Another Achilles: Homer's hero in Rome

CYCLE: The words and images of art: explorations in the literature of ancient Rome
SPEAKER: Federica Bessone
DATE: Tuesday, September 16, 6:00 PM

"The anger of Achilles son of Peleus" is the opening of the Iliad and of Western literature. But Homer has been re-read, reinterpreted, and re-elaborated by all subsequent cultures, and his protagonist along with him. What does "the best of the Achaeans" become in Rome? Latin literature appropriates the Homeric hero, rethinks him through the representations offered in Greece by genres alternative to epic, from lyric poetry to tragedy, views him through the lens of literary criticism and philosophical discourse, and transforms him into a new character – or rather, into as many characters as there are genres, works, or even individual compositions that redefine the protagonist of the Iliad for the Roman audience. At the origins of a reception that continues to this day, imperial-era poetry (from Virgil to Horace, from Propertius to Ovid, from Seneca to Statius) explores the complexity of the greatest hero, investigates his passions and contradictions, recounts his various loves, and reinvents – each time – another Achilles.

Federica Bessone is a full professor of latin language and Literature at the University of Turin. She studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, has been a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge, and is a member of the Academia Europaea. She is the author of a commentary on Ovid's twelfth Heroides (Medea's epistle to Jason), a monograph on Statius's Thebaid (La Tebaide di Stazio. Epica e potere), and numerous studies, primarily on Augustan and Flavian poetry, literary genres, poetic memory, and reception.

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