This is one of a few posts dedicated to Iliad 19. As a reminder, these posts will remain free, but there is an option to be a financial supporter. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
Following the political reconciliation, book 19 of the Iliad shifts back to the personal, exploring further the impact of Patroklos’ death on others.
Homer, Iliad 19. 309-340
“He said this and dispersed the rest of the kings, But the two sons of Atreus remained along with shining Odysseus, Nestor, Idomeneus, and the old horse-master Phoinix All trying to bring him some distraction. But he took no pleasure In his heart before he entered the jaws of bloody war. He sighed constantly as he remembered and spoke: ‘My unlucky dearest of friends it was you who before Used to offer me a sweet meal in our shelter Quickly and carefully whenever the Achaeans were rushing To bring much-lamented Ares against the horse-taming Achaeans. But now you are lying there run-through and my fate Is to go without drink and food even though there inside Because I long for you. I couldn’t suffer anything more wretched than this Not even if I learned that my father had died, Who I imagine is crying tender tears right now in Pththia Bereft of a son like this—but I am in a foreign land, Fighting against the Trojans for the sake of horrible Helen. Not even if I lost my dear son who is being cared for in Skyros, If godlike Neoptolemos is at least still alive— Before the heart in my chest always expected that I alone would die far away from horse-nourishing Argos Here in Troy, but that you would return home to Phthia I hoped you would take my child in the swift dark ship From Skyros and that you would show to him there My possessions, the slaves, and the high-roofed home. I expect that Peleus has already died or If he is still alive for a little longer he is aggrieved By hateful old age and as he constantly awaits Some painful message, when he learns that I have died.” So he spoke while weeping, and the old men mourned along with him As each of them remembered what they left behind at home. And Zeus [really] felt pity when he saw them mourning
Sosias (potter, signed). Painting attributed to the Sosias Painter (name piece for Beazley, overriding attribution) or the Kleophrades Painter (Robertson) or Euthymides (Ohly-Dumm)
This speech follows Briseis’ lament for Patroklos and provides opportunities for thematic and metapoetic reflection. First, when it comes to the content of the speech, Achilles moves through a range of motifs that echo Briseis’ invocation of her dead relatives and the re-location of her hopes for continued life in Achilles (as promised by Patroklos). As Casey Dué observes, these themes are echoes of what Andromache says to Hektor in book 7. There is a significant difference in Achilles’ rumination, however: where Andromache and Briseis invest a single person with the lost hopes of larger families, Achilles projects the loss of a single person on his living father and son. Andromache and Briseis try to find some comfort in life for the loss of many in the hopes of one while Achilles allows the loss of one to articulate his separation from everyone else.
In doing so, Achilles articulates a collapse between himself and Patroklos. His speech is remarkable because he does not mourn his own loss of life (as is clear from his speech in Iliad 18) but instead shows that his hope for life after death was based in Patroklos out-living him. And the way he talks about this frames them as replacements for each other, inverting what actually happens in the Iliad. In book 16, Patroklos literally takes Achilles’ place in battle, wearing his armor as one might a lover’s clothes and facing death in his stead. In book 19, Achilles shows that he expected Patroklos to replace him in life, to take his place as a surrogate father to Neoptolemos, returning him to the home he has never seen to meet the grandfather he has never known.
The elision of identity in Achilles’ speech is facilitated in part by the way he uses Homeric language. There are ambiguities that may leave the audience briefly lost, but they also point to the overlap in Achilles’ mind: consider line 314/5 where Achilles says of Peleus that he is “bereft of a son like this, but he [I] am fighting in a foreign land....” (χήτεϊ τοιοῦδ' υἷος· ὃ δ' ἀλλοδαπῷ ἐνὶ δήμῳ / εἵνεκα ῥιγεδανῆς ῾Ελένης Τρωσὶν πολεμίζω). It is very difficult to convey in English the postponement of meaning in these lines. The qualitative demonstrative τοιοῦδ' (“of this kind of...”) modifies the word “son” (υἷος), yet, given the context it is unclear whether Achilles is referring to himself as the kind of person Peleus mourns over or Patroklos.
The following words make it clear to me that he likely means Patroklos, at first. After using the demonstrative, Achilles shifts to the nominative singular article ὃ followed by what Egbert Bakker has called the discourse shifting particle δ'. The significance of this technical terminology is that in Homer the combination of a stated article with the particle (ὃ δ') frequently indicates a subject change. In this case, it increases the case that we are supposed to imagine Achilles as in some way contrasting the referent of the demonstrative “someone like this” with pronoun.
But it is even more dizzying, because it is not clear from that ὃ δ' that Achilles is talking about himself and not another person until the end of the following line when we get to the first-person verb πολεμίζω. The closest English approximation would be something like “bereft of a son just like this while this guy in a foreign land, for the sake of horrible Helen, I, am fighting the Trojans”. And if it is somewhat unconvincing that the movement from the demonstrative to the pronoun χήτεϊ τοιοῦδ' υἷος· ὃ δ' indicates a shift in thinking about Patroklos to Achilles, some lines later Achilles moves back to Patroklos clearly in contrasting them when he imagines that he was going to die “here in Troy, but you [Patroklos] would return home...” The adverbial αὐτοῦ ἐνὶ Τροίῃ breaks at the same metrical position in the line as χήτεϊ τοιοῦδ' and is followed with σὲ δέ just as the earlier was followed by ὃ δ'. And I don’t think the impact is unclear: Achilles struggles in that first part of the speech to distinguish between his grief and the object of his grief, but when he articulates his lost hopes from the past he can clearly say that he expected to die but that Patroklos would live in his place.
The unfolding associations of replacement and surrogacy should make us, as an audience, reconsider what happens in Iliad 16. Lenny Muellner long ago shared with me an unpublished talk in honor of his Steven Lowenstam who passed away too early. In it, he builds from Lowenstam’s dissertation The Death of Patroclus: A Study in Typology to make observations on the relationship of Achilles and Patroklos. Lowenstam’s dissertation in part explores how the therapon (attendant, ‘henchman’, assistant) may be related to an ancient Hittite practice of a figure who takes a king’s place and dies in his place in battle. Here, Achilles shows that he imagined himself as the one to die in battle and Patroklos as the one to live on in his place. Lenny explains:
“The origin, in fact, of the modern psychological term alter ego is Patroklos himself. It is actually a Latin translation of a Greek proverb that defines the Greek word philos, the word that we translate ‘friend,’: ti esti philos? the proverb goes, 'what is a friend?'; the answer is allos ego, 'another I,' an alter ego. And the epic tells us that Patroklos is Achilles’s philtatos hetairos, ‘most philoscompanion.’ The German Classicist Erwin Rohde applied this designation to Patroklos in his masterpiece, Psyche; from there it apparently entered the vocabulary of Freud and Jung, perhaps via Nietzsche.”
Lenny goes on to explore via the work of the child psychologist D. W. Winnicott the tension between Achilles treating Patroklos as a metaphor for himself (when he goes in his place in book 16) and as a metonym, when Achilles sees Patroklos’ death as in fact his own and not a representation of it in book 18. This follow up speech in book 19 (which Lenny leaves for others to figure out) shows Achilles roiling with pain at the violent resolution of this tension: when he articulates his hope that Patroklos would have been his therapon in life. As Lenny writes, the pain Achilles expresses in book 18 is related in part to the core meaning of philos, “friend, near and dear” to indicate something so close and important as to be a part of oneself.
Despite all this, what I think is missing from Achilles at this moment is the realization that in his imagined future, Patroklos would have been as broken and fragmented without Achilles as Achilles is without him now. And the ability to understand this, to see other’s realness through one’s own grief is the space Achilles has still to travel before he meets Priam in book 24.
It is in this potential for narrative to bridge that space between oneself and others that I think this scene has more yet to teach us. Achilles’ speech is also amazing for its internal and external framing and what they both reveal about how Homeric poetry works. For the first, consider Achilles’ rejection of food. Scholars often write that once Patroklos has died, Achilles symbolically enters the realm of the dead—he refuses to eat or engage with the living. I don’t think this is at all wrong, but the Homeric narrative also offers a more immediate cause: Achilles says he does not want to eat because Patroklos is the one who used to feed him. A scholion is particularly insightful here in sensing the associative leaps in Achilles’ grief.
Schol. bT ad Hom. Il.19.316a ex
“you offered me a sweet meal”: the lament [responds]to what has just happened. For they were begging him to eat, and he was reminded of the table on which his friend used to serve him often. . It is customary to talk to the dead as if to the living. And what he means is that what is sweet is a meal offered to him by the hands of someone he loves.”
As anyone who has ever lost a loved one knows, the magnitude of death is inconceivable. We absorb the basic fact of it but the shape of someone’s absence in a life built around them is impossible to grasp at once: we lose them again in countless different ways as we witness our lives without them. Achilles does not care about the food, he is undone by the reminder of living with Patroklos and the future meals he will never share with him.
Grief is associative and unpredictable, it moves like water, filling the space open to it, dripping, trickling, relentless. This passage helps us see as well how Achilles’ grief is metonymic for his own loss and others as well, and this is part of the external poetics I mentioned above. Note how the speech’s introduction positions Achilles as mourning constantly “as he recalled” (μνησάμενος δ' ἁδινῶς...). The end of the speech reminds us that other people are listening to him as well and are changed and moved in turn by his mourning. The Greek elders mourn in addition (ἐπὶ δὲ στενάχοντο γέροντες) and not because of Patroklos, but as they recall what they have left behind (μνησάμενοι τὰ ἕκαστος ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ἔλειπον).
Achilles’ grief presents a narrative they see themselves in, they project their experiences into his pain and grieve alongside him, anticipating to a great part that powerful moment in book 24 when Achilles and Priam find in each other a reminder to weep for what they have individually lost. And this is clear from Priam’s own language, echoing the narrator’s Zeus: “But revere the gods, Achilles, and pity him, / thinking of your own father. And I am more pitiable still...”(ἀλλ' αἰδεῖο θεοὺς ᾿Αχιλεῦ, αὐτόν τ' ἐλέησον / μνησάμενος σοῦ πατρός· ἐγὼ δ' ἐλεεινότερός περ, 24.503-4)
I have written on several occasions about Mark Turner’s approach to narrative in The Literary Mind. He suggests that what happens when we experience stories is that we don’t recreate the world the story comes from but instead create a blend between the world of our stories and our own experiences. In doing so, we transform narratives and are transformed by it. Another step I usually emphasize is that while our own blending of narratives and the world are idiopathic, connected to our own unique and embodied experiences, we can bring our narrative worlds closer together by sharing them with other people, by measuring our responses to theirs: the iterative, collective responses to Achilles’ lament are poised on that shift from the realization of the other in the individual and the (re)creation of a shared understanding in collectivized reactions.
This moment is a crucial confirmation of the Homeric expectation that words and experiences people hear should (and do) prompt reflection on their own lives (as well as the situation in general). The sequence also anticipates other audiences as well. A simple but extremely useful distinction from narratology (the way narratives are structured and work) is between internal and external audiences. Internal audiences are characters within a narrative who observe and (sometimes) respond to what is going on. External audiences are those outside the narrative (mostly those in the ‘real’ world). A theoretical suggestion from this is that the responses of internal audiences can guide or often complicate the way external audiences receive the narrative.
Achilles’ lament for Patroklos has more than one internal audience. First, as we have just seen, the elders of the Achaeans join Achilles’ mourning and move through it to reflecting on their own lives. Such a move is anticipated right before Achilles’ speech when the women around Briseis join her in mourning:
Homer, Iliad 19.301-308
“So she spoke in mourning, and the woman joined them in grieving Over Patroklos as a beginning [prophasis], but each of them [then] their own pains. Then the elders of the Achaeans gathered around him As they were begging him to eat, but he was denying them as he mourned: ‘I am begging you, if anyone of my dear companions is listening to me, Not to tell me to fill my dear heart with either food or drink When this terrible grief [akhos] has come over me. I will wait and I will hold out steadfastly until the sun goes down.”
Briseis’ mourning is something of gateway for the women who mourn along with them. The Homeric narrative did not have to be this specific about the content of their mourning. And the language itself is somewhat uncommon for Homer: the only other time the word prophasis appears in Homer is under 100 lines previous when Agamemnon swears he never had sex with Briseis (οὔτ' εὐνῆς πρόφασιν κεχρημένος οὔτέ τευ ἄλλου, 262). Here, we might translate prophasis as a ‘pretext’ or ‘excuse’. But in the narrative of the women mourning, these English translations seem too dismissive or pejorative. Perhaps ‘prelude’ is more appropriate, but even this seems insufficient convey the sense of beginning and transition, that slippage from looking outward to inward, that movement from someone else’s story to your own.
And these women are far from the scene’s final audience. Another internal audience appears when we find out Zeus is watching the scene and he feels pity: together the women, the elders, and Zeus present a range of potential reactions for external audiences: the mortals reflect on their own lives and the losses they suffer or those to come. Zeus watches it all and feels pity and tries to do something to help, sending Athena to provide Achilles with the sustenance he will not take on his own. Here, we might even imagine the narrative offering an ethical imperative to response to other’s stories. It is not enough to think about yourself or merely to be moved to pity by seeing the reality that others may feel as deeply and painfully as you. Zeus’s model suggests that if you are in power and can do something to intervene, even something minor, when you notice another’s suffering, then you should do what you can.
A short Bibliography on Patroklos and Achilles
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Allan, William. “Arms and the man: Euphorbus, Hector, and the death of Patroclus.” Classical Quarterly, N. S., vol. 55, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1-16. Doi: 10.1093/cq/bmi00
Anderson, Warren D. “Achilles and the Dark Night of the Soul.” The Classical Journal 51, no. 6 (1956): 265–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3292885.
Emily P. Austin, Grief and the hero: the futility of longing in the Iliad. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.
Burgess, Jonathan. “Beyond Neo-Analysis: Problems with the Vengeance Theory.” The American Journal of Philology 118, no. 1 (1997): 1–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1562096.
Clark, Mark Edward, and William D. E. Coulson. “Memnon and Sarpedon.” Museum Helveticum 35, no. 2 (1978): 65–73. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24815318.
Fantuzzi, M. 2012. Achilles in Love. Oxford.
Gaca, Kathy L. “Reinterpreting the Homeric Simile of ‘Iliad’ 16.7-11: The Girl and Her Mother in Ancient Greek Warfare.” The American Journal of Philology 129, no. 2 (2008): 145–71. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27566700.
Karakantza, Efimia D.. “Who is liable for blame ? : Patroclus’ death in book 16 of the « Iliad ».” Έγκλημα και τιμωρία στην ομηρική και αρχαϊκή ποίηση : από τα πρακτικά του ΙΒ' διεθνούς συνεδρίου για την Οδύσσεια, Ιθάκη, 3-7 Σεπτεμβρίου 2013. Eds. Christopoulos, Menelaos and Païzi-Apostolopoulou, Machi. Ithaki: Kentro Odysseiakon Spoudon, 2014. 117-136.
Kesteren, Morgan van. “ERASTES-EROMENOS RELATIONSHIPS IN TWO ANCIENT EPICS.” CrossCurrents 69, no. 4 (2019): 351–64. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26851797.
Ledbetter, Grace M. “Achilles’ Self-Address: Iliad 16.7-19.” The American Journal of Philology 114, no. 4 (1993): 481–91. https://doi.org/10.2307/295421.
Lesser, Rachel. 2022. Desire in the Iliad: The Force That Moves the Epic and Its Audience.Oxford.
Lowenstam, Steven. “Patroclus' death in the Iliad and the inheritance of an Indo-European myth.” Archaeological News, vol. VI, 1977, pp. 72-76.
Lowenstam, Steven. 1981. The Death of Patroclus: A Study in Typology.
MUELLNER, L. Metonymy, Metaphor, Patroklos, Achilles. Classica: Revista Brasileira de Estudos Clássicos, [s. l.], v. 32, n. 2, p. 139–155, 2019. DOI 10.24277/classica.v32i2.884
Muellner, L. Unpublished Paper in Honor of Steven Lowenstam.
Warwick, C. (2019). The Maternal Warrior: Gender and Kleos in the Iliad. American Journal of Philology140(1), 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2019.0001.
