Achilles and Patroclus - Post-classical and Modern Interpretations

Post-classical and Modern Interpretations

As a rule, the post-classical tradition shows Achilles as heterosexual and having an exemplary asexual friendship with Patroclus. Medieval Christian writers deliberately suppressed the homoerotic nuances of the figure.

No modern classics scholar reads the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus as an example of homosexual love, although Greeks certainly read it in this way, and Aeschylus' 5th century (lost) play Myrmidons made their relationship explicitly sexual, with Achilles as he laments his friend speaking of how he longs for Patroclus' thighs and sweet kisses. In the Iliad itself, the two share an intense but non-sexual relationship: David Halperin ("Heroes and their Pals") compares the traditions of Jonathan and David, and Gilgamesh and Enkidu, which are approximately contemporary with the Iliad's composition, and argues that, while none of these three relationships is portrayed as explicitly sexual in its literary and social context, all of them show how intense same-sex male warrior friendships, being extra-institutional within their societies, were of necessity portrayed by using the language of other, more institutionalized love relationships, such as those of parent/child and husband/wife. This explains well the overtones in the Iliad of having Achilles mourn Patroclus in the manner just used by the girl Briseis a few lines before him, in Book 19, lines 287-300 (Briseis' lament) and lines 315-337 (Achilles' lament).

Jonathan Shay, who in his book "Achilles in Vietnam" proposes readings of the Iliad that have been helpful and therapeutically useful for the healing of mental wounds in Vietnam veterans, pointed out that their familial relationship in the Iliad must not be overlooked: Patroclus is Achilles' cousin and his foster brother; symbolically, comrades in battle are "like brothers," making the Achilles/Patroclus model useful for thinking about the intensity of Vietnam veterans' feelings of loss when their comrades fell beside them. Shay places a strong emphasis on the relationships that soldiers who experience combat together forge, and points out that this kind of loss has in fact often led to "berserking" of soldiers stunned with grief and rage, in a way similar to the raging of Achilles in the Iliad. Shay points out that a frequent topos in veterans' grief for a companion is that companion's gentleness or innocence; similarly, while a warrior of great note, Patroclus is said in the Iliad by other soldiers and by Briseis the captive to have been gentle and kind.