The Beloved's Honor: Correcting Aeschylus on Achilles
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Phaedrus — τιμωρήσας οὐ μόνον ὑπεραποθανεῖν ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐπαποθανεῖν τετελευτηκότι, ὅθεν δὴ καὶ ὑπεραγασθέντες οἱ θεοὶ διαφερόντως αὐτὸν ἐτίμησαν, ὅτι τὸν ἐραστὴν οὕτω περὶ πολλοῦ ἐποιεῖτο. Αἰσχύλος δὲ φλυαρεῖ φάσκων Ἀχιλλέα Πατρόκλου ἐρᾶν, ὃς ἦν καλλίων οὐ μόνον Πατρόκλου ἀλλʼ ἅμα καὶ τῶν ἡρώων ἁπάντων, καὶ ἔτι ἀγένειος, ἔπειτα νεώτερος πολύ, ὥς φησιν Ὅμηρος. ἀλλὰ γὰρ τῷ ὄντι μάλιστα μὲν ταύτην τὴν ἀρετὴν οἱ θεοὶ τιμῶσιν τὴν περὶ
Having taken revenge, he resolved not only to die on his behalf but even to die after him, once he had died. And so, admiring him all the more, the gods honored him more distinctly, because he valued the lover so highly. But Aeschylus talks nonsense in claiming that Achilles loved Patroclus — he who was more beautiful, not only than Patroclus but also than the heroes, every one of them, and still beardless, and besides, much younger, as Homer says. But in truth, most highly this virtue do the gods honor — the one concerning…
Continuing directly from 179e's account of Achilles's vengeance for Patroclus, this unit reports why the gods honored Achilles even more than Alcestis: it was the beloved, not the lover, who prized the tie so highly. Phaedrus then turns on Aeschylus, who had cast Achilles as the older erastes wooing Patroclus, and calls it nonsense — Homer's own text makes Achilles the more beautiful, still-beardless, and much younger of the two. The sentence breaks off mid-clause and continues into 180b, where Phaedrus names the virtue the gods honor most.
The argument turns on a piece of social bookkeeping Phaedrus expects his audience to supply without being told. In Athenian convention the erastes is the active party, older and driven by desire; the eromenos is younger, beardless, and merely consents to being desired. A poet who makes the younger, prettier partner do the pursuing, as Aeschylus does, has on this logic gotten the roles backward, and Phaedrus treats that as a factual error rather than a poetic choice. His proof is entirely physical: beauty, no beard, fewer years. What the argument buys him is bigger than a correction of Aeschylus. If the beloved's devotion counts for more with the gods than the lover's, then the passive half of the pederastic pair, the one who is chosen rather than the one who chooses, turns out to hold the more honored position. That is a striking thing for Phaedrus in particular to be arguing: in the dialogue that carries his name, he is the young man Socrates finds sitting under a plane tree memorizing somebody else's speech, cast throughout as the one who is courted, not the one who courts. Here, without naming himself, he is quietly arguing that his own place in that arrangement was the more godlike one all along.
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