Sunday, September 14, 2014

Achilles and Patroclus


The sensationalized movie Troy has been playing lately. Fun to watch, especially Brad Pitt as Achilles. I knew from lots of reading that the movie writers bastardized the real story, turning Achilles into a womanizing stud. Here's a link that tells an abbreviated but pretty accurate version. Greek mythology (proto-history?) gets complicated but the bottom line is . . .

     "Achilles and Patroclus fell in love when they both were young – they grew up together, studied under Cheiron, the wise centaur together, and went to war – the Trojan war – together. They were always in love. They loved each other as boys and loved each other as men. And their love was a sexual love, at least Aeschylus thought they had sex. But, like all respectable Greeks, they did not have anal sex: according to Aeschylus, they made love between the thighs – intercrural sex we call it these days. And sex was not what was important about their love affair. What the Greeks admired about them was not how good they were in bed, but the strength of their friendship."


http://historyoftheancientworld.org/2012/05/11/achilles-and-patroclus/








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