Achilles in love: intertextual studies

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ACHILLES IN LOVE
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Achilles in Love
Intertextual Studies

MARCO FANTUZZI

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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# Marco Fantuzzi 2012
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2012
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 Foreword

Two of the most famous painters of the ancient world represented

Achilles’ cross-dressing at Scyros, Polygnotus in the fifth century bc
and Athenion in the late fourth 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
classical age to the first century ad, the occasion of Odysseus’ visit to
Scyros kept finding eager narrators, who focused either on Achilles in
women’s clothes and his love affair with Deidameia, or on Achilles’
rediscovery of virility and departure for the war—both episodes are
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 seventeenth and the eighteenth
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 seven-
teenth-century librettists Strozzi, Bentivoglio, and Capece, for in-
stance, yielded to the appeal of using Achilles to reflect the gender
kaleidoscope of the operatic performance, where a woman or castrato
was sometimes 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 carni-
valesque perspective with a substantial enhancement of the figure of
Achilles, in which obvious sympathy (and emphasis) highlighted the
psychological transition through which Achilles rediscovered his
gender and real self as a hero.1
What 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

1
These hints at the history of opera are totally dependent on chap. 1 in Heslin
(2005).
vi Foreword
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 cen-
sorious 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 on-
wards, both in the interpretation of existing texts and in the mytho-
poiesis of new texts.
This book, then, is an attempt at a diachronic account of how these
various views about Achilles’ love life 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 atten-
tion on only some of these loves: Deidameia, Briseis, Patroclus,
Penthesileia. In fact, only in these cases was the number of literary
or iconographical texts 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.
The ÆY
Ø behind the research underlying this book was the
unpublished colloquium ‘Greek Poetry in Italy’ which A. Sens and
J. Osgood organized in July 2007 at the Georgetown University
campus in Fiesole. Some points of the ‘Briseis’ chapter constituted
an invited paper (unpublished) given at the Classics Department
of the University of Cincinnati in the autumn of 2010. Parts of the
section ‘Achilles at Scyros’ were presented at the fifth ‘Trends
in Classics’ conference of the University of Thessaloniki on ‘Encoun-
ters, Interactions and Transformations in Latin Literature’, May
2011, and at the Zurich conference on ‘Das Epyllion: Gattung
ohne Geschichte?’, July 2009, and will be published in the relevant
proceedings.2

At a time when the funding cuts for humanistic research have made it
more and more difficult for many university libraries in many coun-
tries (first of all in the country where I was born) to keep their

2
English translations of Greek and Latin texts are from the Loeb Classical Library,
where available, unless it is otherwise stated. Translations from the Iliad are by
M. Hammond (Harmondsworth and New York, 1987). Translations of the Homeric
scholia are my own.
Most abbreviations comply with the practice of The Oxford Classical Dictionary,
but some reflect my idiosyncratic preference.
 Foreword vii
collections up to date, I had the privilege of writing most of the
chapters of this book in some of the world’s greatest specialized
libraries of classical studies, and in the context of their stimulating
scholarly environments: the Classical Faculty Library and the Uni-
versity Library of the University of Cambridge; the Library of the
Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies at Washington, DC; Butler
Library of Columbia University; and the Library of the Department
of Classics at the University of Cincinnati. Without these institutions,
this book would perhaps have been born anyway, but it would have
undergone a much more difficult gestation.

This book also profited from the generous advice of several friends or
colleagues (in most cases both friends and colleagues). S. Goldhill,
P. Hardie, R. Hunter, D. Steiner, and Gareth Williams read either
the whole of it, or most of it. A. Barchiesi, F. Budelmann, C. Dué,
H. Foley, K. Gutzwiller, D. Konstan, M. Labate, C. McNelis, G. Nagy,
R. Osborne, L. Pagani, T. Papanghelis, D. Poli, L. Prauscello,
A. Rengakos, G. Rosati, R. M. Rosen, A. Shapiro, D. Sider,
M. Squire, Richard Thomas, C. Tsagalis, K. Volk contributed invalu-
able suggestions to single parts or points. The Press’s anonymous
readers made most valuable suggestions in their initial reports and
above all helped me shape the material they had read into a proper
book.
M. Hanses, D. Ratzan, and A. Uhlig joined forces to make my
English more palatable—at the beginning it was, I fear, much less
inviting—and also often improved the clarity of my arguments. At the
end of the gestation of this book many surviving oddities of all sorts
were wiped out by the unyielding eyes of the Press’s copy-editor,
Heather Watson, and proofreader, Miranda Bethell, whose skills
proved to be far beyond the best hopes an author may conceive.
Financial support from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Columbia
University, NY, contributed to cover the cost of the revision(s). But
the debt I owe all of my helpers for the patience with which they
coped with the impossible deadlines I kept setting for myself and for
them will remain unpaid.
I thank them all. I would also like to thank in particular my wife
Maria, whose love, patience, and scholarly advice contributed sub-
stantially to the fulfilment of the project of this book. And I dedicate
this book to the memory of my mother Agata, self-effacing heroine of
day-to-day hard work and love for me.
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

List of Plates xi
1. Introduction 1
Homer: an encyclopedia of love? 1
Achilles and the crossing of boundaries—of
heroism, and of the epic genre 6
Perceptions of (Achilles’) love 13
2. Deidameia 21
Epic silence 21
Classical texts and paintings, and the first critics 29
Achilles the coward lover 38
Achilles makes love, not war 43
Achilles (at Scyros) and the issue of character consistency 61
Ovid as a champion of the character consistency
of Achilles? 65
Statius and the dignification of Achilles at Scyros 71
Effeminacy, passion, and the melancholy of
decisions 89
3. Briseis 99
Homer’s inexplicitness 99
Passion or rhetorical self-defence? 109
Briseis çºÆæ 116
Another opinion about Achilles and Briseis 123
Ovid’s Briseis far beyond matrimonial hopes,
and icy Achilles 128
Briseis’ pessimism destabilizes elegy 133
But at least someone did believe that Achilles
loved Briseis 143
The fortunes of elegiac Achilles 157
Translating but eroticizing the Iliad 173
The tears of Briseis 175
4. Comrades in Love 187
Epic friendships 187
x Contents
‘And Patroclus complied with his dear friend’ 191
Patroclus versus Briseis 198
Patroclus the ‘second self ’ of Achilles 202
Tragic eros 215
Classifying the unlabelled 226
The ancient homo-scepticals 232
Virgil and the fortunate losers: in the steps of
Achilles/Patroclus and Odysseus/Diomedes 235
Fortunati ambo and amor pius 246
Athis and Lycabas, Hopleus and Dymas 257
5. Flirting with the Enemy 267
‘The best of the Achaeans’ is impeached 267
Penthesileia between Propertius (Virgil) and Nonnus 279

Works Quoted 287

Index 309
 List of Plates

1. Youth putting on his armour; spinners

2. Achilles discovered by Odysseus among the daughters
of Lycomedes
3. Achilles’ exposure, with Deidameia kneeling to him
4. Abduction of Briseis
5. Abduction of Briseis
6. Briseis pouring wine for Phoenix
7. Achilles killing Penthesileia
8. Achilles killing Penthesileia
This page intentionally left blank
 1

Introduction

HOMER: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LOVE?

The second-century ad Platonist Maximus of Tyre shared with many

philosophers, beginning with Plato,1 an appreciation for Homer as
a sort of profuse encyclopedia of multifarious forms of wisdom,
but he also displayed a keen awareness of the epic poet’s limits. In
his Oration 18, for example, Maximus did not approve of the quality
or truth of Homer’s lessons concerning a variety of topics. In matters
of cavalry, medicine, or military art Homer’s advice was of a kind
‘that modern-day generals and doctors and charioteers would just
laugh at’.2 However, Maximus reserved one area of expertise in which
Homer was without rival (} 8):

a b
F æø
  
Æ B  Ø Ø, ŒÆd æªÆ, ŒÆd ºØŒÆ, ŒÆd YÅ, ŒÆd
 ŁÅ,
a ŒÆº ,
a ÆN åæ ,
e æÆ æø
Æ,
e IŒºÆ
,
e
ŒÆØ,
e æØ
,
e KØÆB,
e æA· ŒÆd K
d K
Ø
Ø
PŒ
Ø IæåÆE, Iººa
å
Å  ØH, “xØ F æ
 N Ø”.3
The territory of love, however, he surveys in meticulous detail, covering
every act and age and form and experience, noble and base alike, chaste
love, licentious love, just love, violent love, obsessive love, and gentle
love. In this sphere he sheds his naivety and becomes an expert practi-
tioner, ‘compared to the men of today’.
Iliad 1, in Maximus’ interpretation, exemplifies a ‘love contest’
between an abusive and obsessive Agamemnon and a ‘gentle and

1 2
Ion 531c–d, Resp. 599b–600a. Trans. by M. B. Trapp.
3
Formulaic in Homer: Il. 5.304 etc.
2 Introduction
emotional’ (l æ ŒÆd KÆŁ) Achilles;4 licentious love is depicted
through the portrait of Paris in Book 3; ‘just and mutual love’ in the
exchange between Hector and Andromache in Book 6; love that is
‘happy to use the ground for a bed (åÆÆØ Å æø)’ in the scene of
seduction between Hera and Zeus in Book 14; ‘manly love’ in the case
of Achilles and Patroclus—a love ‘won by long toil and preserved till
death, between two equally young, handsome, and temperate, teacher
and pupil; one grieves and the other consoles; one sings and the other
listens’ (ŒÆd
e Iæ E Kd
HØ —Æ
挺øØ,
e øØ Œ
Å
e ήd
åæøØ, ŒÆd åæØ ŁÆ
ı æ æå , ø ŒÆd ŒÆºH I
æø
ŒÆd øæø,
F b ÆØ 
,
F b ÆØ ıı. › b
¼åŁ
ÆØ, › b ÆæÆıŁ E
ÆØ· › b ¼Ø Ø, › b IŒæA
ÆØ). And in the
end it is a ‘lover’s ploy (Kæø
ØŒ)’ through which Patroclus persuades
Achilles to let him enter the battlefield with his armour.
Together with Or. 18, some other orations by Maximus are con-
cerned with exploring the correct parameters of an individual’s social
behaviour, and the philosopher pursues this aim by focusing on the
paradigmatic, albeit controversial and often criticized figure of
Socrates. In the oration from which we have quoted, Maximus tries
to demonstrate that there was nothing sick or dangerous in Socrates’
frequent indulgence in the feeling of love. And to validate Socrates’
outstanding and unimpeachable morality, Maximus offers as evi-
dence the moral authority of other figures who shared Socrates’
interest in the subject of love. Homer is the first example chosen by
Maximus, and he is followed (} 9) by Sappho, Anacreon, and a brief
hint at Hesiod’s Muses, not without a preterition of Archilochus’ too
hubristic idea of love.
Maximus’ understanding of the Iliad as the primary ‘erotic’ text of
Greek literature is quite an over-interpretation. There is, in fact, far
less explicitly erotic content in the poem than one might imagine.
Achilles offers only a few sentimental words about his lost war-bride
Briseis in comparison to his much more substantial and obsessive
complaints about the slight to his
Ø following her abduction by
Agamemnon—and the ancients suspected even these few romantic
words to be insincere and rhetorical, as we shall see. Similarly, an

4
This interpretation of the fight of the two Iliadic leaders is frequently attested in
Latin culture of the 1st centuries bc and ad: see below, pp. 172–5. The faults and
responsibilities of the two men are presented in a much more balanced fashion within
the Iliad itself: cf. below, pp. 100–2.
 Introduction 3
objective reading of the Iliad offers no explicit evidence that Achilles
and Patroclus were bound by an erotic bond, or were anything more
than exemplary good friends. An erotic interpretation of the Iliad—
however philologically inappropriate it might be—can be explained
in historical terms as the effect of a perspective that merged the actual
text of the Homeric poem with its eroticized reinterpretations. In fact,
as I will show in the following pages, post-Homeric literary rework-
ings of the life of Achilles often fictionalized from scratch, or drew
from non-Iliadic traditions, episodes of an erotic life of Achilles for
which very scanty information, if any, was provided by Homeric epic.
We cannot know whether the poets of the oral tradition underlying
the Iliad were aware of these erotic exploits of Achilles. They may
have been entirely unaware of a series of erotic Achilles-myths that
might have emerged only after the text of the Iliad was fixed, or they
might have left these details untold, as they fell outside the poetics of
the martial epos.
To offer an example of what we mean we may look to the youthful
erotic adventures of Achilles on the island of Scyros. The Iliad tells us
only that Achilles had conquered Scyros and that he had a son
growing up there (details below). Did Homer himself know only
these details about Achilles’ time on the island, or did he know of
the whole version of Achilles’ cross-dressing at Scyros and his love for
Deidameia, but passed over this story, opting rather to relate the more
warlike account of the conquest? Either option is equally plausible,
but I have to admit that I favour the latter hypothesis, as I surmise
that sexual life, or the experience of love, would perhaps have repre-
sented something far too human and commonplace, to be integrated
into the Iliadic poetics of the ‘absolute past’, and besides—from the
viewpoint of the ‘absolute past’—something not relevant enough to
the specific values and concern prevailing in the Iliad (war, and war-
won glory). In other words, love was not distant enough from the
shared and common humanity of everyday life and it thus under-
mined the superior detachment of the heroes of epic; it threatened to
devalue their achievements and to contribute to an undue ‘noveliza-
tion’ or ‘familiarization’ of epos.5 After all, as we shall see below,
already in the Aethiopis the criticism of Achilles’ love for Penthesileia
(whichever reasons this criticism adduced) problematized the role of

5
The terminology is from Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1981) 15–17.
4 Introduction
love and women in epic. In my opinion, this Cyclic poem already
included the motif of ‘surprise’ at the role of sex and females in actual
epic, which was worked out in the system of literary genres in Rome
and canonized for the woman a kind of ‘theoretical status as
an ambusher of the purity of epic’.6
If the larger question of Homer’s ignorance or knowledge of an
erotic tradition of Achilles’ life will be left unanswered, the problem of
Homer’s various levels of reticence about the love life of Achilles in
the Iliad will be touched upon in this study. My central focus will be,
in fact, on how Achilles’ love stories were revealed and expanded, or
elided and concealed, in the many forms of post-Homeric interpreta-
tions and continuations of Homer to be found in literary texts and
also in iconography (as far as iconography parallels, explains, or is
explained by literary texts). I shall trace these tales of Achilles in love
down to the Latin poets of the first centuries bc and ad, and the Ilias
Latina, because the first substantial extant texts to articulate romantic
‘novels’ of Achilles’ private life (featuring Achilles and Deidameia,
Achilles and Briseis, Achilles and Patroclus, or Achilles and Penthe-
sileia) date exactly from this time and place. References to the fortune
of these stories in both poets and prose-writers of the imperial age will
also be frequent, but certainly not exhaustive; they only show the
main directions of the narrative traditions or the longue durée of
certain motifs inherent in Achilles’ loves.
I should make clear from the outset that this volume is not, and was
never intended to be, a section in an encyclopedia of mythology, or in
any way a systematic analysis of the myths connected to Achilles’
erotic life. My main interest in the following pages, as stated in
the title, focuses on intertextuality. This means that I have explored
the reciprocal interactions between the various post-Iliadic authors
(and literary genres) that contributed more or less detailed episodes
concerning Achilles’ private life, or between them and the pictorial
narratives of paintings and sculptures. In particular, I have paid
special attention to their various strategies for responding to the
noisy silence of the Iliad, the main common model for most of
them, and a convenient foil for all of them.
This also means I have not dealt systematically with those love
stories which found few or no detailed literary treatments, and are

6
Hinds (2000) 223.
 Introduction 5
known to us only from reports of mythographers or mythographical
notes in other prose-writers, or from iconography with no detailed
literary parallels: Troilus, Polyxena, Iphigeneia and Helen before and
after death, and Medea after death in the Island of Leuce. This is due
to my prioritizing the dynamics of literary genres both in the (re-)
fictionalization and in the evaluation of Achilles’ erotic life.
However, lest I be accused of being too biased in favour of poetry
and its own special mythopoiesis, I have devoted extensive attention
to Homeric scholarship. I share in fact the widespread opinion that,
from at least the Hellenistic age onwards, both the individual inter-
pretations and interpretative trends of Homeric scholars were of the
greatest relevance to the way Homer’s texts were read, alluded to, or
rewritten by later authors (though this is not the same as saying that
there was slavish adherence to all scholarly positions). It is, for
instance, difficult to escape the impression that the opposition
drawn in Ovid’s Her. 3 between a passionate Briseis and a chilly
Achilles presupposes the construction by the exegetical class of
Homeric scholia (possibly reflecting at least in part the thought of
Hellenistic commentators) of the figure of Briseis as ‘husband-loving’
and their corresponding reservations about Achilles’ warmest expres-
sions of love for Briseis. We can see a certain scholarly bias in the
cooling of Achilles’ feelings for Briseis under the rather one-dimen-
sional gaze of these scholia, an interpretation ventured without en-
ough consideration for the passion that his words possibly express, at
least at a surface level. We can also smile, with a feeling of scholarly
superiority, at the obstinacy with which the Hellenistic scholars
suspected those few lines of the Iliad where Homer seemed to come
all too close to speaking of an erotic connection between Achilles and
Patroclus.7 This erasure of the Iliad’s few moments of erotic content
will hopefully never be recommended as a paradigm of sound method
in a handbook of textual criticism. And yet, in terms of literary
criticism, it reveals the sound perception of the Hellenistic scholars
that the poetics of the martial epos of the Iliad privileged as much as it
could the seriousness and greatness of its heroes, above all of Achilles,
‘the best of the Achaeans’. In the context of a broader appreciation for
what the scholiasts call the æ of heroic behaviour, the text of the
poem itself indeed allotted only a limited space to the erotic

7
See below, pp. 208–15.
6 Introduction
components of its heroes’ lives and none whatsoever to the homo-
sexual dimension.8 In other words, this ‘philological mistake’ of the
Hellenistic interpreters may be understood as a reaction—substan-
tially healthy, but more Catholic than the Pope—to what we have
called, in Bakhtin’s terms, the ‘familiarization’ of the epic characters
in general and in particular the eroticizing approaches applied to
Homer by various post-Iliadic authors and genres. As such, this
reductive ‘mistake’ represents yet another invaluable chapter in the
story of the reception of Achilles’ loves—the other side of the coin, so
to speak, that responds and stands in opposition to the magnification
of eros practised by the rereading of Homer in erotic poetry.

ACHILLES AND THE CROSSING OF BOUNDARIES—OF

HEROISM, AND OF THE EPIC GENRE

The late fifth-century ad allegorist Fulgentius tries to explain the

complex character of Achilles in his allegorical/etymological treatise
of mythology (Mythol. 3.7). When Thetis dipped her baby Achilles in
the waters of the Styx—Fulgentius maintains—she knew that she was
dealing with a ‘perfect’ being, the result of the synthesis of three
elements: water from Thetis, earth from Peleus, fire from Zeus.
Thus Thetis decided to make her perfect son invulnerable, that is,
secure against all trials (Achillem natum velut hominem perfectum
mater in aquas intinguit Stigias, id est: durum contra omnes labores
munit). But she made the mistake of not dipping his heel, and the heel
is a crucial spot in the body, since ‘the veins which are in the heel
connect with the faculties of the kidneys, thighs, and sex organs’. In
particular, as Orpheus would have maintained according to Fulgen-
tius, the heel is ‘the chief seat of lust’. Achilles ‘shows that human
virtue, though protected against everything, is subject and open to the
blows of lust’ (monstrat quod humana virtus quamvis ad omnia
munita tamen libidinis ictibus subiacet patula). Achilles is thus as-
signed to the court of Lycomedes as if to the kingdom of lust, for the
name ‘Lycomedes’ is reminiscent of the Greek gliconmeden, that is,
‘sweet nothing’, and all lust is both sweet and nothing. Then he dies

8
See below, pp. 189–90.
 Introduction 7
‘for love of Polyxena’ (amore Polixenae) and is killed as it were
because of lust, through his heel (‘for love of Polyxena’, because he
was ambushed in the night and at the place he expected to marry her:
see below). Of course one might be permitted to smile at the way
Fulgentius sees Achilles’ indulgence in lust as the effect of the in-
complete immersion in the waters of the Styx, and at his attempt to
explain it in pseudo-medical terms; or at the violence he does to the
etymology of poor Lycomedes’ name. But Fulgentius had no copy-
right on the idea that Achilles was a ‘perfect’ hero, secure ‘against
almost all trials’, except for occasional (and not actually that infre-
quent) episodes of unrestrained surrenders to love: this was the com-
mon opinion among the ancients, whose mythopoiesis also ascribed to
Achilles several other forms of intemperance and excess.
Apart from being attracted to members of both sexes, Achilles’
savagery, for instance, against Troilus or against Hector; his readi-
ness to withdraw from the community of his fellow Greeks and
construct a sort of perfect egoistic micro-society with Patroclus;
the paroxysm of his sorrow for Patroclus, which led him to abstain
from food and thus practically to withdraw from life itself; his
frequent exchanges with his mother and thus indirect access to
Zeus’ power, making the gods his interlocutors despite his mortality;
his cross-dressing at Scyros, which turned out to be an episode of
initiation, and an initiation reasserting his maleness,9 but neverthe-
less served to conceal, almost to erase, this maleness for a while: all
these features make him a perfect paradigm for the transgression of
boundaries, which will feature quite often in the stories of Achilles
surveyed in this book. In some sense, Achilles’ heroic status is
synonymous with his ability to cross over divisions that other men
cannot surmount: human/god, human/beast, male/female, life/death.
Because of the seeming ease and frequency with which Achilles
transgressed these boundaries, and the ability of his own unrest-
rained humanity to exacerbate the polarities which he himself re-
fused to respect, Achilles the perfect/imperfect hero, perhaps more
than other heroes of epic, leads us, and led the ancients, to think
about these boundaries, and therefore to ponder what it means to be
a human, or to be a hero.10

9
As happens frequently with cross-dressing in Greek mythology: see below, p. 93.
10
Van Nortwick (2008) 10.
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