Tradunt dolos patres

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores in detail the figure of Ulysses in the poem. It challenges the accepted scholarly premise that Ulysses is a positive father-figure for Achilles. In the first half of the chapter, novel parallels between Ulysses in the Achilleid and Odysseus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes are presented. In identifying Sophocles’ Philoctetes as key intertext for Statius, Ulysses’ manipulation is put on view, as well as the more ominous, recruiting element of the Greeks’ mission on Scyros. The second half of the chapter looks to build on the seriousness and dangerousness of the figure of Ulysses in Statius, and it thus analyses the pervasive associations of Ulysses with violence in a number of similes in the narrative. The chapter then moves on to an arresting and gender-bending equivalence of Ulysses as a metapoetic force of furor, akin to well-known Furies in the literary tradition, offering novel reflections on gender and poetic authority in the poem.