#but I feel like she’d’ve just used finite forms for the two verbs in the quote

[azurejacques]

Back to rereading the song of Achilles and I’m reminded of the ONE little plot hole that bothers me: chapter 12, Deidameia speaking

“No!” She turned to Achilles. “You are lying! You have betrayed me! Monster! Apathes!” Heartless. Lycomedes froze. Achilles’ fingers tightened on mine. In our language, words come in different genders. She had used the masculine form.

ἀπαθής (apathḗs) is a third-declension adjective in Ancient Greek, which means one very important thing- the masculine and feminine forms are the same. There isn’t any way I can think of that masculine gender would’ve been indicated in her speech here- she likely would’ve been using the vocative (a grammatical case which is used when addressing someone, commonly translated with 'O' in English, e.g. “sing, O muse…”) , so absolutely no article (not that I’d expect one anyhow, but you could devise some indirect construction I’m sure). She also would’ve used the 2nd person singular pronoun if she used one at all, which is σύ (sý), and only third person pronouns can have gender marked on them.

Point being- there’s simply no way I can think of that this would’ve explicitly been gendering Achilles masculinely- it would’ve been ambiguous. I’m especially annoyed since Madeline Miller is herself a classicist and apparently has taught Ancient Greek too! So I’d love to know if this was a mistake or what her reasoning her is lmao, because it feels like a pretty big mistake to me (but obviously is not something that most of her audience would spot).