Patroclus was the Greek hero of the Iliad whose death drives the central action of the poem. He was the son of Menoetius, one of the Argonauts, and a cousin of Achilles. He had killed a playmate in anger over a game of dice or knucklebones in his childhood, and his father had taken him to the household of Peleus, where he was raised with the younger Achilles. The two were brought up together under the tutelage of the centaur Chiron, and they were, in the language of the Iliad, hetairoi — companions, of the same age and the same training. Patroclus’s death at the hands of Hector, in Book XVI, and Achilles’s grief at the death, in Book XVIII, are the two hinges of the poem. Without Patroclus there is no quarrel, no withdrawal, no embassy, no death of Patroclus, no return of Achilles to battle, no killing of Hector, no ransoming of the body. The Iliad is, in this sense, the story of what happens when Achilles’s closest friend is killed.
The Family and the Early Life
Patroclus was the son of Menoetius, the son of Actor, the son of Aegina and Zeus. Menoetius was one of the Argonauts in the standard list, and the Catalogue of Women attributes to him several other sons besides Patroclus, including Pelion and Sthelenus. The mother of Patroclus, in most sources, was either Philomela or Sthenele. The killing of the playmate in childhood is the central fact of his early life: the boy was wild, the killing was unintentional (or quasi-unintentional, in some sources), and Menoetius, fearing that the child would turn out badly, took him to Peleus in Phthia. Peleus, the father of Achilles, took him in, and he was raised with Achilles under the tutelage of Chiron.
The childhood killing has been read by some modern scholars as a foreshadowing of the death of Achilles: the hero whose thumos (his passionate spirit) is too strong, who kills in anger and is not yet ready to bear the consequences. The Greek term thumos is the right word for what is going wrong: the boy cannot control his anger, and the anger will lead to the killing that leads to the war. The killing of Patroclus at Troy is the cost of this anger, paid not by the original killing of the playmate but by the larger killing at Troy.
Patroclus in the Iliad
Patroclus is not in the Iliad’s first action. He appears in Book I, in the embassy to Achilles, as one of the silent witnesses. He speaks only once in the first half of the poem, in Book IX, when he brings a message to Achilles and is moved to weeping by the hero’s intransigence. The famous speech, in which Patroclus, as a friend, is the one who can speak to Achilles more freely than the heralds can, is one of the most affecting of the Iliad. Patroclus brings the wine, in the standard Greek ritual, and he draws the wine and the meat, but he does not himself sit down to eat. The friend is working, the friend is grieving for the friend.
The death of Patroclus is in Book XVI. The Greeks, hard-pressed at the ships, are at the point of defeat, and Achilles, sulking in his tent, has refused to fight. Patroclus, unable to bear the suffering of the Greeks any longer, comes to Achilles and begs to be allowed to lead the Myrmidons into battle wearing Achilles’s own divine armour. Achilles, weeping, agrees. The armour is, in a way, more important than the man, because the Greeks will see the armour and think they are seeing Achilles, and the Trojans will see the armour and be afraid.
Patroclus, in the armour of Achilles, drove the Trojans back from the ships. He killed many. He saved the Greek ships. He was about to take Troy itself, by the gates, when Apollo intervened. Apollo struck him on the back, knocked the helmet from his head, broke the spear in his hand, stripped the shield from his arm. Hector, taking his chance, ran him through with a spear. The death is brutal, and the description of the body — the twelve men who fall on the corpse, the spear that goes through twelve of them — is the most concentrated violence of the Iliad.
The Burial and the Aftermath
The body of Patroclus is rescued by the Greeks in a fierce fight that occupies Book XVII. Achilles, in his tent, has not yet heard. When the news reaches him, the grief is so great that the Greek messenger is afraid. Achilles weeps. Thetis, his mother, comes up from the sea, and Achilles tells her that he wishes he had died before Patroclus, and that he will kill Hector, and that he will die himself. The prophecy is fulfilled: Achilles kills Hector, and he dies after Hector, in the manner of the Aethiopis.
The funeral games for Patroclus, in Book XXIII, are one of the great set-pieces of the poem. The chariot race, the boxing, the wrestling, the foot-race, the armed combat, the discus, the archery, the spear-throw: twelve events, with elaborate prizes (the first prize is a woman and a tripod, the second a six-year-old mare, and so on). Achilles presides. The funeral games of Patroclus are the only athletic games described in the Iliad, and they became the model for the Greek athletic festival.
The Relationship of Achilles and Patroclus
The question of the precise relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is one of the most-discussed in classical scholarship. The Iliad uses the word hetairos (“companion”) and philos (“friend”), and the word erastos (“lover”) does not appear. The Greek social institution of paiderastia — the older man as the lover and mentor of the younger man, with the sexual relationship as a part of the social structure — was the standard framework of Greek male friendship at this level, and the most natural reading of Achilles and Patroclus is that they were hetairoi in this technical sense. The two were of the same age in most sources (which complicates the standard reading of paiderastia), and the modern scholarly consensus is that Homer does not emphasise the sexual element. Aeschylus, in the Myrmidons (a lost play of the fifth century BCE), is reported to have presented the relationship as a passionate one, and the later Greek tradition made the same assumption.
The Latin and English traditions inherited the assumption. The Renaissance made the relationship openly homoerotic. The twentieth century read it as a tragic friendship, with the loss of the friend the deepest possible loss. Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011) is the most-read modern version, and it retells the Iliad from Patroclus’s point of view, with the relationship at the centre. The book won the Orange Prize for Fiction (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction) in 2012.
The Death of Achilles
Patroclus is the pivot of the Iliad, and the death of Achilles is the consequence of Patroclus’s death. The Aethiopis (the next poem of the Epic Cycle, now lost) tells how Achilles, after the funeral games, returned to battle, killed the Amazon queen Penthesilea (and, in the most affecting variant, fell in love with her as he killed her), killed the Ethiopian king Memnon, and was killed himself by Paris, with Apollo’s help, at the Scaean Gate. The death of Achilles is the second cost of the death of Patroclus, and the cost is what the Iliad is built around.
A Note on Reading the Myth
The Patroclus story is one of the few Greek myths that has been expanded in the modern period, not diminished. The Greek tradition gave us the basic structure (the friend is killed, the hero grieves, the hero returns to battle, the hero dies). The modern tradition has built on that structure, in literature (Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Miller’s The Song of Achilles), in film (the Brad Pitt Troy, in which the relationship is implied but not made explicit), and in scholarship. The fact that the modern tradition is interested in the relationship as a relationship, rather than as a plot point, is one of the major shifts in the reception of Greek myth, and the Patroclus story is the case where the shift is most pronounced.
For more, see the Achilles profile, the Trojan War guide, and the Iliad (Homer’s poem) for the primary text.