Patroclus

A boy brought out of Opous

Patroclus gives his own origin in the Iliad, Homer’s poem of the war at Troy, and he gives it late, as a ghost. His father Menoetius brought him as a small boy from Opous, a town in Locris on the Greek mainland, to the country of Peleus, Achilles’s father. They came because of a killing at home. The dead boy was a son of Amphidamas, and Patroclus says he killed him in his folly, in anger over the dice, without willing it. Peleus took him into the house, reared him with care and named him squire to Achilles.

Strabo, a geographer of the ancient world, reports the same flight from Opous and adds that Menoetius stayed behind in Locris. Strabo also records a local tradition that names the boy Patroclus killed as Aeanes, with a sacred precinct and a spring in Opuntian Locris called after him.

The errand that began the harm

In Book 11 of the Iliad the Greeks are losing. Achilles stands by the stern of his ship, sees a wounded man carried out of the fighting, and calls Patroclus from the hut to go and ask Nestor, the warder of the Achaeans, who the man is. Patroclus comes out, and Homer stops the scene to say what nobody in it knows: “and this to him was the beginning of evil.”

On the way back Patroclus meets a second wounded man, Eurypylus, with an arrow in his right thigh. Eurypylus asks him for the treatment he is known to have learned from Achilles, who learned it from Chiron, the centaur Homer calls the most righteous of his kind. Patroclus takes him to his own hut, cuts the arrow out with a knife, washes the black blood away with warm water, and rubs in a bitter root that stops the pain and dries the wound.

Into the armour of Achilles

By Book 16 the Trojans have reached the Greek ships and set fire to them. Achilles tells Patroclus to put on his armour, and Patroclus arms himself in it piece by piece. He leaves one weapon behind. The spear is Pelian ash from the peak of Pelion, given by Chiron to Peleus, and Homer says that no Achaean but Achilles could wield it, so Patroclus goes out carrying two spears that fit his grasp.

Achilles calls him, in that scene, Zeus-born and hippokeleuthe, a word for the man who drives the horses, and English translation gives it as master of horsemen. The name itself stands in the Greek as Patroklos, beside the longer form Homer uses when Achilles calls to him aloud.

Sarpedon, and the fourth rush

Patroclus drives the Trojans back and kills Sarpedon, the leader of the Lycian shield-bearers, with a spear cast into the midriff. He sets his foot on the dead man’s breast and draws the spear out of him.

Then he goes forward three times, shouting, and three times kills nine men. On the fourth rush the poem breaks off from the fighting and speaks to him directly to tell him his life is ending. Homer has already given the ending away once, at the hut in Book 11, and he gives it away again here while Patroclus is still winning.

The three who killed him

Apollo, a son of Zeus, takes his stand behind Patroclus, hidden in mist, and strikes his back and broad shoulders with the flat of his hand. The helmet of Achilles rolls away under the horses’ feet, the spear breaks in his hands and the corselet is loosed from him. Euphorbus, son of Panthous, spears him in the back between the shoulders, pulls the weapon out again and runs back into the crowd. Hector comes last. He is Priam’s son, and Zeus has already granted him the helmet of Achilles to wear on his own head. He kills Patroclus with a thrust into the lower belly, driven clean through, as the disarmed man is drawing back.

Dying, Patroclus names his killers in their order: fate and Apollo first, then Euphorbus among men, and Hector third. His last words tell Hector that death and mighty fate stand close to him too, at the hands of Achilles. Hector answers the prophecy by asking who knows whether he might kill Achilles first.

One urn, and a barrow left for later

In Book 23 the ghost of Patroclus stands over the head of the sleeping Achilles, in his stature and his voice and his clothes, and asks to be buried quickly so that it can pass the gates of Hades. The other spirits keep it off and will not let it cross the river. Then it asks for the thing it came for: that their bones lie together in one golden urn with two handles, the urn Achilles’s mother gave him, because the two of them were reared in one house.

Achilles does as he is asked. At dawn the bones are singled out from the pyre, easy to tell apart because Patroclus lay in the middle of it, and they are wrapped in fat and laid in the urn. He wants no great mound raised, only one that is fitting, and tells the Achaeans to build it broad and high after his own death. Then the prizes come out of the ships and the funeral games begin.

What survives outside the poem

Apollodorus, who collected the Greek myths in a book called the Library, names Patroclus in one other list. He closes the roll of suitors who went to Sparta to win Helen with Patroclus, son of Menoetius.

An Attic red-figure drinking cup of about 500 BC, signed on the foot by its potter Sosias, carries on its inside Achilles dressing an arrow wound in Patroclus’s left arm, with both men named by inscriptions. Achilles is in helmet and corselet; Patroclus wears only the cap that pads a helmet out. The painter’s ancient name is not known. The cup was made in Athens and found in a tomb at Vulci in Etruria, and it is held in the Antikensammlung in Berlin.