Achilles in Love

Abstract

Two of the most famous painters of the ancient world represented Achilles' cross-dressing at Scyros, Polygnotus in the 5th. century BC and Athenion in the late 4th century, each depicting different moments and aspects of this episode. Polygnotus painted Achilles sharing the life of the maidens in Deidameia's women’s quarters, while Athenion emphasized the turbulent moments of the exposure of Achilles' masculine state by Odysseus and Diomedes. From the Hellenistic age to the 1st cent. AD, the occasion of Odysseus’ visit to Scyros kept finding eager narrators, who focused either on Achilles in women’s clothes and his odd love affair with Deidameia, or on Achilles’ rediscovery of virility and departure for the war—both episodes taken up later and combined in Statius’ Achilleid. Many centuries later, when Achilles at Scyros enjoyed a time of intense popularity in the opera of the second half of the 17th and the 18th centuries, the synthesis found in Statius, the common source of most libretti on Achilles at Scyros, was split again into the two original viewpoints and emphases of Polygnotus and Athenion. The 17th-century librettists Strozzi, Bentivoglio, and Capece, for instance, yielded to the appeal of using Achilles to reflect the gender kaleidoscope of the operatic performance, where a woman or castrato was usually the actor playing the man Achilles who pretended to be a woman, so that an insouciant indulgence in the carnivalesque eroticism of Achilles in drag and the construction of further erotic intrigues largely overshadowed other aspects of plot and psychology. Quite differently, Metastasio's libretto of 1736 reacted to this carnivalesque perspective with a substantial enhancement of the figure of Achilles, and whose obvious sympathy (and emphasis) emphasized the psychological transition through which Achilles rediscovered his gender and real self as a hero. \n\tWhat can be said of Achilles’ stay at Scyros also applies to all of the other episodes of his erotic life. The martial epos of the Iliad was completely silent about most of them, and laconic about the very few hints it did include. The Epic Cycle must have narrated some of them to some extent, even to the point that a sort of debate developed in the Aethiopis on their epic propriety. Finally, tragedy and erotic poetry indulged in (re-)constructing Achilles' erotic passions with no censorious stance at all. But reactions of indignation at Achilles' erotic debauchery and attempts to counter this with a dignified restoration of his heroism never stopped, at least from the Hellenistic age onwards, at both the level of interpretation of existing texts and mythopoiesis of new texts. \n\tThis book, then, is an attempt at a diachronic account of how these various views about Achilles' loves evolved in literary narratives from Homer to Statius as they moved from generation to generation, author to author, and genre to genre. I have concentrated my attention on only some of these loves: Deidameia, Briseis, Patroclus, Penthesileia. Only in fact in these cases the number of literary or iconographical texts was significant enough to let me (try to) appreciate the dynamics of the different reactions by different authors and genres to the narratives of Achilles' loves.

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