to gather scattered inhabitants into communities, leaving

the ancient woods, and deserting the groves where our ancestors lived;

to put up houses, placing another man’s dwelling beside

our own abode, ensuring that we all slept safe and sound

in the knowledge that each had a friend next door; to shield with our weapons

a fallen comrade or one who reeled from a shocking wound;

to sound the call on a common trumpet; to man the turrets

in joint defence, and fasten the gate with a single key.

But nowadays snakes maintain a greater harmony. Spotted

animals spare their spotted kin; when did a stronger

lion tear the life from a weaker? Was there ever a forest

where a boar was killed, gashed by the tusks of a larger boar?

In India, one ferocious tigress lives with another

in constant peace; and savage bears observe an agreement.

To man, however, it is not enough to have forged his deadly

blades on an evil anvil. Early smiths were accustomed

to spend their energies fashioning only hoes and scuffles,

mattocks and ploughshares; they hadn’t the skill to produce a sword.

But here is a people whose fury is not appeased by an act

of simple murder, who regard trunks, and arms, and faces

as a kind of food! What, one asks, would Pythagoras say?

Would he not take flight to no matter where, on witnessing these

enormities—that man who refused all meat, as though it were human,

and denied himself even the pleasure of certain vegetable dishes?

ACHILLES BECOMES A GIRL

Achilleid, Book I

Statius

Translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 2003

The Achilleid, an epic poem by Statius (c. AD 45–c. 96), is an unfinished Latin ‘biography’ of the Greek hero Achilles, tracing his life from his earliest childhood. Achilles’ mother, Thetis, is a sea nymph or ‘Nereid’. She has divine connections but seems entirely human as she tries desperately to prevent her son from going to fight at Troy, where she knows he is fated to die. A prequel, of sorts, to Homer’s Iliad, the poem even has Patroclus, Achilles’ closest friend in the epic, feature in his early life.