It is easier to steal Hercules’ club than to steal a line from Homer

The story of Achilles’ childhood is not very familiar today, even among those who know a bit about classical mythology. It is as the hero of Homer’s Iliad that Achilles is best known, and rightly so. In the Middle Ages, however, readers in Western Europe did not have direct access to Homer’s great epic, and had to make do with various works in Latin that summarized the tale of the Trojan War. These pallid recapitulations could never fully convey the qualities that gave Achilles the reputation he always enjoyed as the greatest hero of Ancient Greece. Disappointment will also have met the medieval reader looking for vibrant portraits of the hero in the great works of classical Latin literature. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Achilles is a figure already frozen in art, pictured on the walls of Juno’s temple in Carthage. Ovid, who delighted in drawing alternative portraits of certain heroes drawn from the canon of epic, such as Ulysses and Aeneas, only shows us brief glimpses of Achilles, even in that part of the Metamorphoses that tells the story of the Trojan War. The reason for this reticence is easy to understand. If, as Virgil is credited with saying, it is easier to steal Hercules’ club than to steal a line from Homer, then only a fool would try to compete directly with Homer’s eternal portrait of Achilles in all of his pride, stubbornness, rage, and pity.

P. J. Heslin, The Travestite Achilles: Genre and Gender in Statius' Achilleid, Cambridge University Press, 2005