The first fact which the student has to notice is that in the Homeric
poems a modern reader finds no trace of this passion. It is true that
Achilles, the hero of the _Iliad_, is distinguished by his friendship
for Patroclus no less emphatically than Odysseus, the hero of the
_Odyssey_, by lifelong attachment to Penelope, and Hector by love for
Andromache. But in the delineation of the friendship of Achilles and
Patroclus there is nothing which indicates the passionate relation of
the lover and the beloved, as they were afterwards recognised in Greek
society. This is the more remarkable because the love of Achilles for
Patroclus added, in a later age of Greek history, an almost religious
sanction of the martial form of paiderastia. In like manner the
friendship of Idomeneus for Meriones, and that of Achilles, after the
death of Patroclus, for Antilochus, were treated by the later Greeks as
paiderastic. Yet, inasmuch as Homer gives no warrant for this
interpretation of the tales in question, we are justified in concluding
that homosexual relations were not prominent in the so-called heroic age
of Greece. Had it formed a distinct feature of the society depicted in
the Homeric poems, there is no reason to suppose that their authors
would have abstained from delineating it. We shall see that Pindar,
Æschylus and Sophocles, the poets of an age when paiderastia was
prevalent, spoke unreservedly upon the subject.
Impartial study of the _Iliad_ leads us to the belief that the Greeks of
the historic period interpreted the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus
in accordance with subsequently developed customs. The Homeric poems
were the Bible of the Greeks, and formed the staple of their education;
nor did they scruple to wrest the sense of the original, reading, like
modern Bibliolaters, the sentiments and passions of a later age into the
text. Of this process a good example is afforded by Æschines in the
oration against Timarchus. While discussing this very question of the
love of Achilles, he says: "He, indeed, conceals their love, and does
not give its proper name to the affection between them, judging that the
extremity of their fondness would be intelligible to instructed men
among his audience." As an instance the orator proceeds to quote the
passage in which Achilles laments that he will not be able to fulfil his
promise to Menoetius by bringing Patroclus home to Opus. He is here
clearly introducing the sentiments of an Athenian hoplite who had taken
the boy he loved to Syracuse and seen him slain there.
Homer stood in a double relation to the historical Greeks. On the one
hand, he determined their development by the influence of his ideal
characters. On the other, he underwent from them interpretations which
varied with the spirit of each successive century. He created the
national temperament, but received in turn the influx of new thoughts
and emotions occurring in the course of its expansion. It is, therefore,
highly important, on the threshold of this inquiry, to determine the
nature of that Achilleian friendship to which the panegyrists and
apologists of the custom make such frequent reference.