2 - The running

Summary

In Odyssey 8, Odysseus claims superiority in all events except the running; he is now too old and broken by suffering to compete with the young Phaeacian boys. Here already, the running is the site of self-conscious intertextual irony: for it was the running which Odysseus won in the Iliadic games, when Ajax the son of Oileus tripped in the blood of a sacrifice and fell. From the Aeneid onwards, it is an event for boys and becomes a negotiation of masculinity: games as training and playing are essentially boyish; true manhood is necessary for war. To cross the divide between games and war is also to negotiate the transition between boyhood and manhood.

The heroes of the Virgilian race are Nisus and Euryalus, the lovers who later go on to die a futile and tragic death in Aeneid 9. Nisus, too, trips, and uses this as a chance to win the race for his beloved Euryalus. Statius' Parthenopaeus has much in common with Nisus and Euryalus. Both Parthenopaeus and Euryalus are beautiful boys, extraordinary among epic heroes for their association with eros. The relationship between Nisus and Euryalus is undeniably erotic, as is the description of Parthenopaeus. What is more, Nisus and Euryalus become a demonstration of the power of poetry for Virgil when he apostrophises them after the lovers' death in book 9, and Parthenopaeus is emblematic of the whole poem in the final lines of the Thebaid. This section asks: how do these erotic elements fit into the matrix of different ideas about epic heroism? How is Statius' treatment of the problem different from Virgil's? How does the gaze of the audience create and reflect poetic fama?