The Transvestite Achilles: Gender and Genre in Statius' Achilleid (review)

This well-written, fascinating book does not claim to be the comprehensive book on the Achilleid we are (or should be) waiting for. In the first ever English monograph on the Achilleid, Peter Heslin concentrates on the episode of young Achilles on Scyros, the “draft-dodging cross-dresser” (xi–xii). Along the way, however, he offers thoughts on many issues of Latin epic, literary patronage, rhetoric, gender, myth and ritual, and reception studies. This book, together with the reprint of O.A.W. Dilke’s 1954 commentary with a new introduction by Robert Cowan (Bristol Phoenix Press 2005), brings Statius’ Achilleid into the centre of Latin studies.

Heslin boldly devotes the first chapter to the story of Achilles on Scyros in baroque opera. Fans of Statius often start with a few praises from his medieval and Renaissance readers in order to justify their work, but Heslin is looking for more than a stamp of acceptability. He wants us to use reception as a guide to reading the old texts better, and in the course of the book he returns often to reception, especially Statius’ reading of Ovid, Virgil, Catullus, and Homer. Baroque opera proves to be full of libretti about Achilles on Scyros. A woman or a castrato was ideally suited to sing the role of a transvestite Achilles, and the plot offered many comic possibilities as well as serious commentary on the nature of kings, heroes, men, and women. Eight pages on the Habsburg succession (32–39) may be excessive, but Heslin has created a valuable resource for future scholars and he generally succeeds in his purpose of showing how the librettists used the story of Achilles on Scyros to comment on gender and heroism as innate or learned.

In chapter 2 Heslin convincingly argues for reading the extant Achilleid as “a very well-balanced narrative” (63) and “a down-payment against future patronage” (66). His position is a welcome change from the traditional observations on an unfinished fragment. Heslin refrains from speculative reconstructions and emphasizes instead the many ways Statius teases the readers of this first part into demanding the rest of the poem. Statius claims in the proem that he will write the whole story about Achilles, from birth to death. Heslin is easily able to show how this provocative announcement “turns out to be a bluff” and by alluding to the proem of the Metamorphoses signals the Ovidian nature of the Achilleid rather than ignorance of Aristotle (82). Statius is also not afraid to give us a song by Achilles which is “an aetiology for Hellenistic poetics that he has boldly imported into the world of the Iliad” (93).

Thetis and Deidamia are the principal figures of chapter 3. Both women work hard at acting like women, the human being quite a bit more successfully than the goddess, since feminine passivity and suffering are in general easier for humans than for gods. As one might expect in a poem, the success and failure of the characters may be measured by how well they allude to characters in earlier poems. At the beginning of the Achilleid Thetis asks Neptune for a storm to wreck Paris’ fleet: she would like to combine the motherly concern of Virgil’s Venus for Aeneas with the vengeful fury of his Juno (109). Unfortunately Thetis (unlike Statius) does not control her sources well, and Neptune is able to use Catullus to refuse her elegantly (113). Thetis also tries to talk like a man, using Roman male rhetorical tropes and barking out commands, and comically fails, as a woman should (133–134; see also Joseph Farrell on the gender of Latin in his Latin Language and Latin Culture [Cambridge 2001] 52–83). Deidamia, on the other hand, finds the appropriate literary models: “her invocation of the urbanity of Catullus and the epistolary mode of Ovid’s heroines lends a certain knowingness to her adoption of this literary role [of...