Remember Patroklos

At Iliad 24.511–12, Akhilleus “weeps now for his own father, now again for Patroklos,” αὐτὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς κλαῖεν ἑὸν πατέρ’, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε / Πάτροκλον. Commentators have generally ignored the second clause, focusing rather upon the reciprocal weeping of Akhilleus and Priam. The mutuality of fathers and sons and the making of fictive kinship, however fleeting, have been taken as strong signs of narrative closure. And yet, the strongly enjambed name of Patroklos also signals that Akhilleus’ mourning for the beloved comrade exceeds that of any imaginable mourning for his own father (as Akhilleus had also earlier said at 19.321–27). Against interpretative moves toward patriarchal closure, Patroklos is queer excess and resistance (Foucault 1990 [1978], Halperin 1995). My essay argues that Akhilleus’ ongoing, private—post funeral rites—commemoration of Patroklos effects both a de-heroization and re- heroization of Patroklos. Akhilleus’ unassuageable pothos—his longing and mourning (see especially 19.321 and 24.6)—for Patroklos revalues the hero and his name by maintaining him in a position of non-relation—and even of negation—to the Akhaian camp and to the tradition of epic itself.

Much crucial Homeric scholarship has convincingly demonstrated that Patroklos possesses a singularly apposite hero’s name: Πάτροκλος, “the fame of the fathers,” names the tradition of Iliadic poetry itself (Sinos 1980, Nagy 1999 [1979]). Akhilleus’ death for the sake of Patroklos thus ensures that Akhilleus will gain just what the name of the beloved signifies: immortality within the commemorative poetic tradition. I will argue that while the Iliad knows that tradition (indeed, the Iliad is a perfection of that tradition), it also critiques and revalues that same tradition in a fundamentally queer way, where “queer” connotes a critical—sometimes eroticized—non-relation to the structuring reciprocities of kinship and of social and poetic order. By remembering Patroklos beyond the extravagant and socially legible funeral rites of Book 23 (and, presumably, beyond the bounds of the poem), Akhilleus would remember Patroklos as something like a subjectivity—a source of delight, of excess, of unexpected return and meaning (of χάρις, cf. 9.316); without such queer subjectivities, the community itself is shown to be incomplete and, ultimately, death-bound—a scene of social reproduction without enlivening value. Akhilleus would, as it were, recast the very meaning of “Patroklos,” such that the name might register not the tradition, but the subjectivity of a beloved. To “remember Patroklos” is to commemorate, and perhaps rekindle, a set of desires—for, say, a non-martial masculinity, a social order responsive to excess, a language and a poetry less bound to death —that remain too often repressed and consigned to social oblivion.