Patroklos

Patroclus (puh-TROH-klus), in Greek Πάτροκλος (Patroklos), "glory of the fathers," is the dearest companion of Achilles and one of the most quietly beloved figures in all of Homer — a warrior remembered less for what he did than for what his death set in motion. He is not the strongest of the Greeks at Troy, nor the most cunning; his greatness is of a rarer kind. Homer calls him again and again gentle, kindly, mild — the tender-hearted man among hard killers, the one the captive women wept for because he alone was always kind to them — and it is precisely this gentleness, set against the terrible pride of Achilles, that makes his story break the heart. His name promises ancestral glory, and he wins it, but only in dying, and only through the grief of the man he loved.

From boyhood Patroclus and Achilles were raised together: brought as an exiled child to the court of Achilles' father Peleus, Patroclus was made the elder companion of the young prince, and the two grew up inseparable, tutored together, sent to war together, tent-mates in the long siege before Troy. The Greeks understood their bond as the very model of the loyalty of comrades — and later Greek readers, from the tragedian Aeschylus to Plato's Symposium, read it openly as the love of two men, debating only which of them was the elder and which the beloved. Homer himself never uses the word; he simply shows the thing itself, a love so total that when one dies the other no longer wishes to live.

Patroclus stands at the exact hinge of the Iliad. For most of the poem Achilles sulks in his tent, withdrawn from the war in wrath at Agamemnon, and the Greeks are slaughtered for his absence. It is Patroclus — moved to pity by the dying and the burning ships — who begs to be let into the battle in Achilles' own armour, and who is killed for it by Hector with the help of the god Apollo. That death is the pivot on which the whole epic turns: it takes Achilles' private grievance and burns it into a public, world-ending grief, drives him back into the war he had abandoned, and sets in motion the killing of Hector and, beyond the poem's last line, the fall of Achilles and of Troy itself. To tell the story of Patroclus is to tell the moment the Iliad becomes a tragedy.

The boy exiled for a killing

(Content note: this origin turns on an accidental killing, a child's manslaughter.) Patroclus was the son of Menoetius, a lord of Opus in Locris and one of the Argonauts of the older generation; his father Menoetius was the son of Actor — and he must not be confused with the Titan Menoetius, son of Iapetus, whom Zeus blasted into Erebus in the war of the gods. This Menoetius was a mortal king, and his mother's name the poets give variously (Sthenele, Periopis, Polymele among them). Patroclus's childhood ended in a moment of terrible chance. Playing at dice with another boy, Clysonymus, over a game of knucklebones, the child Patroclus flew into a rage and struck his playmate dead — not from malice but in the sudden fury of a quarrel. For this blood-guilt he could no longer stay in his own city, and his father brought him, a suppliant and an exile, to Phthia, to the house of Peleus.

Raised beside Achilles

Peleus received the exiled boy kindly and reared him in his own halls, and there he made Patroclus the companion and squire of his son Achilles, though Patroclus was the elder of the two. So began the bond that would define both their lives. They were raised together, in some tellings tutored together by the Centaur Chiron on Mount Pelion, and they went to Troy together when the great host was gathered. Homer gives the relationship a piercing tenderness in a small memory: the old horseman Nestor recalls how, when the two young men set out for the war, Patroclus's father Menoetius charged him — because he was the elder and the wiser — always to counsel and steady the hot-tempered Achilles, to speak good sense to him and guide him for his own good. It is a father's ordinary instruction that the poem will turn into unbearable irony, for the one time Patroclus cannot restrain Achilles is the time it costs him his life.

The gentle man in the camp of killers

Through the early books of the Iliad Patroclus is a constant, quiet presence at Achilles' side. When Agamemnon's heralds come to take the captive woman Briseis from Achilles — the insult that begins the whole poem's chain of wrath — it is Patroclus whom Achilles bids bring her out and give her up, and later we learn that Patroclus had comforted the weeping Briseis, promising her he would make her Achilles' wedded wife; she will mourn him at the end as the gentlest of all the Greeks. When the embassy comes by night to plead with Achilles to return to the war, Patroclus is there, ordering the wine and the meat, spreading the couches for the guests. Homer builds him, scene by scene, as the warm centre of Achilles' tent: the man who serves, who soothes, who is kind — so that when the killing comes it lands on someone the reader has learned to love.

The embassy of the Greeks, and Patroclus's pity

As the poem drives on, the withdrawal of Achilles brings the Greeks to the edge of ruin. Zeus, keeping his promise to Achilles' mother Thetis, turns the tide of battle against the Achaeans until Hector and the Trojans press them back against their own ships and begin to set them afire. The greatest of the remaining Greeks are wounded — Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus, the healer Machaon. Achilles, watching from a distance, sends Patroclus to ask after the wounded, and in the tent of Nestor the old man works on Patroclus's soft heart: he reminds him of his duty, and plants the fatal idea — if Achilles will not fight, let him at least lend Patroclus his armour and his Myrmidons, so that the Trojans, thinking Achilles himself has returned, might fall back in terror and give the exhausted Greeks a breathing space. Patroclus goes back through the camp, and on the way he meets the wounded Eurypylus and stops, gentle as ever, to tend his hurt and cut the arrow from his thigh — a small act of healing that shows the man exactly, even as he hurries toward his death.

The plea, and the fatal loan of the armour

(Iliad 16.) Patroclus comes before Achilles weeping, "like a spring that pours its dark water down a cliff," and Achilles gently mocks his tears — why does he cry like a little girl running at her mother's skirts? Then Patroclus makes his plea: the Greeks are dying, the best of them are down, the ships are burning; if some prophecy holds Achilles back, let him at least send Patroclus out in his stead, wearing his armour, leading the fresh Myrmidons, so the Trojans might mistake him for Achilles and be driven from the ships. Achilles, his wrath still unslaked but his heart moved by the burning ships, agrees — but with a strict condition that will haunt the poem: Patroclus is only to drive the Trojans back from the ships and then return; he must not pursue them toward the walls of Troy, must not press on for glory, lest he diminish Achilles' own honour, and lest some god — for Apollo loves the Trojans — strike him down. He arms Patroclus in his own gleaming bronze; only the great Pelian ash spear, which none but Achilles could wield, stays behind. And Achilles prays to Zeus for two things: that Patroclus win glory, and that he come back safe. Zeus, Homer tells us, granted the one and refused the other.

The aristeia — Patroclus drives the Trojans to the walls

Patroclus and the Myrmidons fall on the astonished Trojans like a storm, and at the mere sight of the armour the Trojans quail, sure Achilles has relented and returned. Patroclus drives them back from the ships, quenches the fire, and rallies the broken Greeks — and then, glory rising in him, he forgets the warning. He hunts the fleeing Trojans across the plain, killing man after man in the finest hour of his life. He meets and kills Sarpedon, son of Zeus himself and the greatest of Troy's allies — Zeus weeps tears of blood for his doomed son but lets him fall, and over Sarpedon's body a great battle rages until the god carries the corpse away to Lycia for burial. Drunk on his triumph, Patroclus storms the very wall of Troy, three times scaling the angle of the rampart, three times hurled back by Apollo himself, who warns him in a terrible voice that it is not fated for the city to fall to his spear, nor even to Achilles'. This is the hero's overreach, the pursuit Achilles forbade, and it seals his doom.

The death of Patroclus

(Iliad 16, the climax.) In the press of battle Apollo comes against Patroclus unseen, wrapped in mist, and strikes him a stunning blow between the shoulders with the flat of his hand — and at that stroke the world comes apart for him. The helmet of Achilles is knocked spinning from his head and rolls in the dust (a helmet that had never before touched the ground); his spear shatters in his hand, the shield falls from his shoulder, and the god loosens the corselet from his body. Stripped and dazed and defenceless, Patroclus is speared in the back by a Trojan named Euphorbus, who then flees. And into that opening steps Hector, who drives his bronze spear clean through Patroclus's belly and brings him crashing down. Even dying, Patroclus has the last word: Hector did not conquer him, he says — Apollo felled him, and men, and only third did Hector come to strip a man already ruined; and Hector himself has not long to live, for death and Achilles are already close. With that prophecy on his lips Patroclus dies, and his soul goes down to Hades "bewailing its fate, leaving manhood and youth behind."

The war over the body and the armour

Hector strips the divine armour of Achilles from the corpse and puts it on — a fatal arrogance the gods mark against him — but the body of Patroclus he cannot take, for over it now breaks one of the fiercest struggles in the whole poem (Iliad 17). The Greeks, led by the two Ajaxes and by Menelaus, close ranks around the fallen man; the Trojans strain to drag him away to be mutilated and thrown to the dogs. All through a long and bloody afternoon the two hosts haul the body back and forth across the plain, Homer likening the tug of war to men stretching a great ox-hide. At last the news is carried to Achilles, and even before he can arm, the goddess Iris bids him show himself: Achilles goes to the trench and, with Athena's aid, gives three great unarmed shouts across the field, and at that terrible cry the Trojans fall back in panic, and the Greeks bear Patroclus's body safe out of the battle.

The grief of Achilles — the hinge of the Iliad

When they bring the body to him, Achilles' grief is monstrous and total. He pours black ashes over his head, tears his hair, throws himself in the dust; his cry is so terrible that his mother Thetis hears it in the depths of the sea and comes with her sister Nereids to mourn. All the rage Achilles had nursed against Agamemnon is burned away in an instant and turned outward, into a single consuming purpose: to kill Hector and avenge Patroclus, though he knows — Thetis has told him plainly — that his own death is fated to follow hard upon Hector's. He does not care. This is the pivot of the entire epic: the private quarrel that opened the poem is swallowed by a grief that ends it. Achilles reconciles with Agamemnon, takes back Briseis, and, in new armour forged for him by Hephaestus at Thetis's plea (the great shield of Achilles among it), returns to the war he had abandoned. He hunts Hector down before the walls, kills him, and in his fury lashes the corpse behind his chariot and drags it round the tomb of Patroclus — grief curdled into cruelty, until the gods and the aged king Priam call him back to his humanity. Everything that happens in the last quarter of the Iliad flows from the death of one gentle man.

The funeral and the ghost's last plea

(Iliad 23.) Before he can rest, Achilles must bury his friend. That night the ghost of Patroclus comes to him in sleep, in the very likeness of the living man — his voice, his stature, his eyes, the clothes he wore — and reproaches him gently: bury me quickly, that I may pass the gates of Hades, for the other shades will not let me cross the river until my body is burned. And then the plea that is Patroclus's last and most tender word: let not my bones be laid apart from yours, Achilles, but together, in the one urn — the golden two-handled jar your own mother gave you — even as we were reared together in your house and never parted in life. Achilles reaches to embrace him, and the spirit slips away into the earth like smoke, gibbering. In the morning the Greeks raise a vast pyre; Achilles cuts his own hair to lay in his friend's dead hands, slaughters sheep and cattle and horses and dogs, and — in the poem's darkest act of mourning — twelve captured young men of Troy, to burn beside Patroclus. When the fire has died they gather his white bones and lay them in the golden urn, to wait until Achilles' own bones should join them, and heap a barrow over the place. Then Achilles holds the great funeral games in his honour — the chariot race, the boxing and wrestling, the foot-race, the archery — the most detailed athletic contest in early Greek poetry, staged as the last and highest gift a man can give his dead companion.

After the Iliad

The Iliad ends with the burial of Hector, but the tradition carries Patroclus's story to its promised close. When Achilles himself falls not long after, slain by Paris and Apollo at the Scaean gate, his bones were mingled with Patroclus's exactly as the ghost had begged — the Odyssey (24.76–84) shows the two heroes buried together in a single golden urn on the shore of the Hellespont, with Antilochus beside them, under one great mound raised so high that sailors far out at sea could see it. So the name "glory of the fathers" is fulfilled at last: Patroclus, the gentle exile, lies for all time beside the greatest of the Greeks, their bones not to be told apart.

A hero mourned, and a hero honoured

Patroclus received honour of the kind the Greeks gave to their heroes — the mighty dead whose tombs were sites of cult and whose memory was kept with offerings poured at ground level rather than raised to the sky-gods. His case is a special one, for the Iliad itself, in the funeral of Book 23, effectively stages the founding pattern of Greek hero-honours: the great pyre, the shorn hair laid on the body, the sacrificed animals, the heaping of the barrow, the libations to the dead, and above all the funeral games held at the tomb. Athletic games in honour of a dead hero were a living institution of Greek religion, and the Greeks looked back to the games for Patroclus as their mythic archetype — the first and grandest of them, the model every later funeral contest recalled.

The tomb on the Hellespont

Patroclus's cult, such as it was, was bound up with Achilles' own. The great tumulus on the shore of the Hellespont where their mingled bones were said to lie became one of the famous landmarks of the Troad, shown to travellers for centuries as the tomb of Achilles and his companion. To honour Achilles there was to honour Patroclus beside him, for the two could not be parted even in cult. The most celebrated visitor was Alexander the Great, who, crossing into Asia, ran a race in armour to the tomb and — in the tradition reported by Arrian and Plutarch — laid a wreath on the grave-mound, while his companion Hephaestion garlanded the tomb of Patroclus: the young king consciously casting himself as a new Achilles and Hephaestion as his Patroclus, a re-enactment that shows how powerfully the pair still stood, centuries on, as the very emblem of heroic friendship and love.

The pattern of comradeship

Beyond any single shrine, Patroclus's deepest place in ancient worship and thought was as the archetype of the loyal companion — the therapōn who shares a hero's life and death. His bond with Achilles was cited across Greek culture as the paradigm of the love and loyalty of comrades-in-arms: the tragedian Aeschylus made it the subject of a lost play, the Myrmidons, in which the love between the two was explicit; and in Plato's Symposium the speakers argue over the pair as the highest example of erōs and its power to inspire courage, disputing only who was lover and who beloved. Whether read as friendship or as love, the pair of Achilles and Patroclus gave the Greeks their supreme image of the bond between two men who would die for each other, and that image was itself a kind of cult.

A hero, remembered in the ancient way

Patroclus is a hero of the epic rather than a god, and those in modern Hellenic practice who honour him do so in the key proper to heroes: not as a deity who orders the world, but as a great and beloved shade whose memory is kept and whose example is invoked. The forms are the old ones the Iliad itself preserves — a libation of wine poured out to the dead, given wholly to the earth and not taken back; a candle lit in remembrance; the telling of his story. Because his whole tale honours loyalty, gentleness, and the love between companions, acts of faithfulness and care toward one's own dearest people sit well as a living tribute to him.

The archetype of love and loyalty

Patroclus's real endurance, though, is in literature and in the moral imagination. The bond of Achilles and Patroclus has been read, retold, and argued over for nearly three thousand years, and in the modern era it has come to be widely understood as one of the great love stories of the ancient world — a reading with deep roots in antiquity itself. Recent retellings have brought that reading to a vast new audience: Madeline Miller's novel The Song of Achilles (2011), which tells the whole Iliad from Patroclus's own voice and won the Orange Prize, made him for many readers the emotional centre of the Trojan story, the gentle man through whose eyes the wrath of Achilles is seen and grieved. His name has become, in this way, almost a synonym for the beloved companion whose loss undoes a greater hero.

The gentleness at the heart of the war-poem

What the modern world finally inherits from Patroclus is the thing Homer put at the centre of him: gentleness in the midst of slaughter. In a poem about rage and killing and the pitiless machinery of fate, Patroclus is the tender heart — the man who wept for the dying Greeks, who was kind to the captive women, who stopped in the middle of a rout to cut an arrow from a wounded friend's thigh. It is fitting, and deeply Homeric, that the death which turns the whole Iliad should be the death not of its mightiest fighter but of its kindest man; and that the greatest of heroes should be broken not by an enemy's spear but by grief for the one he loved. Patroclus endures as the reminder, set in the oldest war-story of the West, that what makes the loss of a life unbearable is not its strength but its gentleness.