A couple of weeks ago a reader (Emma Lyons) queried Taki, the High Life professor of ancient Greek culture and society, who had argued that Achilles and Patroclus, heroes of the Trojan War, were not gay, and implied that Greeks did not do transgenderism. On both counts a little clarification is required.
The 5th-century BC Athenian playwright Aeschylus indeed represented Achilles and Patroclus as lovers, as many ancients did. But professor Taki was talking about the situation in Homer’s Iliad (c. 700 BC), in which they were no such thing. The wrath of Achilles, with which the Iliad opens, was down to Achilles’s loss of his captive woman Briseis, taken from him by the Greek leader Agamemnon. Achilles replaced her in his bed with another captive, Diomede, while Patroclus bedded down in the other corner of their hut with ‘fair-girdled Iphis, whom Achilles had presented to him after he captured Skyros’.
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