Occult(um) Aeaciden: Elisions of gender in Statius’ Achilleid

1 Prologue: Ovid hiding Achilles

Before discussing the Achilleid itself, let us have a look at Ovid, who is an important model for Statius in the Achilleid, and is his predecessor also in employing elision to illustrate Achilles’ temporary hiding of his masculinity. Already in the Ars Amatoria, illustrative word order emphasizes the hero’s pretence in the lines summarizing the sojourn on Scyros: Achilles / veste virum longa dissimulatus erat (‘the fact that Achilles is a man was hidden with long dress’, 1.689–690). Just like Achilles’ male identity is concealed by the female dress, the word virum is enclosed within the expression denoting that dress: veste … longa. Then, in the Metamorphoses, Ulysses recalls the story during his quarrel with Ajax for the arms of Achilles (Met. 13.162–163):

Praescia venturi genetrix Nereia leti

dissimulat cultu nat(um), et deceperat omnes …

 

Foreseeing his inevitable death, the daughter of Nereus made her child unrecognizable with a dress, and she succeeded in tricking everybody …

Everybody – except, of course, the wily Ulysses who discovers the hero. It is conspicuous that the only elision in these lines is precisely the one affecting the word ending of nat(um), signalling (in the written text) the masculinity of Thetis’ child. Just like the female dress conceals Achilles’ sex, the grammatical gender is suppressed when the text is pronounced. This elision also forces us to act like Thetis or Ulysses. If we are listening to a recital, we have to reconstruct the masculine ending just like Ulysses discovered the man concealed by the female dress; if, by contrast, we read Ovid’s text obeying the rules of elision, we become the accomplices of Thetis, as it were, in concealing Achilles’ identity (then, in turn, the continued presence of the written text may reverse this process of hiding into one of unmasking). The written text, in this sense, with its visual signs seems to represent ‘reality’ hidden by an unreliable ‘pretence’ made up by the sounds of the spoken text.

2 Elisions of gender in the Achilleid

We can turn now to the Achilleid itself. In a way which is unprecedented in Roman epic,^[12] the programmatically always important opening word of the poem is elided, and then also the first word of the second line (Ach. 1.1–3):

Magnanim(um) Aeaciden formidatamque Tonanti

progeni(em) et vetitam patrio succedere caelo,

diva, refer.

 

Goddess, tell of great-hearted Aeacides and the offspring frightening the Thunderer and forbidden to succeed to his father’s heaven.^[13]

The opening adjective (a calque of Greek μεγάθυμος) emphasizes bravery and heroic valour as characteristics of Achilles, well-known from Homer onwards.^[14] The elision of the word probably would not be significant in itself. Aeneas, for example, also receives the same epithet four times in the Aeneid, twice in the same metrical position and with elision;^[15] the Statian choice of the elided epithet may thus signal no more than Achilles being an ‘epic successor’ of Vergil’s hero.^[16] On the other hand, the privileged position of magnanim(um) Aeaciden at the very beginning of the epic, taken together with the narrative context of Achilleid 1, suggests that the elision may, in fact, be of some significance. The heroism conveyed by the opening adjective is the very characteristic which will be questioned, or at least shown to be imperfect, in Achilleid 1 during Achilles’ stay at Scyros. He will not behave like a true hero throughout the Achilleid, and magnanim(um) might foreshadow that, if only in retrospect, after reading the only completed book of the epic or at least lines 5–6 of the proem where the story of Achilles’ hiding on Scyros is first mentioned (Scyroque latentem / Dulichia proferre tuba, ‘bringing him forth by Dulichian trump as he hides in Scyros’).

Later we can find a couple of elisions in the Achilleid which are directly connected to the temporary suspension of Achilles’ male identity, and whose significance and interpretability is, in my view, much more obvious than that of the elided opening word. After taking Achilles to Scyros, convincing him to take the female clothes and teaching him how to behave like a girl, Thetis introduces him to King Lycomedes as ‘the sister of our Achilles’ (nostri germanam … Achillis, 1.350), entrusts him/her to his cares in a short speech (350–362). This is the last step in the youth’s concealment, since it is at this moment that Achilles can mingle in the crowd of Lycomedes’ daughters. It is also the first test of the cover: will Lycomedes detect that a boy is actually being introduced to him? The cover, at least for the time being, is working perfectly (1.363–365):

Accedit dictis pater ingenioque parentis

occult(um) Aeaciden – quis divum fraudibus obstet? –

accipit.

 

The father assents to her [i. e. Thetis’] words and accepts Achilles disguised by parental craft – for who could resist divine deceits?

Just like in the Metamorphoses passage discussed above, elision occurs in a sentence whose subject is Achilles’ concealment, and the elided syllable is a masculine ending: occult(um). Statius, however, further develops the Ovidian game. This time, the elided word is precisely the one with the meaning of concealment. This way, a closer metaphoric relationship between story and poetic language is suggested: hiding Achilles, and especially the fact that he is a boy – the text seems to suggest – is like the elision of a gender-specific word ending. It also seems worthwhile to compare line 364 with the above discussed opening line of the Achilleid.^[17] The metrical situation is the same in both: elision affects the adjective at the beginning of the line, and the second word refers to Achilles in the accusative as Aeaciden. In the first line, elision qualified the validity of the adjective magnanim(um) as a kind of fixed epithet expressing an essential characteristic of Achilles; now we also get to know what replaces bravery: during his hiding, occult(um) instead of magnanim(um) may be taken as his ‘temporary epithet’.

Three further cases of elision seem to be particularly interesting because they do not just hide a masculine ending, but also replace it, as it were, with a feminine one. The first of them occurs somewhat earlier than occult(um), when Achilles first appears as a character in the poem. Chiron and Thetis are in discussion about the young hero (1.126–158) at the centaur’s cave when he suddenly arrives, returning from a hunt: ill(e) aderat (‘he was there’, 159). In his description of Achilles’ looks (159–166) the narrator emphasizes the liminality of the young hero: he is between child and adult, man and god, and, most importantly for us here, male and female.^[18] Like a maiden, he exhibits ‘purple glow on his white face’ (niveo natat ignis in ore purpureus, 161–162), and ‘there is much of his mother in his looks’ (plurima vultu mater inest, 164–165). This liminality might also be expressed, in advance, through elision which, in this case, merges the gender-specific ending of ille with the beginning of aderat, the result resembling the feminine form of the same pronoun. The youth who enters is somewhere between being an ille (as expected and written on the page) and an illa (as the text sounds, thanks to elision).

The other two instances of this type are directly related to the theme of transvestism and metamorphosis. Thetis, trying to persuade his reluctant son to take on the female clothes, cites some examples. Hercules also put on female clothes in the palace of Queen Omphale; Bacchus used to wear feminine clothing himself; Juppiter used to appear in female form to mortal women he was longing for (1.260–263). The final example is that of Caenis, who was born as a girl, but asked to be changed into a man after having been raped by Neptune, and from that time was called Caeneus. According to Thetis (1.264),

nec magn(um) ambigui fregerunt Caenea sexus

 

his ambiguous sexes did not break the great Caeneus.

Thetis hints at the ambiguity of biological sex and social gender; but grammatical gender also becomes ambiguous in this line. Vergil and Ovid had already employed incongruous grammatical gender when telling about the transformation(s) of Caenis/Caeneus;^[19] but the employment of elision seems to be Statius’ innovation. Magnum stands in the written text with the masculine ending; this ending disappears, when the poem is recited, through elision and thus the adjective blends with the next word, ambigui, whose beginning resembles the feminine accusative ending. The word magnum is ‘broken’ even if Caenis/Caeneus had been not, according to the goddess. The result is a grammatically ambiguous, ‘virtually feminine’ sound sequence: magn am … Caenea.^[20] Elision thus repeats Caenis/Caeneus’ change of sex in the world of language, but it does so in a direction opposite to what is probably expected. The mythical character changed from woman into man; the elision, by contrast, replaces the masculine with the feminine. The text as pronounced suggests that Caeneus did, in fact, retain something of his former female identity, and may even call our attention to a rhetorical fault in Thetis’ reasoning.^[21] It may be true that Caenis was not ‘broken’ by the change of sex – indeed, (s)he became stronger as a man –, but the myth depicts a world in which women suffer violence committed by men; Caenis feels that life after such violence can be continued only by leaving her female identity behind. It would be hard to persuade anyone to choose female life, if only temporarily, by citing the example of Caenis/Caeneus. It is no wonder, then, that Thetis herself fails to persuade: Achilles will agree to put on female clothes only later, after seeing Deidamia.

The same kind of elision can also be interpreted elsewhere as a signal of focalisation. At the turning point of the Scyros episode, the hero rapes Deidamia during a nocturnal feast of Bacchus, exclusive for women. When he begins to describe the feast, the narrator exaggeratingly emphasizes the female beauty of Achilles, not his masculinity: on this night he was supposedly even more beautiful than Deidamia (1.606–608). Thus the girls ‘are fain to gather round him’: ill(um) ambire libet (1.614).^[22] Thanks to elision, affecting the pronoun ille again, two different points of view can be expressed at the same time. We are perfectly aware – especially if we are reading the text and thus seeing illum rather than listening to a recital – that the girls are gathering around a boy, but they are not aware of that; they believe Achilles is a girl just like themselves. Their own version of the narrator’s comment just quoted would contain the word illam instead of illum, and it is ill am we ourselves say or hear if elision is practiced. The written text thus represents the point of view of the omniscient narrator and the well-informed reader; the text as pronounced represents that of the ignorant girls.

The last elision to be discussed in this paper also occurs in connection with the nocturnal feast and seems to illustrate how Deidamia finds out that her companion is, in fact, a boy. Ille is again (for the third time now!) the affected word. Immediately after reporting about Achilles’ rape of Deidamia (1.640–648), the narrator – for the first time in the Achilleid^[23] – directly quotes the hero’s words by which he introduces himself to the confused girl (1.649–652):

     … dubiam verbis solatus amicis:

‘Ill(e) ego — quid trepidas? — genitum quem caerula mater

paene Iovi silvis nivibusqu(e) inmisit alendum

Thessalicis. …’

 

He consoled the confused girl with friendly words: ‘I am the man – why do you tremble? – whom his sea-green mother almost bore to Jupiter and sent to Thessaly’s woods and snows to be reared. …’

These ‘friendly words’ sound, in fact, quite insensitive and brutal, especially the question quid trepidas? (to be followed a few lines later by quid defles and quid gemis, 655–656). Achilles’ rude rhetoric mirrors the violence of his act. The crude words, however, are also wittingly allusive at the same time: they recall the autobiographic pronouncement ille ego qui quondam … in the pre-proem of the Aeneid. I cannot discuss here the fascinating possibilities for intertextual interpretation;^[24] I emphasize instead that the pseudo-Vergilian expression contains an elision and is also quoted for that by the grammarian Pompeius (ille ego … fit illego, V. 298 K.). The ending of the pronoun is again indicative of gender: ille ego and illa ego sound the same when pronounced with elision. In most situations, of course, the resulting ambiguity would be only theoretical. People rarely talk to each other in hexameters, and even if they do (whether in real life or in a Latin poem), the addressee usually knows in advance if the speaker is a woman or a man. The case of Achilles and Deidamia on Scyros is, however, more complex. Up to this point in the story, Deidamia must have been convinced that any such speech by her companion were to start with illa ego; only the rape she just suffered makes it clear for her that the ‘correct’ grammatical form is ille ego. The tension between the written and the pronounced text, the basis for my interpretation of the earlier elisions in the Achilleid, is this time (almost) non-existent. The final sound of ille is suppressed, to be sure, but only to be replaced by the same at the beginning of ego. The shocking discovery of Achilles’ male identity and the end of his masquerading (towards Deidamia, for the time being) is also expressed by this elision which is probably the least conspicuous of those discussed in this paper, but just as suggestive as the others, if one considers the narrative context in which it occurs. The earlier instances of elision affecting ille illustrated the ambiguous identity of Achilles (resulting from his liminality at Chiron’s cave and then his feminine disguise on Scyros); the rape of Deidamia, by contrast, followed by his ill(e) ego speech, marks Achilles’ most testosterone-laden moment in the poem. His being an ille, his masculine ego, cannot be diminished this time even by elision.

3 Gender-bending and the lack of elision

I would like to finish this paper by examining two Achilleid passages which are made conspicuous, in view of the above discussed instances, by the lack of some manipulation of grammatical gender. Ulysses, sent by the Greek army along with Diomedes to find Achilles, suspects that the hero is to be found among the daughters of Lycomedes. At this point in the story, then, Achilles is already suspected but not yet exposed. When the princesses, Achilles among them, take part in a banquet hosted by the king, Ulysses studies the figure, face and behaviour of the girls to find out which one is the hero in disguise (1.764–766):

At tamen erectumque genas oculisque vagantem

nullaque virginei servantem signa pudoris

defigit comitiqu(e) obliquo lumine monstrat.

 

Even so, he marks one with face erect and roving eyes, that observes no mark of maiden modesty, and with a sidelong glance points her out to his companion.

Ulysses then tells about the Greek preparations for the Trojan war, expecting that Achilles will react differently from the real girls and thus betray himself. So it happens (1.794–795):

Aspicit intentum vigiliqu(e) haec aure trahentem,

cum paveant aliae demissaque lumina flectant.

 

He sees one who all attention, drinking in his words with a vigilant ear, while the others are afraid and turn their eyes down and away.

The two passages are very similar regarding the use of adjectives and elision. Both contain present participles whose endings do not discriminate between the masculine and the feminine and thus help maintain the uncertainty inherent in the situation: a person who is vagans (764), servans (765) or trahens (794) might be a man as well as a woman. However, there are also two past participles, erectum and intentum, with gender-specific endings. The narrator – and in this case, perhaps, we may even think of the author writing or dictating the Achilleid – must decide between the masculine and the feminine. The choice influences possible interpretations of focalisation: both defigit (766) and aspicit (794) emphasize that Ulysses is looking at and interpreting visual signs. By choosing the feminine, the narrator/author can express the point of view of those who suspect nothing, or that of Ulysses as a ‘detective’ who has only discovered some oddities as of yet, noting that ‘one of the girls is behaving strangely’. If the masculine ending is chosen, by contrast, it will expose Achilles by language, expressing the point of view of the omniscient narrator or that of the detective who feels his suspicion to be well-grounded and is confident that he has found the culprit: ‘one of them is behaving strangely, and thus cannot be a girl’. The passage under discussion is thus one of those in the Achilleid in which elision might be employed to great effect, sustaining the ambiguity of grammatical gender and simultaneously expressing different points of view. This time, however, elision is prevented from happening: the adjectives are followed by the suffix -que and the word vigilique.

In addition to the author and/or the narrator, there are other persons involved who cannot evade decision here: scribes copying and scholars editing the text. It would not be surprising were the feminine variants of the adjectives in question be found in some of the manuscripts; but all of them contain the masculine forms. The indirect tradition also supports this reading, since Priscian quotes line 794 with intentum.^[25] Philologists had thus no reason to suspect the transmitted text.^[26] In the latest edition of Statius’ epics, however, J. B. Hall conjectured the feminine variants erectamque (764) and intentam (794).^[27] The accompanying translation reflects these conjectures: ‘but still one girl whose head is up … attracts his attention’, and ‘he is watching a girl who is listening intently …’ (my italics).^[28] Is such a conjecture needed here?^[29] It is possible, theoretically, that Statius’ text had originally contained the feminine variants, which were later changed into masculine ones on the ground that they refer to Achilles who is, in fact, a man. If such a change occurred very early, it is even conceivable that the former disappeared from all surviving manuscripts (and already from the one used by Priscian) without a trace. On the other hand, the transmitted readings and Hall’s conjectures, even if they lead to different interpretations with regard to focalisation, as we have just seen, both result in a text whose meaning is clear and appropriate. Under such circumstances, most philologists (including myself) would probably stick with the transmitted masculine readings.

Nevertheless, Hall’s conjectures are signs of a very sensitive reading and reveal, in my view, an important aspect of Statius’ text: namely, that both the masculine and the feminine forms are possible in the given context. Either the masculine or the feminine reading must be genuine (even if we cannot ultimately prove which one), but neither is ‘perfect’ in the sense that they cannot grammatically represent the inherent ambiguity of the situation. The present participles in these passages (vagantem, servantem, trahentem) can do so through the lack of gender-specific endings; in other passages of the Achilleid, as discussed above, elision creates a tension between the written text (indicating gender) and the pronounced text (not indicating, or even misleading about it). In the case of erectumque/erectamque and intentum/intentam, it is editorial intervention which creates a similar tension in the form of textual variability. In a critical edition, both the masculine and the feminine forms may have their place – one of them in the main text, the other in the apparatus criticus. In this sense, Hall’s most important contribution to the interpretation of these lines seems to lie not in restoring them to a supposedly better state, but in making the ambiguity of (grammatical) gender visible and allowing future editors of the Achilleid to document his feminine conjectures at least as rejected variants.

What makes Hall’s editorial intervention even more interesting from the point of view of literary interpretation is that, in this case, the implicit rhetoric underlying the activity of the critic is comparable to the behaviour of a character in the story, namely Ulysses. Both act as ‘detectives’ who suspect that the ‘evidence’ they are presented with is misleading and not genuine.^[30] Ulysses tries to uncover biological truth: a man, Achilles, is hiding under the female clothes. The truth which Hall seeks is, by contrast, textual: the feminine grammatical forms supposedly replaced by masculine ones in all manuscripts. There is however, an even more significant difference between the two detectives. Both have the chance to find the truth, but only in the case of Ulysses is this truth verifiable in the end. In the fiction, it is an unequivocal fact that the strangely acting girl is, indeed, Achilles; but it will probably never be possible to prove (or refute, we may add) that Statius had originally chosen the conjectured feminine variants. In the case of Hall’s textual investigation, there is no way to go beyond the stage of suspicion and incrimination and reach an unappealable verdict.

4 Conclusion

It would be nearly impossible to compose a poetic text, on any subject, in which all elisions are meaningful and interpretable, or one about Achilles on Scyros in which all ‘gendered’ elisions can be interpreted directly in connection with the hero’s temporary hiding of his masculinity. Even if such texts existed, this mechanical effect would probably make them less interesting as literature. In the above case study, I have only tried to show that in six cases gendered elisions, and in a further passage, the lack of such elisions, can be incorporated into literary interpretation of the Achilleid. The examples discussed represent just 1.6 % of all the 375 elisions in the unfinished poem, and 5 % of 119 elisions silencing gender-specific endings.^[31] Other readers, of course, might find more (or less) of them to be interpretable. The above discussed elisions, in any case, seem remarkable for functioning as a network rather than just a series of isolated instances. Most of them occur at significant moments in the narrative: at the very first word of the Achilleid, at the first appearance of Achilles, at his handover to Lycomedes in women’s clothes, and at the beginning of his first speech directly quoted by the narrator. With the exception of 1.264, these elisions affect the first word in a line and can also be grouped as a pair and a trio. Magnanim(um) and occult(um) are both followed and elided by Aeaciden and, most notably, the three elisions of the pronoun ille illustrate first the liminality of Achilles, then his disguise on Scyros, and finally his first step in regaining and confirming his masculine identity. It also seems noteworthy that the elisions discussed above all occur in the first half of the unfinished epic, focusing on the ambiguity of Achilles’ identity during (and, in some sense, even before) his hiding among the daughters of Lycomedes. Interpretable gendered elisions seem to disappear from the extant text with the discovery of Achilles; in addition to Hall’s conjectures, this fact also seems to emphasize the significance of those two passages (with erectumque and intentum) when gendered elision would be in place but does not actually happen. Thus, if not in Statian poetry or in the Achilleid as such (either in its unfinished state or the planned whole), but in its Scyros episode there seems to be, indeed, a ‘poetics of elision’ at work, which in this particular text adds much to the poetic efforts to suggest the destabilizing of Achilles’ gender and identity.