Celsiana Warwick, University of Iowa
This paper argues that post-Homeric Greek writers employed references to Achilles and Patroclus as a way to subtly address the taboo topic of mutual eros between men. According to the normative model of Classical Greek sexuality, adult citizen men desired and sexually penetrated their social inferiors: boys, women, and slaves (Dover 1978). A reciprocal erotic relationship in which one party did not seek to dominate the other was, according to these norms, unthinkable (Konstan 1997). An adult male who desired other adult males risked being branded a kinaidos, a figure of mockery whose love of being sexually penetrated rendered him an effeminate failed man (Winkler 1990; Richlin 1993). Achilles’ and Patroclus’ relationship in the Iliad thus posed a problem for Classical Greeks, since, although the emotional intensity of their bond was often read as erotic (cf. scholia A ad Il. 16.97-100), it did not fit the socially acceptable erastes/eromenos model of male same-sex desire. Patroclus is older than Achilles (Il. 11.785-89), but Achilles has a higher social position, and both are adults. Further, the two heroes seem to alternate taking on the “feminine” role in the relationship (Lesser 2022), suggesting a transgressive blurring of active and passive roles that threatens to undermine the dominance/submission paradigm upon which Classical masculinity is based.
A number of Athenian sources portray Achilles and Patroclus as lovers but recast one of them as an adolescent eromenos in order to fit them into appropriate pederastic roles (Aeschylus, Myrm. fr. 135; Plato, Symp. 179e–180a; Aeschines, In Tim. 141–150). Some scholars have characterized this trend as a “misreading” of Homer by later Greeks who attempt to impose their own sexual categories anachronistically onto epic (Halperin 1990; Percy 1996; Hubbard 2013). However, given that the manipulation of Homeric exempla for rhetorical purposes is ubiquitous in Greek literature (Ford 1999), it is profitable to consider how these “misreadings” are employed as deliberate and artful commentary upon the nature of sexual and romantic relationships between males, whether pederastic or otherwise.
In this paper, I investigate three instances in which I argue that Achilles and Patroclus are used to comment upon relationships that do not neatly fit the pederastic model: Phaedrus’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, Theocritus’ 29th Idyll, and ancient sources touching on the relationship between Alexander the Great and his friend Hephaestion. In these instances, the ambiguity surrounding which partner in the relationship should be dominant opens up a space for reading Achilles and Patroclus as existing in a more flexible and transgressive erotic relationship to each other, one in which roles may be reversed or done away with, and in which it is possible to conceive of mutual eros between partners. In this way, the two heroes provide Greek writers with both a way to address relationships that fall outside the pederastic model without stigmatizing them, as well as offering the possibility of new paradigms of sexuality for ancient Greek men who may have found the rigid dominance/submission model of masculinity restrictive and damaging.