Leonine Achilles

Abstract

Abstract The chapter offers a re-evaluation of Achilles’ heroic persona in the poem through the lens of leonine imagery. By drawing attention to his animalistic elements, the chapter explores the tragic issues of Achilles’ liminality between man, beast, and god. The lion comparandum is no longer envisioned as a traditional marker of heroism, but is deployed by Statius in a way that urges his readers to deconstruct the hero. These leonine features linked to Achilles’ diet also bring to mind monstrous figures of the literary tradition with excessive appetites, such as the Ovidian Polyphemus (Metamorphoses 14) and the Statian Tydeus (Thebaid 8), which highlight Achilles’ own liminality and draw attention to his bestial archetypes. Achilles’ choice of nourishment—raw meat—continues to complicate his traditional heroic outline. The chapter’s second section extends reflections on his staunch primitivism, as it is problematized by the troubling connections to omophagy. The chapter ends with an intertextual re-reading of understudied Bacchic junctures in the Achilleid that expose Achilles’ tragic and mortal destiny.