ACHILLES AND PATROCLUS IN LOVE. NEW CONTRIBUTIONS TO GREEK FUNERAL RITUAL*
By Carlos Espejo Muriel
(edited by Journal of Ancient Civilizations 14 (1999), 19-26)
I. Introduction.
The subject of Greek funeral rituals is a very complex one which has attracted the attention of many scholars (1). In this brief paper I discuss certain aspects of these rituals which raise intriguing questions for which we cannot claim (even if I would like it) to have a definite answer.
Most of the research that I have been doing in the last years, since the completion of muy Ph. D. thesis, has focused very specifically on the topic of Greek rituals and festivals (2). I have been concerned mainly with the historical period which is revealed in the poems of Homer and Hesiod, because the periods of crisis or change which societies undergo from time to time, and are often referred to as "Dark Ages", are of particular interest to me. In this article, I will focus mainly on the period which, following Finley, I will call "Primitive Greece" (3).
II. Funeral Rituals.
By rituals I mean those individual or collective acts which, even if they are flexible enough to allow certain degree of improvisation, are always subject to specific rules which determine their ritual character. Rituals have the following defining characteristics:
* expressive power,
* repetitive character, as a consequence of which each act is surrounded by a differentiating halo carrying an emotional and religious load springing from the sacred link with tradition,
* inherent symbolism as a defining element of the action itself.
As for their origin, some take the view that they arise simply from the wish to protect from any threat the ideal of a life fully governed by rules, a life without unexpected or distressing events; for others, it is to be found in the desire to place oneself symbolically in the realm of absolute powers, in which case, the human condition would not really exist (4).
I, however, I agree with Cox's (5) view that the ritual appears in parallel with myth in the evolutionary process of man, sharing the same sources. While myth humanizes times, ritual humanizes space, so that ritual becomes a social fantasy, in that it provides a set of connections through which emotion can be expressed instead of being repressed (6).
By funeral rituals, then, we understand thouse mourning or mortuary rituals which refer back to the mythic world in reverse order, since they are used to transform the dead into ancestors. In other words, these rituals are, in their connections with transition, close to rites of passage, but they differ from these in their irrevocable character, for they mark the passage from a state to the negation of that same state.
III. Patroclus' Funeral Ritual.
Of all the funeral rituals described in classical texts I will focus on just one of them and will select just one aspect of that ritual for discussion. I am referring to Patroclus' funeral ritual, as described in books XVIII, XIX and XXIII of Homer's Iliad (7). This ritual can be schematically divided into three major events: the announcement of the death; the lamentation; and the funeral proper.
III.1 The announcement of the death.
This is the moment when Achilles is informed of the death of his beloved companion, Patroclus. It is followed by a strict ritual of grief performed by Achilles, the women and Antilochos, which includes as its central event the strewing of "darkk dust" over head and face, and even lying in the dirt (8). This outburst of grief and bereavement is the first sign of recognition on the tragic event and is followed by contained sobbing and deep sighing.
III.2 The lamentation.
The lamentation for Patroclus is led by Achilles, his closest friend. He is the only one who can touch Patroclus' dead body while the women lead the mourning (weeping, as they were expected to do, day and night). Achilles cleans Patroclus' wounds with hot water, anoints him with precious oils, fills his wounds and shrouds his body in a fine linen cloth.
III.3 The funeral proper.
It begins with a parade, the last farewell to the dead comrade, his closest friends surrounding him (to such a point that some have seen here a kind of funeral and armed dance) (9). Then, Achilles starts the funeral mourning, laying his hands over his friend's dead body. This funeral prayer has two parts, one dedicated to memory (mneme), which is always mortal, and the other dedicated to life, which is always despised, indifferently known as soma, psyche or bios. Nevertheless, in Homer this funeral prayer is actually a moral (civic and hoplitic) action (10). Then comes the banquet. A big pyre is set up with the corpse, animal and human victims, various objects, and so on. Patroclus' dead body is placed on the pyre by his closest friends while Achilles holds his head. The corpse is covered with fat of animals to facilitate the burning. The whole army parades to the rhythm of the dance in front of the pyre to say its last farewell to the lost comrade. Before the body is engulfed in flames Achilles will call the name of his beloved Patroclus. The cremation ceremony is followed by games held by Achilles in honour of his friend, the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this paper.
IV. New contributions to Greek funeral ritual.
After this brief review of Patroclus' funeral, we are faced with a puzzling situation: during the lamentation here described, the standard practices demanded by the ritual are performed, not by the women, but by Achilles and his other companions. Women traditionally led all these practices in the primitive Greek world (11), so the question arises of why they did not do it on this particular occasion (12).
There are three possible solutions to this problem, none of them (as we indicated at the beginning of this paper) fully convincing, although the third possibility is the most believable of them:
1.- The first possibility is that it was an unintended mistake on the part of the poet, probably due to his treatment of Patroclus and Achilles as a couple, of the erastes-eromenos kind, but at any rate a couple. This would solve the problem, since if one of the two characters is considered to be more feminine that the other, then according to Homer's logic, the former had to take the female role in the lamentation, as is the case with established couples of opposite sexes. In other words, throughout the ritual we are shown an Achilles-wife versus a Patroclus-dead-husband and so the ritual functions pertaining to the female domain are aptly performed by the appropiate person.
Just one problem: we all know that we have to wait till Aeschylus'play "Myrmidons" (13) to be able to perceive Achilles-Patroclus as an erastes-eromenos couple. But this is just one solution to our problem that implies first of all the reality of "homosexuality" (if we accept the term) (14) in Homer, and in second place, the existence of pederastic love between Achilles and Patroclus.
2.- If, on the other hand, we take the view that Homeric poems do not reflect faithfully a real historic period, or realistic events, then we can end up thinking not only that Homer did not exist or did not write these poems, but also that everything that is told in them is pure fiction. In this case, it would be pointless to look for historical elements in these poems and thus this variation of Greek funeral rituals is nothing more than a poetic distortion with no historical value whatsoever. This is probably the least attractive solution.
3.- Before coming to the third possibility, there are two preliminary questions which must be answered: why do they behave in this way? and How do they behave?
Esentially, the behave as they do because they are in the middle of a very special situation, war. It is the simple fact of their military situation which prevents the ritual from taking place in any other way: Patroclus' relatives, such as his wife or his mother, who in a normal situation would be in charge of the funeral ritual, are absent. It could be objected that there were some women who knew the ritual and could have performed it. But we must not forget that the notion of "gens", blood ties, plays a fundamental role within the primitive Greek society. Thus, in the absence of any of Patroclus' close relatives, only certain people were allowed to perform the ritual acts: his closest friends, his companion. The slave women could not even dare to offer themselves to do it, since they had no bond with the deceased, nor could they invoke any common ancestor. It is obvious, then, that under no circumstances could the women have performed the ritual.
Once it is established that it was the friends of Achilles and Patroclus who performed the ritual, we need to explain how is it possible that they knew the techniques of embalming or the various procedures for the preparation of the corpse. There is only one possible solution to this question: that knowledge was acquired (and never forgotten) by the Greek youth at a certain point in his life, probably in his childhood-adolescence (just before crossing the threshold of his youth). In this period of their lives, their age allows them to play ambiguously with their sex, coming in and out of the sex-defined roles of the Greek universe. In support of this hypothesis we may recall that Homer repeatedly makes reference to the presence of young boys in the different stages of the ritual, always accompanied by their mothers and other women (15). However, this solution has a major drawback: even if they learned to perfom these tasks when they were boys, it is hard to believe that by the time they became young adults they would remember all the steps of the ritual, since they would not have had many chances to repeat it, belonging as it did to the female world.
All things considered, I can only think of one possible answer to this problem, which is based on a suggestion due to Annie Schnapp-Gourbeillon (16). She argues that the relevance of the funeral ceremony lies in the fact that it is intended to praise the heroic figure of Patroclus in his double condition of living and dead character (because he is at the same time, fellow and object of a practice in two fields: fellow of the funeral ritual and pure object of sacrifice). This results in an ambiguous ritual that evolves within the limits of death and immortality and places the hero halfway between men and gods. What I would like to suggest is that, given the heroic figures involved (Achilles-Patroclus) and their enormous impact on Greek collective consciousness, Patroclus' funeral ritual is not real in itself. It is rather and idealized exaggeration, and, consequently, contradictions are to be expected, for it is not anybody's ritual, but the ritual of the great Patroclus. Being "so special" we must expect a totally distorted ritual lacking in a realistic basis. In other words: a mythic ritual within an epic poem.
Nevertheless we cannot forget (if we consider as we do, Homer takes the old traditions) that in Greek collective immaginary was present, in those old times, the essence that Achilles-Patroclus were a couple of the erastes-eromenos kind.
Notes.
(*) This is an extended and revised version of the paper: Nuevas aportaciones al ritual funerario griego, La Religión en el mundo griego. De la Antigüedad a la Grecia moderna, Granada 1997, 37-43.
(1) Such as M. Alexiou, The ritual lament in Greek tradition, Cambridge 1974; W. Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mithology and Ritual, Berkeley 1979 and Homo Necans. The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, Berkeley 1982; V. Desborough, The end of Mycenaean civilization and the Dark Age, Cambridge Ancient History 11.2, chap. XXXVIa (1975), 658-677; B. Dietrich, Death, fate and the gods. The development of a religious idea in Greek popular belief and in Homer, London 1965; G. Gnoli et J.P. Vernant, La mort, les morts dans les sociétés anciennes, Paris 1982; L. Hinckley, Patroclus' Funeral Games and Homer's Character Portrayal, CJ 81-3 (1986), 209-221; R. Huntington & P. Metcalf, Celebrations of Death. The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, Cambridge 1979; D. Kurtz & J. Boardman, Greek Burial Customs, London 1971; G. Mylonas, Homer and Mycenaean Customs, AJA 52 (1948), 56-81 and H. Willcock, The Funeral Games of Patroclus, BIGS 20 (1973), 1-11.
(2) See, for instance C. Espejo Muriel, Rituales y Festividades en Grecia Primitiva (siglos XII-VIII adne), Granada 1987 and Grecia: sobre los ritos y las fiestas, Granada 1995 (2nd edition).
(3) M.I. Finley, La Grecia Primitiva: edad del bronce y era arcaica, Barcelona 1983. However, I disagree with Finley in his inclusion of the archaic age in this period.
(4) J. Cazeneuve, Sociología del rito, Buenos Aires 1972, 16-17.
(5) H. Cox, Las fiestas de los locos. Ensayo sobre el talante festivo y la fantasía, Madrid 1983, 87.
(6) More details vid., C. Espejo Muriel, La dimensión mítica, Florentia Iliberritana 4-5 (1993-1994), 155-166.
(7) For this paper I have used the following editions of the Iliad: D.B. Monro & Th.W. Allen, Homeri Opera, Iliadis, vol. I-II, Oxford 1985 and 1978, respectively, and the spanish translations of C. García Gual, La Ilíada, Madrid 1981 and L. Segala, La Ilíada, Barcelona 1927.
(8) L. Luzzatto & R. Pompas point out in Il significato dei colori nella civiltà antiche, Milano 1988, 55 that the act of darkening the body implies death, the end of existence, for it symbolizes the return to emptiness in which eyesight blurs, conscience leads up to the night, and the body returns to the darkness of mother Earths' womb.
(9) L. Lawler, The Dance in Ancient Greece, London 1964 and F. Rodriguez Adrados, Orígenes de la Lírica antigua, Madrid 1976.
(10) N. Loraux, Mourir devant Troie, tomber pour Athènes: de la gloire du Heros à l'idée de la Cité, G. Gnoli & J.P. Vernant, Op.cit., p.78.
(11) S. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves. Women in Classical Antiquity, New York 1972, 101: "The meaning of the corpse has certain analogies to the caring for infants: the cycle of life takes us the care of women and returns us to the care of women".
(12) Although there is no doubt that this is a female domain. I would like to point out that in this Primitive Greece, even if there are some specific domains associated to one or the other sex, these divisions are not very rigid. In fact, these domains are not defined by sex, but by membership, taboos and associations within the communal social amalgam typical of this period. In other words, they are not yet the fully regulated domains that they would later become.
(13) Aeschylys, Fragmenta 228a 1.
(14) More details vid. C. Espejo Muriel, Nuevas aportaciones al modelo pederástico griego, II Reunión de historiadores del mundo griego antiguo-Homenaje al profesor Gascó, Sevilla 1997, 379-390.
(15) See, for instance, Hector's funerals, Iliad., XXIV, 159 ff. and 664 ff. where Andromache does her lamentatio inside the palace with her followers and her son. And M. Alexiou, Op.cit., p. 6 says children were always with their mothers, took by hands or seated on theirs thighs during the last phase of prothesis.
(16) A. Schnapp-Gourbeillon, Les funerailles de Patrocle, G. Gnoli et J.P. Vernant, Op.cit., 87.