This post is written by Francesco Busti, postdoctoral researcher in Latin language and literature at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). A previous, shorter version of this post can be read on the Leiden Arts in Society Blog (published June 25, 2024).
On March 4, 2024, the Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS) in Pisa hosted a lecture by an Oxford scholar on “Achilles’ Gender: A Queer and Trans Perspective on the Iliad”. “This approach”, so the abstract went, “offers new opportunities to consider Achilles’ character and experience as a queer and trans affective experience”.
Two days later, the Italian right-wing newspaper Libero published an article denouncing the lecture, presumably on the sole basis of its title and abstract, as “supreme woke anachronism” and “the most absurd caricature of political correctness” in thrall to “rainbow carnival and gender ideology”. This article spawned a plethora of analogous reactions on websites and social media, which either reproduced excerpts of the Libero article or offered variations on its themes.
An article published by Il Giornale, another Italian right-wing newspaper, spoke of “the triumph of woke religion, the evolution of cancel culture into reset culture” and “an integralist ideology, verging on the Taliban”. The tone of other reactions was similarly hostile (Il Primato Nazionale: “the latest delirium of LGBT dictatorship”; Ricognizioni: “the monstrous, perverted decadence of Western thought”) if not homophobic (Vox News: “deranged lecture on the faggot Iliad”).
This outbreak of digital frenzy climaxed with a press release issued by the Italian anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQIA+ rights group Pro Vita & Famiglia [“Pro-Life and Family”], asking that the Minister of University and Research prevent Italian universities from becoming “mass ideological re-education camps at the disposal of fanatical minorities”. The press release was headed by a picture of the SNS entrance on which a giant rainbow “WOKE” was superimposed.
Amid the fuss, the SNS released a statement debunking the claims made about the lecture by people who did not attend it in the first place, and the hubbub promptly died down. Yet, even after a few months, unpacking the arguments of these attacks remains tricky, primarily because of their randomness. Online communication dynamics, of course, play a significant role in this kind of process by amplifying the noise in size and strength to the point that arguments tend to lose any consistency and grow increasingly detached from reality.
What seemingly sparked a storm of verbal violence with no relevance to the content of the lecture was the sole presence of the words “gender”, “queer”, and “trans” in its title, a trinity of bugbears to most right-wing movements, and specifically to the current Italian government led by Giorgia Meloni’s populist far-right party, Fratelli d’Italia [“Brothers of Italy”]. In fact, the same reasoning underpinned Italy’s decision not to sign an EU declaration ensuring the protection and promotion of LGBTQIA+ equality.
Much of the abuse launched against the SNS lecture can be explained precisely within the context of the conservative backlash Europe has witnessed in the past few years. When opponents of the SNS lecture liken “gender ideology” to totalitarianisms like “the Taliban”, their position echoes a common overlap in political discourses of populist far-right leaders between anti-LGBTQIA+ and anti-immigration stances. This overlap is based on the assumption that both “gender ideology” and “Islamization” threaten the “traditional family”, the former for wanting to eliminate sexual differences, the latter for oppressing women.
In this political context, Achilles becomes the symbol of the “natural order”. The Libero article claims that analysing Achilles’ experience from a queer and trans perspective goes “against ourselves, against what we are before we are even born, Western men”. The Italian word for “to be born” is nascere (from the Latin nascor, “to be born”) and shares its root with the Italian word for “nature”, natura (from the Latin natura, literally “the conditions of birth”).
Another Italian word cognate with both looms large in the background of these political discourses: nazione, “nation”, from the Latin natio, which an ancient gloss possibly going back to the Augustan grammarian Verrius Flaccus interestingly defines as “a race of people, who did not come from elsewhere but were born there” (Paul. Fest. 165 Lindsay genus hominum, qui non aliunde venerunt, sed ibi nati sunt). The emphasis placed in the Libero article on our prenatal condition as “Western men” signifies the slipping of the national into the natural which allows nationalistic politics to present their actions as the “natural” way of doing things.
In his capacity as the character mentioned in the first line of the first Greek literary work (Hom. Iliad 1.1 “The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus’ son, Achilles”), Achilles is instrumental in naturalizing the identity of “Western men”. It is precisely in relation to Achilles’ wrath as the driving force behind the entire Iliad that the Libero article speaks of Achilles’ “substantial heterosexuality” and defines his relationship with Patroclus as a “homosexual life phase”. This reasoning anchors Achilles’ dispute with Agamemnon over Briseis to Achilles’ substance, his essence—in other words, his nature. He is identified with what we can read about him in the proem of the Iliad, and every other aspect of his character is dismissed as unsubstantial, inessential—in other words, unnatural.
And yet, insofar as Achilles is a fictional character, any claim about his “substance” does not so much reflect any real “sub-” of the text as the “stance” of the reader towards the text. Since antiquity, Achilles’ relationship with Patroclus in the Iliad has been the object of countless, sometimes fundamentally divergent interpretations, with different readers playing up or down different arguments about its exact “nature”—a heavily loaded term, as I tried to show above. Within this mass of interpretations, more nuanced readings than that of the Libero article have anchored themselves in specific passages of Homer’s text that have attracted particular attention.
The so-called story of Meleager, told by Phoenix during the visit of the embassy sent by Agamemnon to offer Briseis back to Achilles (Hom. Iliad 9.529–99), is probably the most striking example. During a war between the Aetolians and the Curetes, the Aetolian prince Meleager withdrew with his wife in a rage and would not fight, despite many begging him to rejoin the battle. Only when Meleager’s wife implored him in tears was he finally persuaded and led the Aetolians to victory. This story mirrors the plot of the Iliad, in which the role of Meleager’s wife is played by none other than Patroclus. Within this parallelism, it is hardly a coincidence that Meleager’s wife is called Cleopatra, a name with the same components as Patroclus’ name, only in reverse order (Cleo-patra / Patro-clus). Phoenix’s tale seems, therefore, to couch the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus in explicitly conjugal terms (Cleopatra is Meleager’s “wedded wife”: cf. 556 μνηστῇ ἀλόχῳ, literally “a woman who has been wooed and won as a bed partner”, and 590 παράκοιτις, literally “a woman who lies beside in bed”), which strongly contrasts with the idea of Achilles going through a phase.
Recent scholarly attention to such and further evidence has contributed to a more complex idea of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, ultimately leading to expressly queer retellings. A clear sign of this new perception is Madeline Miller’s first novel, The Song of Achilles (2011). Miller, who has a BA and MA in Latin and Ancient Greek from Brown University, retraces the events of the Trojan War with a focus on the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. Their bond grows into passionate love, and Briseis complicates things by developing a romantic friendship with Patroclus.
With its worldwide success, The Song of Achilles might even have marked a watershed in contemporary Homeric reception, a broader phenomenon in which the representation of Achilles’ relationship with Patroclus seems to play a crucial role. Among early twenty-first-century screen adaptations of the Trojan War, the Hollywood blockbuster film Troy (2004) desexualized their relationship by turning Patroclus into Achilles’ cousin, while Achilles (Brad Pitt) becomes lovers with Briseis. Fast forward just over a decade and one could watch Achilles (David Gyasi), Patroclus, and Briseis engage in a threesome in the BBC One television miniseries Troy: Fall of a City (2018).
Such creative receptions of Achilles testify to his potential as a queer figure and challenge binary understandings of his character as that upheld by the Libero article, in which one’s interest in identifying his “substance” often originates from a rightist obsession with identitarian politics. Classics and classical reception studies can contribute significantly to denaturalizing such identities as that upheld by the Libero article. In this new critical approach, innovative theoretical frameworks like those offered by Queer Theory can help Classicists and classical reception scholars address the processes that made social constructions and cultural fictions about sex, gender and sexual desire into “natural” categories. Queer theory is particularly promising in the study of the ancient world because it allows us to highlight historical differences between ancient and modern categorizations of sex, gender and sexuality and to point at both systems of norms, values and assumptions as socially constructed and not naturally permanent.
Queer Classics is experiencing a surge in interest, but its potential is vastly uncharted. Given the increasing spread of nationalist and anti-LGBTQIA+ stances across Europe and their use of classical culture as an anchor, this call to revise standard theoretical framings of Classics becomes critical.
Further reading
Morgan, Cheryl. 2020. “Queering the Classics”. CUCD Bulletin 49.