So, part three in my series of textual rants about how people are abusing poor Patroclos in their fanfiction. (Part one is here, part two is here, if anyone cares. Though actually part one wasn't as much about Patroclos as about Ancient Greek naming schema...)
One warning about this post: I'll be talking about a lot of different works (albeit briefly) and will be changing spellings accordingly. If I'm talking about a work in Greek or the character in general, I will use my standard spelling of Patroclos, but if I'm talking about a work in Latin or an English-language work that spells it thus, I'll be using the Romanized Patroclus. (One exception is that there's one work I'm not sure how they spelled it, so I'm using my standard...'cause they might actually have used Patroklos, only I can't remember for certain...) I apologize if this seems confusing.
Over the millennia, there have been a lot of changes to Patroclos' role in the story of the Trojan War. We don't know what the story was like before the Iliad was composed, but from the way the epic never bothers explaining who he is or why he's following Achilles around so devotedly, we can assume that prior to its composition, their relationship was well-established, and the audience would already know that they were friends, comrades-in-arms and lovers. (Well, given the variations caused by oral tradition, it's actually safer to say that many held them to be lovers, rather than that all did. But the way the intimacy of their relationship was treated, it was clear that the poet expected people to already be aware of it.)
In late antiquity, two anti-heroic versions of the Trojan War story were floated about, purporting to be first-hand accounts by Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia; in addition to changing the story to make everyone seem worse, these stories confused or conflated various figures who had similar names (e.g. Atreus and Catreus, Peleus and Pelias), making it clear that not all the changes to the tale were purposeful. In these, Patroclos played almost no role, and in fact died almost immediately in one of them. And he's not even mentioned in Vergil's Aeneid (which only makes sense, really). And why do I bring this up? Well, because eventually the ancient Greek language was pretty much lost in Europe, so throughout the Middle Ages and most of the Renaissance, these Latin versions of the Trojan War story (which did, admittedly, also include a highly-truncated version of the Iliad, about 1/16th the length of the real thing) became the only ones known.
So for all the Medieval and Renaissance tales of the Trojan War--Bocaccio, Chaucer, etc.--Patroclos essentially doesn't exist. Around Shakespeare's time, Ancient Greek was becoming known again, and there was even a translation of the Iliad into English, thus Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, while mostly based on the Medieval version adapted out of Dictys and Dares, was able to reintroduce Patroclus as a major player and Achilles' true love (despite much moaning and groaning about Polyxena). But Shakespeare made other changes to the character. His Patroclus was a teenage boy (probably played by the boy who usually played the female leads) and not only didn't fight (being too young) but didn't even want to fight. (Though he still met his traditional end on Hector's blade, of course.)
Shakespeare's version of Patroclus--despite that his Troilus and Cressida was ignored for centuries, only reemerging onto stages in the 20th century--at some point became viewed as the dominant version, being called upon by any hack writer who didn't want to deal with the real story as told in the Iliad. (See, for example, that ghastly movie Troy. Well, no, don't see it: just look it up on Wikipedia or something.)
The Patroclos in the Iliad is radically different from Shakespeare's timid boy: he is older than Achilles, he's brave, he's kind, and when he's rampaging across the battlefield in Achilles' armor and cutting down Trojans left and right everyone knows exactly who he is and they are still terrified of him. (In fact, when Apollo disguises himself as a regular Trojan and goes to fetch Hector to have him face Patroclos, he tells him that it's Patroclos who is running rampant, and Hector's reaction is basically "yes, only I can deal with this deadly foe" not any mockery of an insignificant opponent.)
But what does any of this have to do with the misuse of ancient words in fiction?
Well, I'm getting to that.
You see, not all modern authors are willing to work with Shakespeare's teenage boy version. He'd have been sorely out of place in the video game that was a Canadian-made spin-off of Koei's Dynasty Warriors franchise. (I think it was called, like, Warriors: Legends of Troy or something like that. I'm sure about the first word and the last, just not the ones in the middle... 😅) I haven't played the game, but I did watch some footage of it years ago (when I was working on a paper on the changing portrayals of the Trojan War heroes over time), and its Patroclos was just as buff and dangerous as any other player character. (Too buff, honestly; the characters were kind of grotesque, as I recall. Like, they looked like they'd all overdosed on steroids.) The version of Patroclus in the very recent game Hades is probably the best, most accurate version of the character I've ever encountered in a modern work. (Yes, they changed his ethnicity, but there aren't actually any ancient descriptions of him that specify his ethnicity. No reason his family a few generations back couldn't have moved to Greece from Africa. I think it happened a lot more back then than people now expect.)
Literature seems to have been less kind to Patroclos than video games, weirdly enough. Most of the (unintended) abuse of the character I've encountered on AO3 has been entirely caused by fans of a single modern novel, Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles.
And why do I call it abuse?
Because it turned a warrior into a healer.
Seriously, some of these fanfic works have claimed he never even went onto the battlefield, just waiting in the camp for Achilles to return.
That is the most appalling nonsense! (I can only hope that comes from the fic writer and not the novelist, but I fear the opposite is true.) Every man in the Greek camp--with the possible exception of the priest Calchas--went out to battle. Even the aged Nestor, who was too old to fight, still went onto the field for every battle! Let's be real, here: the Greek army was having too much trouble procuring food for it to have useless hangers-on in the camp who didn't fight. (Uh...especially in light of all the women they had enslaved, who obviously didn't do any fighting, but still had to eat...and all the children those poor women were being forced to bear...)
The closest to professional healers that the Greek army had were Machaon and Podaleirios, the sons of Asclepios. But they still went out and fought. (Machaon, in fact, died in battle, either to Penthesileia or to Eurypylos of Mysia, depending on the version you're looking at.)
Now, yes, it's true that Patroclos had some knowledge of field medicine, and in the Iliad he helps a bit with some of the wounded before persuading Achilles to let him join the fight, but they've all been fighting for nine years at that point! Every soldier would have needed to know a bit about field medicine just to ensure his own survival. And all the more so for an attendant like Patroclos, who would need to be able to help his lord if the need arose. (Okay, not so likely given Achilles' natural skills and supernatural armor (his first set of armor was also made by Hephaistos) but still!) Furthermore, in pretty much all known traditions, Achilles was trained as a child by Cheiron, who was known for his knowledge of healing (he had, in fact, trained Asclepios himself), and who had surely taught the boy at least enough medicine to be able to deal with injuries on the battlefield. Whether or not Patroclos was trained alongside Achilles (and there is ancient precedent for that being the case), Patroclos would have learned some of the techniques from Achilles if he hadn't learned them with Achilles, because Achilles is going to want to make sure his lover knows how to save his own life if necessary.
So, where did Miller's healer-only version come from?
Well, in that we get to the title of this post, and the misuse of ancient words.
Because the word for Patroclos' position is θεράπων (therapon), a word often used in the fanfictions that have gotten me so worked up about this. Obviously, someone (presumably Miller?) looked at that and said "well, it looks so much like therapy that it must be related!"
And yeah, it probably is related, in the sense of it having come from the same root word as θεράπευσις, meaning "treatment, attention."
But θεράπων does not mean anything related to healing!
In the Homeric context, it has traditionally been translated as "squire," and its most standard definition is "comrade-in-arms, but of inferior rank." Other definitions include "attendant," "servant" and even "worshipper." But not one of its definitions has even the slightest thing to do with healing. (You can check out the dictionary entries for θεράπων at the Perseus Project: here, here and here.)
This is not only just plain wrong, it was also purposefully wrong on Miller's part. She had to have done enough research to have known that the word did not mean that, and she used it that way anyway. In consequence, its misuse has been spread like a virus throughout the Trojan War-related fandoms on AO3.
I cannot express emphatically enough just how much that pisses me off.
I'm not even going to try (the fact that I've spent this long ranting about it is probably a good indicator of just how angry I am, obviously), as the whole point of this was to try and purge the anger from me, not to wallow in it.
The worst part is that--whether this comes from Miller's novel or from the people writing derivative works on AO3--by making him a passive healer, they've imposed an artificial heteronormative dynamic on a homosexual relationship: the Patroclus of those fanfiction works is forced into a feminized position, allowing those writers to essentially write a straight relationship despite that they're writing about two men. Now, yes, not all of them do that, even when they embrace the "sitting passively in camp" aspect. (My sample size is small, since I quickly got too fed up to read any more of them, so I can't guess at percentages either way.) But the fact that any of them do it is already cause for alarm as well as fury. And yes, Shakespeare's Patroclus was a relatively passive character in a submissive role in the relationship, but he was not so much feminized as not-yet-masculinized, as man/boy relationships were not uncommon in Shakespeare's day. (Shakespeare himself wrote more than one love sonnet addressed to a boy, which if they were in his own voice (rather than works written on commission for someone else) indicate that he was likely bisexual, but due to the culture in which he lived, that bisexuality would have found expression only with boys, not adult men.)
Hopefully, this has concluded my series of rants about the ghastly things people are doing to my poor favorite on AO3. (Aside from my overwhelming fury that they keep putting their fics that are 100% contrary to the Iliad in the Iliad fandom! Anything that lists Miller's novel as its fandom is automatically not compliant with the Iliad, and therefore shouldn't list it!)
*ahem*
Yes, so, as I was saying, hopefully I'm done with this ranting, and will post more positive, interesting things in the future. (I always have lots of things to say about Greek mythology, after all...)
In closing, though, I just want to encourage everyone to actually read the Iliad if they're interested in the Trojan War. Some of the battles can get a bit gruesome (though tame by modern standards, I suppose) and the catalog of ships is pretty dull unless you're into ancient power structures and/or geography, but the characters are fascinating, the dialog is often very entertaining (the snipes at Alexander/Paris esp.), and the pathos of loss is genuinely heart-wrenching. And Patroclos is just 💓.
