Here in Greece we don't really accept that Patroclus and Achilles were anything more than friends,cousins or at least Platonic lovers. What have you been taught at school?
Interesting! I love the term platonic lovers btw, it’s wonderful.
I had two instances where I learned about Achilles and Patroclus in a school setting. The first was in high school, where we just BARELY talked about them as a pair. All the focus in that class was on Odysseus because we were only really required to know the Iliad as a lead-up to the Odyssey. But ultimately, they were just talked about as best friends.
My second, much more in depth, encounter with them was in college. I took a mythology class and we talked about them briefly and my professor pretty much explicitly stated that they were lovers.
My suspicion is that in high school, their relationship was never even mentioned as potentially homoerotic because, while I was in high school, the legalization of gay marriage was a pretty controversial topic (even living in northern California!) and the school probably had some rules on what instructors were and weren’t allowed to talk about. Whereas I attended a very liberal university where instructors had no such limitations on what they could say or teach.
Ultimately, my opinion of them as proof that true love exists came from my own exploration of their stories rather than from any educational institution. The movie Troy that was released in 2004 opened the floodgates for me and ever since, I’ve consumed films, books, academic articles, documentaries, wikipedia pages, fanfiction, random material that shows up on google searches, and artwork about them and just decided for myself “…they gay.”
I kinda went off on a tangent there… tl;dr: high school says no-homo, university says they gay.
