The Transvestite Achilles Gender and Genre in Statius' Achilleid [Paperback]

Offers the first book-length examination of Statius' unfinished epic, the Achilleid.The Achilleid, a brief, unfinished epic on the life of Achilles, was composed in Latin by the poet Statius in the first century AD, and focuses on the attempt by Achil les' mother, the goddess Thetis, to save her son from the Trojan War by dressing him as a girl. This first book-length study of the poem offers a detailed interpretation of Statius's narrative and explores the ramifications of this unusual interlude in Achilles' career. It also addresses questions of the poem's reception and of gender in antiquity.The Achilleid, a brief, unfinished epic on the life of Achilles, was composed in Latin by the poet Statius in the first century AD, and focuses on the attempt by Achil les' mother, the goddess Thetis, to save her son from the Trojan War by dressing him as a girl. This first book-length study of the poem offers a detailed interpretation of Statius's narrative and explores the ramifications of this unusual interlude in Achilles' career. It also addresses questions of the poem's reception and of gender in antiquity.As we follow Achilles' metamorphosis from wild boy to demure girl to lover to hero, Statius brilliantly illustrates a series of contrasting codes of behavior: male and female, epic and elegiac. This first full-length study of the poem addresses not only the narrative itself, but also sets the myth of Achilles on Scyros within a broad interpretive framework. The exploration ranges from the reception of the Achilleid in Baroque opera to the anthropological parallels that have emerged to explain Achilles' transvestism.Introduction; 1. Opening nights at the opera 16411741; 2. The design of the Achilleid; 3. Womanhood, rhetoric, and performance; 4. Semivir, Semifer, Semideus; 5. Transvestism in myth and ritual; 6. Rape, repetition, and romance; 7. Conclusion. Heslin's analysis convincingly shows that Statius skillfully employs the literary past to revisit familiar questiols>