Scyrian experience to his fellow warriors: ‘my mother knows the rest’ (scit cetera mater: Ach. 2.167). The reader knows what happened on Scyros, but not how the poem would have continued: would Statius’ eroticised young hero metamorphose fully into Homer’s ultra-violent murdering machine, or has his fragment enacted a different transformation, of the genre itself? In this monograph, Julene Abad del Vecchio argues for a darker, bleaker reading of Achilles’ Scyrian sojourn than much previous scholarship, reconceiving its playful elements as part of an intricate pattern of light and dark, or tonal dissonance.
A.’s impressive book is the only the second English-language monograph on the Achilleid, following Heslin’s groundbreaking The Transvestite Achilles (Cambridge, 2005), and the poem is ripe for a new interpretation of its complex, allusive and tonally jarring poetics. A.’s dense intertextual readings show how Statius’ concentrated style gestures repeatedly to the violent plots of hyper-tragedy and ‘ultra-epic’, including the Thebaid. At the heart of the book is a thought-provoking reinterpretation of Achilles’ epic trajectory in terms of Thetis’ tragic opposition to the epic tradition. A rich introduction maps out this generic struggle and explores the competing perspectives, tragic subtexts and contrasting affective registers opened out by the teasing prologue. A. demonstrates how, despite humorous overtones, the narrative is saturated with a sense of teleology, as foreshadowing and suspense-filled ‘sideshadowing’ draw attention both to Achilles’ violent future and to alternative possibilities, ‘what might have been’. The epic that emerges is, like its hero, excessive: it ‘contains’ the future of its own narrative present and completes and supersedes the whole epic tradition within the short span of the poem. A.’s survey of Achilleid’s narrative strategies — prolepsis, compression, cyclicality — demonstrates how traditional motivations, expected plot trajectories and conventional tonal registers are foregrounded and amplified only to be manipulated, ironised or undermined. Although the poem is structured around recognisable binaries — masculine/feminine, Scyros/Aulis, epic/antiepic — she argues that the Achilleid pursues a canon-destabilising middle course: there is no secure, single source of interpretative authority, narrative direction or moral certainty.
Even as Statius sets up the Iliadic master-text as his hero’s and his epic’s destiny, a tragic vision persistently intrudes, sowing unease about Achilles’ future exploits. A. intensively decodes allusions intimating that the boy Achilles is an embryonic tragic figure, immoderate and excessive like Seneca’s Hercules, threatening to usurp his father. Bacchic madness and gigantomachy also loom as hypothetical, hinted-at horrors, recasting the future Trojan war as Roman civil discord. A. shows how Statius subtly remoulds Ulysses, via Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Seneca’s Troades and Virgil, not as a comedically inflected father-figure who ‘corrects’ the maternal scandal of Scyros, restoring epic and hero to their rightful Homeric destiny, but as a predatory threat, a wolf-like hunter and masculinised version of Allecto, the narrative agent inaugurating the poem’s projected war narrative. Ulysses’ search for Achilles provides an unsettling model for the reader-critic too, who would ‘probe’ the text for traces of the ‘real’ Achilles recognisable from Homer — a suspicious, even cynical reader, like Ulysses in Troades.
A.’s layered, fascinating readings validate her method of searching intertextual analysis, but I would have liked some theoretical reflection on the stakes of this kind of Ulysses-style, ‘paranoid’ intertextual decoding, which the poem’s multiple tonal and subtextual dissonances seem to require: is something lost as well as gained in reading this way? The idea that the Achilleid explores a crisis in modes of reading would also have tallied with the final chapter’s metapoetic conclusion: here A. argues for a gendered struggle over poetic inspiration between Calchas, the feminised Trojan prophet, and Thetis, maternal poet-figure, resisting reader and foreseer of Achilles’ fate. The poet himself, A. observes, ‘appears torn, just as his subject matter, … playing both vates and diva’ (208). A tantalising ‘postlude’ proposes that Statius’ rewriting of Achilles through a maternalised, epic-tragic lens rewrites the tradition itself, not as Oedipal rivalry but as network of competing perspectives and affective investments, reflecting contemporary anxieties about patriarchal power and imperial excess.
This is an impressive monograph with original and striking arguments, which shows that paradoxical elements can coexist and complicate each other in the same work and this incongruity is energising for poet and genre. While its intensive detail sometimes betrays its PhD origins, overall A.’s method powerfully prevails. Statius emerges from the book as a ‘suspicious’ over-reader himself, an intertextual decoder and resisting critic of the epic tradition. We could read the Scyrian digression as an unheroic detour that loops back to the Homeric tradition, thereby reaffirming that tradition (and its traditional gender/generic roles); but A. shows us an Achilleid which reflects on the projected telos of that tradition, questioning its inevitability, testing its underlying assumptions (ethical, generic), and by recapitulating it, reforming it.
