The Most Unkindest Cut: Gender, Genre, and Castration in Statius’ Achilleid and Silvae 3.4

This article examines how two of Statius’ late works—the Achilleid and Silvae 3.4, composed roughly contemporaneously—use their central characters for similar explorations of issues of gender and genre. Both poems feature boys whose journeys to manhood are arrested by detours into situations with troubled gender boundaries: Achilles’ stay on Scyros as a girl and an imperial eunuch’s celebration of a rite of passage into adulthood. Similarities in plot, character, and language invite a close reading of both poems together as part of the poet’s exploration of the genre boundaries so intimately connected with epic’s self-definition through gender and masculinity.