The plot of the Achilleid as we have it describes an arc bounded by Thetis' two failures: her attempt to destroy Paris' fleet, and her attempt to keep her son hidden on Scyros. Accordingly, Statius depicts Thetis as overreaching her powers; the goddess becomes by turns a figure of pathos and of comic ineptitude. The most important manifestation of her haplessness is her frequent misuse of language and rhetorical tropes; and one way of reading this incompetence is that she is trying to usurp modes of behavior inappropriate to her gender. Thetis is the mirror image of Achilles; both have equal difficulty wearing with ease the constricting garb of womanhood. In particular, Thetis' behavior is strangely at odds with what is usual for epic goddesses, and she has difficulty adapting herself to the literary models she tries to evoke, such as the traditional epic roles of protective mother and of avenging nemesis. We begin with Thetis' attempt to recreate the wrath of the Virgilian Juno.

Stormy Weather

The Achilleid begins in medias res, and we discover Thetis in mid-ocean as she observes Paris' fleet sailing back from Sparta with Helen aboard.

A statue of Pallas Athena guards the shore of Scyros in the Achilleid (Tritonia custos ι litoris, 1.696f), and Ulysses and Diomedes venerate the image upon landing on the island (1.697f). It is a lucky omen: the presence of Ulysses' patroness adumbrates success for his mission. This is not the first time that we have seen this particular statue. It is to a shrine of Pallas on the beach, presumably this same one, that the procession of Deidamia and her sisters made its way on the occasion of Achilles' own arrival at the island (1.285f). The virgin goddess presides, not without irony, over the arousal of Achilles' interest at his first sight of Deidamia: Pallas, the virgin goddess who guards the kingdom's boundary, will prove an ineffectual guardian of her ministrant's virginity.

The cult activity of Deidamia and her sisters on that occasion is described by the poet in some detail:

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.

One classical Latin poem that was well known in the Middle Ages did provide an alternative sketch of Achilles, at least in part.

After the French Revolution, Paris emerged as Europe's foremost political center and indisputable cultural capital, and the city began to attract composers both for occasional visits and for extended residencies. The Académie Royale de Musique (the Opéra), the most prestigious of the three major opera houses, held a particular allure. Combining splendor, technical innovation, and quality of performance, it became the institution in which any ambitious composer hoped to score lasting success. A number of Italian composers in particular made Paris their temporary or permanent home: Luigi Cherubini, Gaspare Spontini, and Gioachino Rossini wrote some of their most important works for the Opéra. Gaetano Donizetti and Giuseppe Verdi continued this tradition, the former with La favorite (1840) and Dom Sébastien (1843), the latter with Jérusalem (1847, an extensive reworking of I lombardi, 1843), Les vêpres siciliennes (1855), and Don Carlos (1867). By the time of Don Carlos, Verdi had mastered French grand opera to such a degree that Rossini declared him the genre's leading representative. Referring to the possibility that Verdi might again compose for the Opéra, Rossini asked the publisher Tito Ricordi to “tell [Verdi] from me that if he returns to Paris he must get himself very well paid for it, since – may my other colleagues forgive me for saying so – he is the only composer capable of writing grand opera.”

A burgeoning interest in music theory beginning in the 1960s led scholars to settle new empires, among them nineteenth-century Italian opera. Increasing sophistication of operatic analysis has been indebted to what Thomas Christensen has called “presentist” music theory, for which the craft of the critic/theorist provides a key to principles of order and value, and, by extension, an analogue to technological progress. In the early days of the academic bull market for Verdi's stock, even Pierluigi Petrobelli, a commentator not aligned to the Anglo-American theoretical establishment, observed:

By suggesting that the “determining power” of “formal principles” is nested in a web of “complex relations,” Petrobelli posits a fertile line of investigation that seems partly to attribute the “amazing richness” of Verdi's scores to immutable laws – by implication, deeply buried and ingenious ones – waiting to be discovered by perspicacious scholars with the right tools. Is there a secret method similar to that “discovered” by Alfred Lorenz in the works of Wagner, one which will reveal the craft behind the magic?

From the beginning, the libretto (“little book” because of its small printed format) played a fundamental role in operatic structure and style. Until the mid-eighteenth century, a dramma permusica was considered a literary text, judged according to the canons of spoken theatre. It led an autonomous life, and its music constituted an aspect of staging, one that could change over time. By the nineteenth century, however, this relationship was inverted: the music became more important, and composers intervened in writing the libretto, assuming the role of “musical dramatists.” This trend culminated in Germany with Wagner and in Italy with Verdi, who did not write his own librettos but influenced their genesis profoundly. Through this reversal, nineteenth-century librettos lost importance as a literary genre. They were compared unfavorably to their literary sources (especially when these were the greatest examples of dramatic literature by Shakespeare, Schiller, and others) and criticized for unrealistic plots and purportedly bombastic, antiquated language. In the last thirty years, however, literary critics as well as musicologists and those in theatre studies have recognized the nonliterary values of the libretto and have reappraised its function in musical dramaturgy.

In considering Verdi's librettos, it is useful to distinguish between dramatic, poetic, and literary design. The fact that Verdi intervened in the first category most and the third least implies that they should be considered as being of decreasing importance.

In an oft-quoted assessment of Shakespeare's Desdemona, Verdi described her as “not a woman, but a type. She is the type of goodness, resignation, self-sacrifice. They are creatures born for others, unconscious of their own egos.” Shakespeare's play, of course, provides ample material for this sort of interpretation, as characters extol her beauty, virtue, selflessness, and other merits. And as James Hepokoski has documented, in recreating Desdemona for their own Otello (1887) Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito were probably influenced by nineteenth-century critical traditions represented by August Wilhelm Schlegel and by Victor Hugo, who viewed Desdemona as “saintly” and as “a spiritualist and almost amystic,” and also seem to have drawn upon such late nineteenth-century literary themes as decadentismo devotional iconology and the femme fragile. Of course devout heroines in peril were nothing new to Verdi, the Leonoras in Il trovatore and La forza del destino being prime examples, while heroines falsely accused had long been stock-in-trade, and Violetta (La traviata) provided a precedent for the physically fragile heroine. So by emphasizing Desdemona's purity, naïveté, and vulnerability, Verdi and Boito adhered to an aesthetic involving the cathartic destruction of a sympathetic female lead with which their audience could readily identify.