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Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages

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In contrasting Homer's complex tragic hero to the simplifications of later writers who invoked him, King devotes about a third of the book to Achilles the soldier of love. She notes classical traditions in which Achilles's bond to Patroklos was erotic, and also a murderous unrequited passion for Troilos, but does not elaborate on these (nor on the Amazon queen Penthesileia), focusing primarily on the accretion of later romantic entanglements with Polyxena, the last virgin of the Trojan royal family.

The book is primarily a passionate recovery of the tragedy of Achilles from later allegorizing simplifications. Besides providing a fascinating demonstration of the tangle of traditions growing out of one character in a nearly lost text, the book is of special value for those trying to understand cultural constructions of gender and sexuality for showing the assumption that enthusiastic heterosexuality effeminized a man. Traditions of Achilles as an ardent heterosexual suitor have him undertaking women's work (like Herakles) and even cross-dressing. While love with Patroklos was masculinizing for the young warrior, falling in love with Deidameia "is not merely the result of assumed effeminacy that allows him to move freely among beautiful maidens but is the cause of that effeminacy" (p. 182). The opposition between effeminate lover and masculine warrior is often a contrast between Paris and Achilles, but by the 2nd century A. D., the contrast was made in phases of Achilles's career. In the Illiad itself "only in Achilles does kállos [a stunning and sexually enticing beauty attributed by Homer also to Paris and to Ganymede] coexist with all the other excellences that a man and a warrior are expected to have if he is to be called áristos" (p. 4).

The book's 23 illustrations are also fascinating, but, unfortunately, not discussed. The classical Greek ones support the contention that Achilles was an eromenos. Only long after it stopped being a criterial feature did he begin to be represented as bearded.