As we saw in the preceding chapter, Statius in the Achilleid revises the Ovidian account of Achilles' rape of Deidamia. For Ovid, that incident represents the collision of gender as artifice and sex as reality, and the way Achilles yields to his desire illustrates the irreducible imperative of biology in his own destiny. In the Achilleid, however, even though Achilles explicitly announces his intention that his phallic intervention should restore him to his gender, the rape is a failure. The child Neoptolemus is thereby conceived, so the sexual act is not a failure in the ordinary sense, but rather in the symbolic sense, in that it fails to have the corrective effect upon himself that Achilles intended, as he continues thereafter to live as a girl. This is not an isolated incident: the Achilleid is a poem of failure, most generally in that it tells the story of Thetis' epic failure to divert the impending epic destiny of the Iliad; but as we have seen this broader failure is mirrored in many particular incidents which show Thetis to be not quite up to the task she has in mind.