That loss hurls Achilles back into combat, driven by a grief so overwhelming that it can still stun and move us.īut who was Patroclus? Why did his death so devastate Achilles? Deprived of Achilles’s godlike skill in combat, tens of thousands of Greeks die as the price of his honor, but it is the death of his friend Patroclus that truly arouses Achilles’s rage. During the siege of Troy, Agamemnon takes the captive girl Briseis from him, and Achilles sulks in his tent rather than fight for the king who humiliated him and stole his new toy. In “The Iliad,” Homer roots Achilles’s wrath in sullenness and injured pride. Read these two books together is my advice. After bogging down in several of those, I had just finished Stephen Mitchell’s propulsive, muscular rendering of “The Iliad” (Free Press, 2011) when Miller’s “ The Song of Achilles” arrived. That pejorative is more aptly applied to florid, opaque translations of Homer. The term “homeric” can be code for overripe prose, sweeping epic plots and a mob of indistinguishable heroic characters. Until I was 60 and writing about Doc Holliday (who read the classics in their original languages), the closest I came to “ The Iliad” was watching Brad Pitt in “ Troy.” Unlike the lucky students of classicist Madeline Miller, I was never exposed to Homer in my youth.
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