1028 Fantuzzi, M. the Iliad Is Notoriously Reticent About

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1028 Fantuzzi, M. the Iliad Is Notoriously Reticent About 1028 de novis libris iudicia Fantuzzi, M. Achilles in Love: Intertextual Studies. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012. xi, 317 pp. Pr. £74.00. ISBN 9780199603626. The Iliad is notoriously reticent about Achilles’ love life. The lost poems of the Epic Cycle are less so—the Aithiopis engaged with the subject, but we can only guess at what we have lost. With lyric and tragedy, and especially in Hellenistic and Roman poetry, poetic treatments of Achilles’ erotic life proliferate, run- ning the gamut from glorification of love to reinstatement of honor-centered decorum, in various flavors. Fantuzzi traces these developments in chronologi- cally arranged chapters, one for each of Achilles’ loves—Deidameia, Briseis, Patroclus, and Penthesileia. Achilles and Patroclus become lovers whose devo- tion increases their bravery in war, a dewy-cheeked cross-dressing Achilles seduces his ‘friend’ Deidameia in feminine homoerotic tones, Briseis turns into a perfect elegiac domina, Penthesileia vanquishes her killer with her beauty as she dies, Lycophron’s Alexandra fulminates against Achilles’ erotic ‘weak- ness and wickedness’, and Libanius refuses to believe that a youth educated by Cheiron would dodge the draft in drag, excoriating the inventors of the myth as miserable liars. One of the pleasures of this book is the sense it gives the reader of the broad sweep of ancient ideas about epic and elegy, masculine and femi- nine, love and war, and the sense of an ongoing cultural and poetic dialogue on these subjects, even if some of the cultural trends Fantuzzi reconstructs do lure the reader into the impression of a closed poetic world, where poets talk to each other almost free of the bonds of time and place. The subtitle of the book is “intertextual studies” and the author’s approach is resolutely intertextual throughout. This is not a study of myths about Deidameia, Briseis, Patroclus, and Penthesileia, and indeed a reader would not know from this book that there is any difference between myths in Archaic Greece and Greek mythological stories in Roman poetry, nor that the texts studied stem from vastly different societies. Each chapter begins with a per- ceptive discussion of Homer or with a forensic reconstruction of the Epic Cycle, but it is with the analysis of Hellenistic and Roman sources that Fantuzzi’s method comes into its own. He is at his best when his task is to uncover instances of multi-layered intertextuality and clever metaliterary messages of poetae docti. Here the reader will find sequences of intertextual windows (Ovid commenting on Virgil commenting on Homer would be a sim- ple case by the standards of the book), complicated mirroring games, and poetic reactions simultaneously to several centuries of preceding poetry and the scholarly works of Homeric commentators. Inevitably, some theories seem © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi �0.��63/�5685�5X-��30�8�6 de novis libris iudicia 1029 like houses of cards, full of potential scenarios, often with several of them to choose from. As he builds these constructions, Fantuzzi is meticulous, however, in pointing out the parts of his reasoning that depend on guesswork, his own choices, and, refreshingly, his personal preferences. Every case of intertextual engagement is either carefully made or clearly marked as speculative, and the latter category is every bit as interesting and instructive as the former. Another pleasure of this book is Fantuzzi’s discussion of ancient Homeric scholarship, primarily the bT exegetical scholia on the Iliad, which are exten- sively quoted and carefully analyzed. It is not quite clear to me why Fantuzzi ascribes the scholarly opinions he finds in the scholia specifically to Hellenistic scholarship (some of them may well stem from the first century CE or later), but this hardly detracts from this welcome aspect of the book. The voices behind the Homeric scholia seldom get much airtime, but they do here. The commentators’ Achilles is indifferent to Briseis (who is in love with him) and keeps his affection for Patroclus within prudish limits (the Iliadic verses where he does not are deemed spurious), conforming to a version of epic propriety far narrower than anything found in the epic itself. Fantuzzi sees this warlike Achilles with little time for love as, in part, a reaction to the hero’s very differ- ent evolution in poetry, a reaction he charitably describes as “substantially healthy but more Catholic than the pope”. The centerpiece of the Deidameia chapter is a discussion of the Epithalamium of Achilles and Deidameia, a bucolic epyllion of the 1st century BCE, which boasts not only a love-sick Achilles, but also the only happily and self-indul- gently effeminate Achilles on record. Also noteworthy is Fantuzzi’s discussion of the Scyros episode in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Statius’ Achilleid, including delightful examples of Ovidian jest and trompe l’oeil, and a convincing analysis of Statius’ poetic strategy to defend Achilles’ dignity, while not missing the chance to dwell on the hero’s maiden-like eroticism. Throughout the book Fantuzzi contemplates the possibilities of intertextuality everywhere, and imagines what the consequence would be, should we assume its presence: “If Ovid did presuppose the Epithalamium, it seems that distancing his text from the version of the story narrated in the Epithalamium must have been no less significant for Ovid’s poetic strategy than alluding to it” (66). The next chapter begins with a brief look at Briseis in Homer, but is mostly devoted to Latin elegy. In Fantuzzi’s hands, Rome of the first century BCE emerges as a marketplace of ideas regarding Achilles and Briseis, and it is vis- à-vis Briseis that Achilles is transformed into a hero of love, a soldier in Propertius’ militia amoris, starring opposite his “perfect though anomalous wife” (157). Especially interesting is the discussion of Ovid’s multiple ways of mnemosyne 67 (�0�4) �0�8-�03�.
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