Patroclus: The Companion Whose Death Changed the Trojan War

Patroclus, son of Menoetius of Opus and closest companion of the hero Achilles, is one of the most poignant figures in the Iliad. He is not among the greatest warriors at Troy, nor is he the son of a god or bearer of prophetic destiny. He is, instead, the most human character in Homer's poem: compassionate where Achilles is proud, gentle where Achilles is fierce, concerned for the suffering of others where Achilles is consumed by personal honor.

Yet Patroclus's death is the single most consequential event in the Iliad. When he falls at Hector's hands, the Greek army loses a capable warrior, but Achilles loses the person who made him human. The grief that follows is the fiercest and most elemental emotion in the entire poem, transforming Achilles from a sulking hero withholding his services over a point of honor into a force of nature bent purely on destruction and vengeance. Without Patroclus, there is no return of Achilles, no killing of Hector, and no progression toward Troy's eventual fall.

The bond between Achilles and Patroclus was celebrated in antiquity as one of the supreme examples of philia, deep, devoted friendship or love. Whether that bond was understood as erotic or purely as an intense warrior-comradeship was debated even in antiquity; Plato in the Symposium treated them as lovers, while Homer himself is deliberately ambiguous. What is not ambiguous is that for Achilles, the death of Patroclus was a wound deeper than any weapon could inflict.

Patroclus was the son of Menoetius, king of the small Locrian city of Opus in central Greece, and his wife Sthenele (or Polymele in alternate versions). His family was connected to the broader network of heroic lineages: Menoetius was an Argonaut and a companion of Heracles in some traditions, giving Patroclus a respectable heroic ancestry even if it was far less distinguished than that of Achilles.

As a child, Patroclus committed an act of accidental violence that would change his life and bind him to his great companion. While still a boy, accounts vary on his precise age, some saying he was quite young, he quarreled with a companion named Clysonymus (or Aeanes in some versions) over a game of dice or knucklebones and struck the boy dead in a fit of anger. The killing was unintentional, but Menoetius was obligated to send his son into exile to atone for the bloodguilt.

He was sent to the court of King Peleus of Phthia in Thessaly, the father of Achilles. There he was received as a foster-son and companion to the young prince. The two boys grew up together in Peleus's household, trained by the centaur Chiron on Mount Pelion according to some accounts. Patroclus was older than Achilles, the Iliad makes this clear, and the relationship between them had a dimension of guidance and tenderness as well as comradeship: Patroclus was in some sense the steadying, gentle older companion to the blazing, volatile Achilles.

When Achilles joined the Greek expedition to Troy, Patroclus went with him as his inseparable companion. His father Menoetius gave him explicit instructions before the voyage: since Achilles was the greater warrior, Patroclus should use his wisdom and experience to counsel and guide the younger man. The irony is devastating, Patroclus would die precisely because he tried to do exactly that, pressing forward in battle when Achilles had warned him not to go too far.

For the first nine years of the Trojan War, Patroclus fought alongside Achilles and the Myrmidons, the elite Thessalian warriors who formed Achilles' personal contingent. The Iliad does not dwell on his deeds in this period, but it is clear he was a respected and capable warrior, if not among the very top tier of Greek champions like Achilles, Ajax, or Diomedes.

When Achilles quarreled with Agamemnon over the captive Briseis in the first book of the Iliad and withdrew from battle, Patroclus withdrew with him. He shared Achilles' tent, his meals, and his self-imposed exile from the fighting, a loyalty that cost the Greek army dearly as the Trojans, freed from fear of Achilles, pressed the siege with devastating effect.

One important episode before his final entry into battle: when the Greek embassy came to Achilles' tent to persuade him to return to the fighting, Patroclus was present. He accompanied Achilles in receiving the ambassadors with formal hospitality, preparing food and wine, while Achilles played his lyre and sang of the klea andron, the glorious deeds of men. Patroclus is given the specific task of preparing the food and setting out the dinner, a domestic detail that characterizes him throughout the poem as the warm, practical, caring presence beside the brilliant but volatile Achilles.

He also showed his compassion in the care of the wounded hero Eurypylus: while the other Greeks fought, Patroclus stopped to tend the wounded man's arrow wound, cutting out the shaft and applying healing herbs. This scene establishes his character as a man moved by others' suffering, and it is the sight of more Greek casualties, combined with his inability to watch his comrades dying while Achilles sulks, that eventually drives him to his fatal request.

Patroclus's single greatest feat is also his last: the sortie in Achilles' armor, which turned the tide of the war at the ships and ended in his death.

When Hector finally breached the Greek defensive wall and fighting reached the very ships, Patroclus could no longer bear to watch. He went to Achilles with tears streaming, and Achilles, moved but not yet willing to return himself, gave him permission to lead the Myrmidons into battle wearing Achilles' own armor. The divine armor, a gift from the gods, would make the Trojans believe Achilles himself had returned, and the psychological shock might drive them back from the ships. Achilles set one strict condition: once the ships were safe, Patroclus must return. He must not pursue the Trojans back toward the walls of Troy.

Patroclus led the Myrmidons out and the effect was immediate and shattering. The Trojans, seeing what appeared to be Achilles, broke in terror. Patroclus drove them back from the ships in a routing pursuit, killing many. Among his most significant kills was Sarpedon, the son of Zeus himself and co-commander of the Lycian allies, one of the most powerful warriors in the entire Trojan coalition. The death of Sarpedon, which Zeus watched without intervening because his son's fate was sealed, is one of the Iliad's great tragic passages.

But carried away by success, Patroclus did exactly what Achilles had warned him not to do: he pressed on toward the walls of Troy. Three times he attempted to scale the wall; three times Apollo himself pushed him back, saying that it was not fated for Troy to fall to Patroclus. On the fourth charge, Apollo struck him from behind, knocking off his helmet and striking the spear from his hand. Euphorbus wounded him with a spear thrust from behind. Patroclus, dazed and disarmed, was then confronted by Hector, who drove his spear through him and killed him.

His dying words to Hector contained a prophecy: Achilles would avenge him, and Hector himself would not live long. The body of Patroclus then became the center of the war's most fierce and brutal fighting, as both sides struggled to possess it.

Patroclus's primary ally was Achilles, the entire foundation of his life at Troy, his companion since boyhood, the warrior whose fame he shared and whose anger he could not ultimately prevent himself from trying to remedy. Their relationship was the emotional core of the Iliad.

The Myrmidons, Achilles' elite Thessalian warriors, followed Patroclus willingly into his final battle. They respected him as Achilles' companion and accepted his leadership in their master's absence. His relationship with the Myrmidons illustrates his quiet authority: he was not the sort of hero who inspired through blazing charisma, but through steady reliability and genuine concern.

Ajax the Great and Menelaus were his most important allies in the desperate defense of his body after he fell. These two warriors stood over his corpse and fought off the entire Trojan army while messengers ran to bring Achilles the news of his death, a defense that required immense courage and lasted until Ajax could finally carry the body to safety.

His enemies were, in order of responsibility for his death: Apollo, who stripped his armor, struck him senseless, and declared the limits of his fate; Euphorbus, a Trojan warrior who struck the first wound; and Hector, who delivered the killing blow. In the aftermath, the Trojans fought ferociously to strip his body of Achilles' divine armor, which Hector claimed and wore, knowing that its possession would enrage the Greeks' greatest champion.

Patroclus's death is narrated in Book Sixteen of the Iliad with a careful, almost slow-motion quality that emphasizes its inevitability. Homer shows him at the height of his success, routing Trojans, killing Sarpedon, fighting as if he truly were Achilles, and then shows the exact moment when the gods withdraw their protection and the outcome turns.

Apollo's intervention is presented not as malice but as fate: the god comes at Zeus's direction to enforce the boundary of what is destined. The detail of Achilles' helmet falling to the ground in the dust, that famous plumed helmet that Patroclus had no right to wear, being a mortal, is Homer's signal that the divine protection Achilles' armor represented could not extend to a man who was not its rightful bearer.

The news of Patroclus's death reaches Achilles through his companion Antilochus in Book Eighteen, one of the poem's most shattering passages. Achilles falls to the ground, tears out his hair, and pours dust over himself. His divine mother Thetis, hearing his cry of grief from the depths of the sea, comes to him. His lament is total: he says he wants to die, that life without Patroclus has no meaning, and that his one desire is to kill Hector. Thetis tries to comfort him but knows he has chosen the path of his own early death, the ancient prophecy that a life of great glory would be a short one.

The elaborate funeral Achilles gives Patroclus, including the sacrifice of twelve Trojan captives on the pyre, which Homer presents unflinchingly as a measure of Achilles' grief rather than as admirable, shows how completely Patroclus's death has unmade him. At the funeral games held in Patroclus's honor, Achilles distributes magnificent prizes to the winners, a moment of structured order amid his chaos of grief.

Patroclus was worshipped as a hero alongside Achilles at Achilles' sanctuary on the White Island (Leuke) in the Black Sea, a blessed island where ancient tradition held that the souls of Achilles and his companions lived on in a state of heroic happiness. The two were venerated together as inseparable in death as they had been in life.

Hero cults for Patroclus existed at several sites, including at Sparta, where the Spartans, who particularly honored Achilles, also venerated his companion. The joint burial mound of Achilles and Patroclus at the Sigeum promontory near Troy was one of the most famous monuments of the ancient world. Alexander the Great, who identified deeply with Achilles, honored the tomb on his march to Persia and reportedly ran a race around it naked in honor of both heroes.

In later Greek and Roman philosophical tradition, the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus became a central example in discussions of the nature of love and friendship. Plato in the Symposium has the character Phaedrus argue that their bond was the noblest form of love. Aeschylus wrote a trilogy of tragedies about Achilles in which the two were explicitly lovers, a tradition that was influential in antiquity even though Aeschylus's plays have not survived.

The figure of Patroclus serves in modern reception as a symbol of the cost of war not to the famous and powerful but to those who love them: the friend, the companion, the person whose death destroys not just themselves but the person they loved most.

Patroclus appears throughout the Iliad but his greatest literary prominence comes in Books Sixteen (his death) and Eighteen (Achilles' reaction to his death), which together constitute one of the most emotionally powerful sequences in world literature. Homer's characterization of him is subtle and achieved largely through accumulation of small details: the tears, the care of the wounded, the borrowed armor, the broken prohibition, the dying words.

The ancient tragic playwrights engaged extensively with the Achilles-Patroclus story. Aeschylus' lost trilogy, The Myrmidons, The Nereids, and The Phrygians, apparently depicted their relationship as explicitly romantic, with Achilles grieving over Patroclus's body in terms that evoked erotic as well as military loss. The fragments that survive show Achilles addressing the fallen Patroclus with words of devastating intimacy.

In visual art, the death and funeral of Patroclus were popular subjects. The François Vase (c. 570 BCE), one of the most important surviving Attic black-figure vases, depicts the funeral games at Patroclus's tomb in careful detail. Numerous red-figure vases show Achilles receiving the news of Patroclus's death or tending his body. The motif of Achilles binding Patroclus's wound, a reversal of their usual roles, showing the great warrior in a tender, caring role, appears on a famous cup by the Sosias Painter (c. 500 BCE) and is one of the most intimate depictions of the two heroes.

In the modern era, Madeline Miller's novel The Song of Achilles (2011) retells the Iliad from Patroclus's perspective and became an international bestseller, introducing his story to a new generation. The novel won the Orange Prize for Fiction and is credited with significantly reviving popular interest in the Trojan War myths.