Statius’ Achilleid is a curious text which embraces the norms and traditions of Roman epic writing and yet pushes against the boundaries, defying comfortable characterisation. Weighing in at just over 1100 lines of hexameter written by a masterful poet at the height of his powers, the poem, divided into a book and a bit of a book, is conventionally described as unfinished and yet shows a remarkable degree of polish. A poem which narrates the life of Achilles portrays itself as a kind of ‘hyper-epic’ and yet notoriously rejoices in tales of gender bending and sexual transformation far from the plains of Troy. Charles McNelis provides a modern, English-language edition and commentary, building on the momentum generated by recent French and Italian editions among the huge upsurge in interest in Flavian literature over the last quarter of a century. M.’s text will surely be a definitive one for Anglophone scholars and provide a basis for further scholarly work and discussion of this brilliant poem. This reviewer’s only real reservation is that the price the press is willing to charge for this volume may mean that Statius’ poem and M.’s work on it will be less widely accessed than might otherwise be the case.
The format of the commentary is traditional and familiar. M.’s introduction is thorough, encompassing a brief and uncontroversial overview of Statius’ life (1–3), followed by a more thorough summary of the themes and structure of the poem (3–9). This leads to more focused discussion of sexuality and gender (9–12) and a concise literary history of Achilles (12–15). M. then moves to the mythological background (16–21), looking at Peleus and Thetis, Chiron and Scyros in particular, and a brief but comprehensive summary of Statius’ literary inheritance (21–5) whose monumental footnotes function as a species of index locorum. These sections reflect the edition’s strengths; M. has a tremendous awareness of Statius’ cultural context and of the full range of modern scholarship; his discussion, while remaining reasonably conservative, nonetheless opens out key ideas for future scholarly interrogation. The introduction then moves to those often ephemeral categories, ‘language and style’ (25–7) and ‘meter’ (27–8). Here the introduction is sharp and well focused, reflecting M.’s excellent understanding of his material and his ability to distil it effectively for his audience. The subsequent section on reception (28–34) is tremendous and will, one suspects, be a springboard for much work on the Achilleid in future. This reader would quite happily have had more.
M.’s text (35–6) is a conservative one, but sensibly so. His textual criticism is noticeably supported by a detailed and thorough understanding of the tradition. In addition to the eight main textual witnesses, M. has collated a further forty of the near 220 manuscripts which survive and provides a meticulous apparatus to accompany the text. The commentary regularly delves into the thornier textual issues in a reassuringly clear and prudent fashion. Only once does M. deviate from a reading not attested in at least one of the three recent editions by Hall, Nuzzo, or Ripoll-Soubiran (nec at Ach. 1.724), and there his reading is amply supported by at least five other modern editions.
The text and apparatus are supported by a facing English translation which adeptly juggles the balance between readability and giving a sense of the original. There are occasional trickier moments, but slightly obscure English generally reflects Statius’ allusive and difficult Latin, and the main commentary is always there to help a befuddled reader (e.g. rendering Ach. 2.140 as ‘at which pace it is run through the flats’ needs a little elucidation in the notes). In one or two places, M.’s translation lends an emphasis that some might quibble with (e.g. Ach. 1.41 improbus as ‘naughty’ perhaps underplays the force of this adjective), but more often these decisions make good sense of the Latin (e.g. Ach. 1.642 vi as ‘by rape’ gives a specific emphasis crucial at this moment).
The bulk of the volume is taken up by commentary (121–418) organised by lemmata and punctuated by occasional overviews of individual sections. M.’s scholarly acumen and explanatory clarity are consistently to the fore; we are provided a very clear elucidation of the intertextual wealth of this poem, a clear-eyed account of any textual, metrical or linguistic issues and some really intriguing notes on reception (e.g. on Poliziano’s reworking of the proem to Domitian in his own address to Lorenzo de’ Medici). The visual elements of Statius’ text are especially well handled (e.g. Neptune’s arrival at Ach. 1.52–61 compared to the statue group in the Circus Flaminius, or the complex issues prompted by Achilles’ spontaneous and sudden nudity at Ach. 1.874–85). It always feels as if we are in safe hands. The commentary is followed by a sizeable bibliography (419–40), which unfortunately omits two of the most recent monographs on the Achilleid (Sigurjónsson, 2023 and Abad del Vecchio, 2024), and a slightly too brief general index. Typographical errors are impressively few.
In his preface, M. refers to ‘the long period of writing this book’ (v). It is evident in every page that the long period of gestation has been the product of meticulous research on every level and a desire to see this material comprehensibly articulated throughout. Not only will existing Flavian enthusiasts want this book at their elbow, but McNelis’s edition will bring more readers to the table.
