Sing, Goddess, the Story of Tonight

“One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.”

— Raymond Queneau.

The musical Hamilton is a notorious hybrid. It borrows from conventional musicals, but also from rap, opera, hip-hop — all to bring to life the USA’s revolutionary past. But the musical is also fan-fic: part of the pleasure comes from watching the daring re-imagining of the founding fathers as people of color and their revolutionary anger resonating in the beat of rap, with Hamilton himself as a scrappy immigrant, hungry for glory.

To a classicist, the musical may come across as something else: epic, in the tradition of the great Homeric poems. It recreates the spirit of a protracted revolutionary war and its aftermath with a self-contained linguistic world of rap banter and song, much as the rhythm of the dactylic hexameter and formulaic language creates Homer’s imaginary world.

Hamilton’s revolutionaries would be quite at home in the Iliad; they risk death for honor and fame. “The Story of Tonight,” the song through which the fighters reflect on their historic meeting and imagine themselves as the subjects of future storytelling, is a modern version of the undying glory that Thetis offers Achilles and all Homeric heroes strive for. Both stories explore the tension between the desire for glory in war, and domestic responsibilities. Hamilton may want to “fight, not write,” but his family commitments, a wife and newborn son, pull him in a different direction; this is the Iliad’s “tragedy of Hector,” whose desire for glory conflicts with protecting his family. Even the series of duels, culminating when Hamilton is shot by his uncanny double, Aaron Burr, echo the series of heroic duels of the Iliad, up to the final one between Achilles and Hector.

All of these topics are worthy of essays. But I want to look, instead, at how Hamilton mirrors much of the Iliad’s plot. For the structure of Hamilton might help us gain insight into the formation of the Iliad as a dramatic work of art. Both give dramatic form to their raw material (the history of the Revolution in one case, the vast array of myths about the Trojan War in the other) by turning them into love stories. This may not be the usual interpretation of the Iliad, but it makes sense out of the story. Indeed, the central dramatic dilemma Achilles and Alexander Hamilton face down, and which anchors the plot, is: should love be between equals, or is it part of a social, domestic arrangement, embedding a man in the family he ultimately controls? The similarity in plot of both is tied to how the central characters construct their erotic identities.

To see how this works in the Iliad, consider a recent remake, the 2004 film Troy, directed by Wolfgang Peterson. The film increases the importance of the heterosexual love story between Achilles and Briseis. In the Iliad, Briseis, Achilles’ slave and lover, is re-appropriated by the angry Agamemnon from the spoils of war, and this act sets in motion Achilles’ anger. Not only do we know nothing about Briseis, she quietly disappears from the poem’s story as Achilles’ anger progresses. By the time Agamemnon returns her to Achilles, his intimate, Patroclus, has died, and she hardly seems to matter to him.

But Troy fleshes out Briseis’ character. We see Achilles and Briseis fall in love, banter, argue; she is his primary love interest, and something close to his equal. What of Patroclus? Rather than, at the very least, an intense male friend, he becomes Achilles’ youthful cousin, neatly skipping the vexed question of whether their attachment was erotic. Of course kinship ties and mentorship are hardly able to generate the rage of the Achilles of the Iliad when Patroclus dies.

Still, Troy sheds light on the Iliad’s love story: Achilles’ initial love for the socially inferior Briseis (he loved her “even though she was won by his spear”) is gradually replaced by his love for a social equal, Patroclus. But because this love is only properly acknowledged when Patroclus has been killed, the epic is tragic. We have two different, and competing, kinds of love. The heterosexual bond with Briseis, still a possible bride despite her status (she tells us that Patroclus often urged Achilles to marry her), is contrasted with Achilles’ relationship with Patroclus where, in the tradition of Gilgamesh, the person loved is part of the hero’s search for an equal.

It is pivotal to the plot of the Iliad that Achilles remains unmarried. He experiences both the pull of conventional marriage in the form of Briseis, but also the passion of singing songs of glory alongside Patroclus. Indeed, when Achilles tells of a life choice his mother has said was open to him, between a long, peaceful domestic life in his home town, or a short, glorious one at Troy, each choice implies a different love partner. Patroclus also answers the poem’s central question: what would Achilles be willing to give his life for, if not glory? (Patroclus.) All the crucial moments of the poem’s plot — Achilles’ request to his mother to give help to the enemy, the promotion of Hector as Achilles’ antagonist, even the progress of the war itself, since it will take Hector’s success on the battlefield to draw Patroclus into battle — are stages in this love story.

In Hamilton, the same structure plays itself out. All turns on the two songs sung by the Schuyler sisters. First, Eliza, his future bride, sings “Helpless,” a ballad about her “love at first sight” encounter with Hamilton at the party where they meet. She sees her sister, the more charismatic Angelica, meet Hamilton, and feels a tinge of envy. But their eyes meet, she is “helpless,” and so on. So far so good.

But we later relive these few moments from the perspective of Angelica in “Satisfied.” Before Eliza and Hamilton’s eyes met, there had already been an exchange with the other sister. Hamilton meets her, and recognizes her as himself, someone who “can never be satisfied.” For a moment, Angelica imagines a marriage between equals. But she sees her sister’s face, knows she is “helpless,” and gives Hamilton up, ostensibly to pursue her social duty to marry rich, not the penniless Hamilton.

The form of the songs emphasize the dichotomy. “Helpless,” sung by Eliza with a female chorus formed by her sisters, is a conventional ballad in the tradition of Destiny’s Child. But in “Satisfied,” Angelica enters the predominantly male genre of rap, and the backing chorus, the revolutionary warriors at the wedding, is male. Angelica’s choice determines the parameters for the whole plot. Hamilton will marry Eliza, but remain unsatisfied, longing for Angelica. Angelica will marry rich, but always want Hamilton. Hamilton’s later infidelity, and temporary destruction of his marriage, is already set up and explained here.

We can transpose this love triangle neatly onto the Iliad. For do we not find out, too late, that Achilles can never be “satisfied” by Briseis? Certainly by the time she is returned to him, she is hardly even an afterthought. With hindsight, we find that he may have loved her, but his love is linked to the social status that makes her “helpless,” in need of his protection. But the initial love for her also blocks the depths of his feelings for Patroclus. Miranda has heterosexualized the plot of the Iliad, creating a female equal to Hamilton as counterpoint to the traditional and hierarchical marriage between him and Eliza. But the broad conflict between these different types of love remain.

It is here where things get interesting. For though Miranda has made much of his fidelity to historical fact, the construction of this love plot requires some doctoring.

Hamilton and Angelica had a close, and intense, relationship; Chernow himself is unsure if they were more than friends. But in Chernow’s biography, Angelica was already married when she met Hamilton. Miranda has changed this to make his plot turn around a tragic choice, and one made by the female protagonist, not the male. If we can call the Iliad the “tragedy of Achilles,” inasmuch as his complex sets of choices (and failures to choose) produce the tragedy, then Hamilton is the tragedy of Angelica, and her renunciation of love. But where did Miranda’s own inspiration for this love story come from?

According to Chernow, Hamilton may well have loved an equal when he met Eliza: his comrade, John Laurens. In a phrase that has a whiff of the euphemistic, and which could be easily transferred to how so many have characterized the relationship of Achilles and Patroclus, Chernow refers to the “most intimate friendship” of Hamilton’s life with the “young, blue-eyed” Laurens (Hamilton, 94). The nature of their relationship has been a source of some speculation among historians, and Chernow does not take a side. But the intensity of their affection for each other, as shown in their letters, is at least punctured by Hamilton’s marriage. This is all well known.

So Miranda has transferred the conflict between Hamilton’s (possibly erotic) love for a comrade and a soon-to-be wife into the heterosexual triangle between sisters, with Angelica replacing Laurens. There is no outright denial of the love between Hamilton and Laurens; in fact, Miranda gestures to it. In “My Shot,” Hamilton talks of his affection for Laurens in lines that are nicely homoerotic: “Burr, check what we got./Master Lafayette, hard rock like Lancelot./I think your pants look hot./Laurens, I like you a lot.” But it is a dramatic footnote, not the plot’s hinge.

So where does this leave us? Hamilton, much like the film Troy, heterosexualizes the love triangle available to it from its raw material. But what this tells us about either work of art, and the cultures that produced them, is far from obvious. Both hinge on the power of a love story between equals, though the Iliad privileges the love between men. But whether that love is sexual, and whether the Iliad can be properly called a gay love story, is a notoriously vexed question. This suggests further that both are somehwat reticent about love between men. So I’d now like to take a closer look at the love story between Achilles and Patroclus. To pose the question more starkly: what is at stake in not making Hamilton, or the Iliad, a gay love story?

The Iliad is a story about the love of one man for another. But I suspect scholarly confusion on the nature of the poem’s plot (often focused on efforts to explain Homer’s enigmatic reference to the “plan of Zeus” Il.1.5) is at least reinforced by a reluctance to countenance this love: it comes a little too close to admitting homosexuality into the poem’s core. The scope of epic aids the confusion; the vastness of Homer’s epic world means that it is in some way “about” everything, and thus helps the later readers who sought in it an answer to everything. Nevertheless, at the level of plot, the dramatic turning points all center on Patroclus. In much the same way, Hamilton is “about” all of America, but is all the same structured around the love triangle. Still, to call the Iliad a love story seems to require at least some erotic, and ideally physical, interaction between the two men, and on this topic, there is a lively scholarly debate. I’d like to review it, briefly, and then return to how Hamilton might help shed light on it.

The case against the Iliad as a gay love story is simple. There are simply no erotic, physical interactions between Achilles and Patroclus within the poem. There clearly could have been. A couple of centuries later, the Greek tragic stage will take it for granted that they were lovers. But in the Iliad, they don’t touch even touch other. Or rather, the first time Achilles touches Patroclus is when he is already a corpse. This suggests, at least to me, that not only is there a lack of physicality; that lack, within the poem, is a taboo, and one that is dissolved on Patroclus’ death.

And yet, as with Hamilton’s letters to Laurens, their interactions suggest more. When Achilles sends Patroclus into battle, he outlines a strange fantasy. He dreams of the two of them alone together, with all the Trojans and Greeks dead, sharing the spoils of war (Il.16.96–100). In short, the romantic motif of a couples’ affection for each other blotting out the world, but with a twist: human destruction is desired by Achilles, and presumably to highlight his attachment to their romantic aloneness and togetherness. Earlier, when Agamemnon sent an embassy to Achilles’ tent in order to persuade him to return to battle, they found Achilles and Patroclus singing to each other, their “story of tonight,” in a space that seems peculiarly intimate and domestic.

The most powerful arguments for Achilles’ love comes after Patroclus’ death. He is not just excessively angry; his anger takes on an erotic form. He “longs for” the “manhood” of his dead comrade, is unable to sleep, and writhes around in bed (Il. 24.5–12.) But the most entertaining part of the scholarly debate relies upon the meaning of a single word. Achilles’ grief causes him to suspend all normal human activities: eating, sleeping. So when Achilles’ mother Thetis visits him, and tries to get him to return to the world of the living, she imagines a return to these natural activities, but includes sex: “even to sleep with a woman” is a good thing, she claims (ἀγαθὸν δὲ γυναικί περ ἐν φιλότητι / μίσγεσθ᾽, Il. 24.130–1).

But here the controversy begins. What does the concessive particle “even” mean here? Does she mean “even [to sleep with a woman]” is a good thing? If so, she presumes that the sex would be heterosexual, and that such sex is natural and good. Or does she mean that to sleep with “even a woman” is a good thing? In that case, she seems to know with whom Achilles would rather be sleeping. There are excellent literary reasons for the latter reading. Thetis’ words picks up Achilles’ longing for “manliness,” and his writhing in his bed. Briseis’ status now gets a second downgrade: once loved by Achilles “even though” won by his spear, she is now offered as a secondary sex-object, “even though” a woman.

But the trouble is that this cannot be solved by either grammar or literary criticism; the particle could refer to both, and both sides have their contexts to point to: for one, the lack of overt sexual interactions between the two, for the other, the erotic atmosphere that colors Achilles’ grief.

A solution comes from simply recognizing what is on the surface: however much delight we can take in our own cleverness at noticing the poem’s ambiguity, The Iliad takes care to preserve it as an ambiguity. Even if we “get” the subtext, the gay love story played out after Patroclus’ death remains a subtext. The ambiguity encourages open response to Achilles’ longings: from the simplicity of love for a lost comrade, through the messier ground of strong homoerotic bonds between men, toward overt sexual longing. The plasticity of the the erotic helps the openness. Our most common metaphor for overwhelming feelings is the erotic one; a moment’s consideration of expletives in either language can prove this. Achilles may react erotically to Patroclus’ death. But why, in principle, could the poem not be borrowing from the vocabulary of sex to show the depth of his loss?

So is the Iliad a gay love story? Well, it could be. But that “could” matters, and seems to be built into its narrative. Let us return to the Broadway stage. When Vice President-Elect Mike Pence went to Hamilton shortly after the November 2016 election, there was predictable controversy. At the end of the performance, the lead actor addressed Pence from the stage, outlining the concerns of the cast at the prospect of a Trump administration. He had good reason. Not only was Trump’s rhetoric on immigration in the campaign racist, Pence himself has been a long-time advocate of gay conversion therapy. But when quizzed afterward about the experience, Pence was measured and polite, even praising the show. But imagine the musical had staged a love triangle not between Hamilton and the two Schuyler sisters, but between Hamilton, Eliza, and John Laurens? Would Mike Pence ever have taken his seat?

The marketing for Hamilton relied heavily on the concept of an “American musical,” even as it re-imagined what an American musical looks like. But the advertising campaign also banked on the breadth of its appeal. Despite the hip-hop form, it is remains traditional, and the picture of the Founding Fathers is similarly respectful: founding fathers chic, as it has been called.

In short, Hamilton has it both ways. It is edgy, promotes a multicultural version of America as a community of scrappy immigrants, but leaves many of the crucial myths of America’s self-image intact: America as the land of freedom, opportunity, where striving pays off, where any immigrant can make it with hard work. But, most crucially, it keeps the central love story hexterosexual. Make Alexander Hamilton fall in love with a man on stage, deny that love, and instead choose a conventional marriage with a woman, and everything changes. Perhaps still a national musical, but one more likely to be emblematic of the well-known culture wars of contemporary America, facing boycotts to balance the critical praise.

But does Hamilton not help us see that the Iliad, too, tries to have it both ways? Whether consciously or unconsciously, the reticence (some might say, tact) in gesturing toward a homosexual love points toward a fundamental cultural conflict. What these two epics have in common, then, is that their statuses as national epics offer up a compromise on how sexual love between men is depicted. This, I think, might suggest a fundamental similarity between these epochs: the way men and women express their love for each other, and in particular the ways in which sexual love between men can be explored, remains not just a huge source of interest, but also a problem and potential controversy. The compromises in the plot of both are one reaction to this controversy.

This may not be saying much, but I offer it against facile, historicizing generalizations about Greek views of homosexuality. The currently scholarly debate on the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus has, I suspect, its origins in the original culture that produced the poem, where their love must have already have been a controversy. Both works of art deftly work around that controversy. Or, to phrase it in a more positive fashion: Homer and the Greeks produced an epic that could allow different ways to understand and identify with the ways in which a man could love another man. Just as Miranda, for all his obvious support of gay rights, made a musical that would allow Mike Pence to show up.

Mark Buchan is a former professional classicist, and occasional writer.