Does Achilles desire to be buried with Patroclus mean that Achilles was probably gay, or was that kind of burial 'a thing' for Greek warriors?
Achilles’ wish to have his remains mixed and buried with Patroclus strongly signals an exceptional, intimate bond, but it does not prove in a modern sense that Achilles was “probably gay.” Sharing a grave or urn was not the standard for Greek warriors in general, yet ancient authors and later interpreters debated whether their intimacy was erotic, romantic, or a particularly intense form of heroic friendship.[1][2][3][4]
## What the Iliad actually shows
In the Iliad, Patroclus appears to Achilles after death and asks that their bones be placed together in a single urn, and Achilles agrees and carries this out. Achilles’ extreme mourning, including keeping Patroclus’ body in his tent and organizing lavish funeral rites, marks this as a relationship set apart from his other connections.[5][3][1]
Homer, however, never explicitly labels their bond as sexual or uses the conventional vocabulary of pederastic relationships, which leaves room for reading it as either romantic or as a uniquely intense comradeship. Some modern scholars argue that the poem emphasizes emotional dependence and loyalty more than eroticism, consistent with how the Iliad generally sidelines sexual relationships among male heroes.[4][1]
## Ancient interpretations of their bond
Classical and later Greek writers were themselves divided on how to understand Achilles and Patroclus. Aeschylus’ lost tragedy “The Myrmidons” reportedly treated them openly as lovers in a pederastic framework, with Achilles as the older erastes and Patroclus as the younger eromenos.[6][7][1]
By contrast, Plato and Xenophon have Socrates downplay or deny a sexual reading, presenting them instead as paradigms of loyal, non-sexual comrades-in-arms. Even so, later antiquity often cited Achilles’ love for Patroclus as a model for martial male–male devotion, blurring the line between “heroic friendship” and erotic love.[2][1][6][4]
## Was joint burial “a thing”?
Greek funerary practice allowed multiple burials in the same tomb, especially for families or elite groups, but deliberately mixing ashes in one urn or insisting on a shared grave was a special gesture rather than a routine military custom. In the poem, the request to combine their remains underscores that Achilles and Patroclus should be remembered as a pair, not just as two comrades who happened to die in the same war.[3][8][9][10][1]
Ordinary fallen soldiers were usually cremated or buried together as a group, without such individualized, mutual arrangements; what Achilles does for Patroclus is exceptional in scale and in symbolic intimacy. The shared-urn motif therefore functions as a narrative marker of a bond closer than typical battlefield friendship, though its exact nature is left for audiences and later thinkers to interpret.[8][11][1][3]
## How modern historians tend to read it
Modern classicists generally agree on two points: the relationship is emotionally central and unusually intense, and Homer leaves its erotic status deliberately ambiguous. Many find the shared burial, the language of love, and Achilles’ grief highly compatible with a romantic interpretation, while others stress that ancient heroic friendship could be just as consuming without necessarily involving sex.[12][1][2][6][4]
So the desire to be buried with Patroclus is not “just what Greek warriors did,” but a sign of a uniquely close partnership that ancient and modern readers have often, though not unanimously, understood as a form of male–male love.[1][2][3]
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