which one do you like better: achilles and patroclus as lovers or as best friends? why? tbh i really love them as lovers *insert eternal screaming that sounds more like belly grumbling here*
(Accidental essay here because I have strong feelings about the subject: press J to skip!)
I don’t really have a preference, per se! I have to say that I like the interpretation of them as lovers because I think it makes the best story, and also explains Achilles’ later actions re Hector’s body in a way that’s easier for me to understand and relate to as a modern reader, but I can accept the reading of them as friends / absolute bros as well.
In The Iliad, Homer doesn’t actually state or indeed even really imply that Achilles and Patroclus are lovers. They’re portrayed as close friends (and often referred to as such; Patroclus’ first appearance is prefixed by the words ‘Achilles’ friend’) but there are no explicit romantic or erotic undertones, and both of them are shown as having more than a passing interest in women (they get laid a lot, is what I’m saying). Of course, their interest in women doesn’t negate the potential for an interest in men, but no such interest is ever really referenced in The Iliad.
The idea of Achilles and Patroclus as lovers comes from the Classical period, during which a practice / relationship model known as pederasty had come about; initially in Crete, in around 630 BC. The model of pederasty was essentially a romantic and occasionally sexual relationship between two males, with each male taking a definitive role. The older male, the erastes, would always take the dominant role, whereas the younger one, the eromenos, would take the more subservient role. The reason I’ve used the word ‘male’ here instead of ‘man’ is because the eromenos was generally either pubescent or pre-pubescent; the name ‘pederasty’ is an anglicised form of the Greek paiderastês, which means ‘love of boys’. The age difference was an important part of a pederastic relationship as to the Greeks this meant that there was an also an educative element. There are examples of these relationships within Greek mythology, such as the relationship of Zeus and Ganymede, described as such by Theognis in a surviving fragment:
There is some pleasure in loving a youth, since once in fact even the son of Kronos, king of the immortals, fell in love with Ganymedes, seized him, carried him off to Olympos, and made him divine, keeping the lovely bloom of boyhood.
Although Plato wasn’t convinced by this, suggesting in Laws that the pederastic element of this relationship was invented by Cretans to justify their pederastic model:
One certainly should not fail to observe that when male unites with female for procreation the pleasure experienced is held to be due to nature, but contrary to nature when male mates with male or female with female, and that those first guilty of such enormities were impelled by their slavery to pleasure. And we all accuse the Kretans of concocting the story about Ganymedes. Because it was the belief that they derived their laws from Zeus, they added on this story about Zeus in order that they might be following his example in enjoying this pleasure as well.
Even within Classical contexts, the exact nature of pederasty as a relationship was not easy to define. Often, relationships took on a sexual nature, with the erastes taking the role of the top (no other way of saying it, soz) and the eromenos as the bottom. If that sounds like an excessively rigid model for the basis of a sexual relationship, then you’re right; it was. Pederasty, contrary to a lot of modern beliefs, was not exactly comparable to what we would now define as homosexuality, in which each partner doesn’t necessarily take the same role in every sexual encounter. In pederastic relationships, you either topped or you bottomed, and it was entirely dependent on whether you were older or younger. This was largely because the role of the erastes, as the older participant, was seen as more masculine. No penetration was supposed to take place, however, as penetration was seen as a feminising and demeaning act, reserved for prostitutes, slaves and other people whose sexual agency had been taken away from them. Therefore, any sex within an ideal pederastic relationship was non-penetrative in nature (eg intercrural, mutual masturbation).
Some people notably disapproved of the role of sex within pederastic relationships. Plato, for example, wrote in his Symposium that the purest form of love was that between two individuals who had transcended physical expression and instead loved in its purest form, without the need for naughtiness:
And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonor and emulating one another in honor; and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that when fighting at each other’s side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world.
However, it’s with this text that we can return to our old friends Patroclus and Achilles, as their relationship is held up in Symposium as an example of what Plato took to be a pederastic model. The two men are explicitly stated to be lovers, with Phaedrus (a speaker in Symposium) arguing that, as a man of renowned beauty, Achilles would certainly have taken the role of eromenos. In saying so, he’s directly disagreeing with an earlier presentation of the two as lovers by the playwright Aeschylus, who wrote a trilogy called Achilleis (since lost, because time is a bitch) including a play called Myrmidons, based on the Trojan War. Only a few fragments from this play survive, and one such fragment makes it very clear that Aeschylus also took Achilles and Patroclus as lovers:
Does it mean nothing to you, the unblemished thighs I worshipped and the showers of kisses you had from me?
And the chaste nearness of thy limbs.
And yet – for that I love him – they [Patroclus’ thighs] are not repulsive to my sight.
Here, he portrays Achilles as the erastes and Patroclus as the eromenos. Plato, as previously mentioned, disagreed with this in Symposium, stating that Aeschylus had made a mistake in focusing on Achilles’ societal status to ascribe him the role of erastes:
[…] the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus— his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two, fairer also than all the other heroes; and, as Homer informs us, he was still beardless, and younger far).
Basically, the Ancient Greeks had ship wars over who topped and who bottomed. That is literally a thing that happened. Anyway.
To answer your question, I personally enjoy the version of their relationship as portrayed by the works of Classical Greece, but such works were written with a then contemporary slant on things; due to the changing societal norms, people were beginning to reinterpret old works through a modern lens, and that meant ascribing an erotic or sexual relationship to Patroclus and Achilles which Homer may not have intended. However, such a relationship does actually make sense even in Homeric context. As stated in Symposium, many warriors took on a pederastic relationship and were feared more by their enemies because of it; their enemies realised that to kill one man meant incurring the wrath of the other. And yes, that is literally exactly what happens when Patroclus is killed by Hector in The Iliad. You can totally see why the Classical Greeks read it and thought ‘hang on a minute…’
After around 300 BC, the idea of Achilles and Patroclus as lovers fell out of favour with the introduction of stricter heterosexual societal expectations. Historians at the time argued that any lines in The Iliad which may have inferred a more than platonic relationship had been added in the Classical period to try and sway an agenda, and throughout the Medieval period and into the Renaissance, the two men were portrayed as having a sort of incredibly manly, asexual warrior-bond relationship. That’s not to say that people had forgotten the idea of the two of them as lovers; in the Shakespeare play Troilus and Cressida, Achilles and Patroclus are painted fairly explicitly as such, to the point that Achilles refuses to leave the tent he shares with Patroclus and fight in the war, which his fellow soldiers take to be due to his love for Patroclus rather than his anger with Agamemnon. Achilles constantly refers to Patroclus as ‘my sweet Patroclus’, and Patroclus later gives Achilles this rather moving speech in Act 3, Scene 3:
To this effect, Achilles, have I moved you:A woman impudent and mannish grownIs not more loathed than an effeminate manIn time of action. I stand condemn’d for this;They think my little stomach to the warAnd your great love to me restrains you thus:Sweet, rouse yourself; and the weak wanton CupidShall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,And, like a dew-drop from the lion’s mane,Be shook to air.
Essentially, the point I’m trying to make is that Achilles and Patroclus almost certainly weren’t initially interpreted as having been lovers, but this interpretation of them is both an incredibly historic one (Classical Greece covers the period from the 5th to 4th centuries BC) and a pervading one. When modern readers look at The Iliad and analyse the homoerotic nature of the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles, we aren’t simply attributing a modern reading onto it. We’re doing the same thing that Plato and his pals did. We’re interpreting historic texts and applying both our historic and our modern knowledge to offer an alternative reading. The only difference is that they were looking at it from a pederastic viewpoint, whereas we often read it as a more nuanced homosexual / queer relationship.
