There was no one more important in the hero's life, and his last promise - made to the ghost he tries in vain to embrace - is that they shall be buried together, for Achilles himself will not live long now.Īnd yet, later writers found much was left unexplained by Homer's description, and the Athenian tragedians felt free to fill in the details themselves. 'And if the dead forget their dead in the house of Hades, yet even there shall I remember my dear companion', Achilles says in Homer's Iliad, after his beloved Patroclus has been killed fighting against Troy. le Comte de Lamberg, Paris, 1813įor JFB Prelude: The Heroes and the Playwrights The Narrative Construction of Heteronormativity from Homer to The HobbitĬover: Two Brothers, One Sister, based on an illustration in Alexandre de Laborde, Collection de vases grecs de Mr. We begin in archaic Greece, with a story which was already old when Homer composed his epics. By following these stories and the changes they underwent through the centuries Straightforward attempts to answer two related questions: 'When and why did the heterosexual ideal become normative in our narrative tradition?' and 'What was there before?' It is a study not of the loves of real people, but of the ideal of love as it found expression in stories, stories which were often retold and reimagined by new generations and new cultures. Straightforward examines how we got from there to here. The reason for this is also not hard to find: as it does now, 'love' in the ancient world meant the affection of equals, and given the inferior position of women in Greek and Roman society, between the sexes is not usually where love is to be found. Very few will come up with a classical example, and the reason for this is simple: when you say archetypal, it is assumed you mean love between a man and a woman, and instances of this in classical accounts are rare. When asked to name an archetypal love story, most people will reply 'Romeo & Juliet', although some say 'Tristan & Isolde' instead.
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