Achilles and Patroclus: The Friendship the Iliad Cannot Quite Name

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Were Achilles and Patroclus Lovers?

The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is one of the oldest questions in Greek literature. Homer never names it directly — he does not call them lovers, and he does not deny it. The ancient world took the question seriously enough to argue about it: Plato's Symposium explicitly debates whether Achilles or Patroclus was the lover and which was the beloved; Aeschylus wrote an entire play on the subject. In Homer's Iliad, Achilles displays his most violent and extended grief at Patroclus's death — far beyond what the poem reserves for any other loss. Two and a half thousand years of scholarship has not resolved the question of what Achilles and Patroclus meant to each other, which is either a failure of interpretation or a sign that Homer was doing something genuinely difficult. Probably both.

Homer never uses the word lover. He never uses the word friend in a way that would distinguish it from the word lover. He uses the word hetairos — companion — which in the Greek heroic tradition carries a weight that our word companion does not, because it encompasses fighting together, eating together, sleeping in the same tent, sharing everything. When Patroclus dies and Achilles learns of it, Homer gives us grief so violent and physical that it breaks the surface of the poem like a fault rupture: Achilles falls in the dust, tears at his hair, and the servant women scream, because they think he too has died. His mother Thetis hears him from the sea. This is not, in the language of the Iliad, the response to losing a comrade. This is the response to losing the thing the poem has been building toward eliminating. The word for what Achilles and Patroclus are to each other is never given. The grief is the definition.

The ancient world argued about this. Plato's Symposium — which is, among other things, a sustained inquiry into the nature of love and desire — explicitly debates whether Achilles or Patroclus was the lover and which was the beloved, since these were considered distinct roles in the Greek understanding of desire. Phaedrus, giving the first speech, argues that Achilles was the beloved — younger, more beautiful — and that his grief and his choice to die to avenge Patroclus made him the greater lover because he chose death for a man who had already been lost. Aeschylus, in a lost play called The Myrmidons, appears to have taken the reverse position: fragments that survive suggest Achilles spoke of his thighs' sacred companionship, which is the kind of language that settles one question while opening several others. The argument was not considered scandalous. It was considered a serious question, which in the ancient world was a different kind of respect entirely.

What Homer Actually Wrote

It is worth being specific about what Homer does and does not write, because the poem is often cited in debates where neither side has actually counted the lines. In the Iliad, Achilles and Patroclus share a tent. When Achilles is visited by envoys in Book Nine, Patroclus is there, preparing food, serving it, sitting nearby while the negotiation happens. Achilles plays the lyre and Patroclus listens. When Patroclus dies, his ghost comes to Achilles in a dream and asks to be buried quickly so he can cross into the underworld, and also asks that their bones be mingled in the same urn — a request Achilles grants with emotional intensity that the poem renders without comment. "We grew up together," the ghost says, more or less. "Bury us together." Achilles agrees immediately. This will happen. They will share the urn. Homer states it once and moves on, which is either restraint or the most efficient expression of certainty in the poem, depending on your view of Homer's methods.

What Homer does not write is explicit physical desire. He also does not write explicit physical desire for any of the other significant male relationships in the poem — the Iliad is not, as a general matter, interested in the intimate interior of any relationship, preferring instead to show the consequences of connection rather than the connection itself. We know what Achilles and Patroclus mean to each other from what happens when Patroclus is gone: the entire second half of the poem is Achilles's response to that absence. The wrath of the poem's first line, directed at Agamemnon, becomes a different kind of wrath entirely. The man who could not be moved by the Greeks' suffering, by Agamemnon's apology, by Odysseus's eloquence, is moved by a single death. That single death is what the poem has been building toward. Without Patroclus, there is no Achilles. This is not a friendship. It is an architecture.

The Grief That Drives the War's Ending

Achilles's return to battle after Patroclus's death is not heroic in any standard sense. It is not about Troy, or the Greeks, or honor in the conventional meaning of that word. It is about Hector, specifically, who killed Patroclus, and through Hector's death about closing an account that has nothing to do with the war's nominal cause. Achilles knows, when he arms for the second time, that his own death is coming — his divine armor, forged by Hephaestus after Hector stripped the original armor from Patroclus's body, is the most beautiful thing in the poem and also the most temporary. He will wear it and kill Hector and be killed in turn. He enters this knowing it. He enters it because the alternative — the continued existence of the man who killed Patroclus — is not livable.

The ancient debate about the nature of the relationship matters not because it resolves anything about the poem but because it demonstrates how seriously the ancient world took what Homer had written. This was not a relationship they glossed over or categorized quickly and moved past. Plato returns to it in the Symposium and again, briefly, in the Phaedrus. Aeschylus wrote a full play about it. Pindar references it. The mythological tradition after Homer includes traditions about where Achilles and Patroclus are buried — together on the White Island, in the Black Sea, where Achilles is said to live with other heroes after death and where some versions of the myth place Patroclus beside him permanently. The ancient world knew what it was reading. It simply could not agree on what to call it — a problem that two and a half thousand years of subsequent scholarship has not entirely resolved either, which is either embarrassing or a sign that Homer was doing something genuinely difficult. In that disagreement lies the poem's most honest quality: the refusal to name something precisely is sometimes the most accurate way to describe what that thing is.