Book XVI: The Death of Patroclus | The Iliad

Chapter summary

Patroclus comes to Achilles weeping, while the fighting goes on beside a ship, and Achilles, moved with pity at the sight, first asks whether news has come from Phthia, whether Menoetius and Peleus are still alive, and then whether he weeps for the Achaeans who are dying beside the ships because of their own insolence. Patroclus asks Achilles not to be angry: the best men are wounded, Diomedes, Odysseus, Agamemnon and Eurypylus, the physicians are tending them, and only Achilles is impossible to approach. He accuses him of having been begotten by the sea and the rocks, and makes two requests: if Achilles is avoiding some prophecy his mother may have given him on behalf of Zeus, let him go out with the Myrmidons, and lend him his armor, so that the Trojans will take him for Achilles, draw back, and the Achaeans can catch their breath. The narrator comments that in asking this way, Patroclus asks for his own death.

Achilles answers that he knows no prophecy and that his mother told him nothing from Zeus. What hurts him is that one man takes the prize from someone who is his equal just by having more power, and Agamemnon took the girl as if she were a dishonored foreigner. But he lets it pass: he had said that he would end his wrath only when the cry of war reached his ships, and now it has. He orders Patroclus to put on the armor and lead the Myrmidons, because the Trojans have grown bold for not seeing his helmet shine, and he wants the mission to bring him honor before all the Danaans and the return of the girl with gifts. He sets a limit, and repeats it: after driving the fire from the ships, Patroclus must come back; even if Zeus gives him glory, he must not fight without Achilles, so as not to leave him less honored, nor lead the attack to Ilion, lest a god intervene, for Apollo loves the Trojans. He ends by wishing that no Trojan and no Argive escape death, and that only the two of them tear down the wall of Troy.

Meanwhile, Ajax gives way under the spears and the will of Zeus. Hector cuts the shaft of his spear, Ajax recognizes the work of a god, who wants to give victory to the Trojans, and withdraws, and a ship begins to burn. Achilles strikes his thighs and orders Patroclus to arm quickly, while he gathers the people. Patroclus puts on everything except the ash spear, which only Achilles knows how to wield; Automedon yokes Xanthus and Balius, the immortal horses, and beside them Pedasus, a mortal horse. Achilles arms the Myrmidons, in five companies, and tells them that the battle they wanted, when they accused him of keeping his wrath, has come. Then he opens in the tent the chest that Thetis had put aboard for him, takes out the cup from which only he drinks and which he offers only to Zeus, purifies it, pours wine and prays to Zeus of Dodona: grant honor to my companion, so that Hector will see whether he can fight alone, and bring him back safe and sound to the ships with the armor and his companions. Zeus hears and grants one half: Patroclus will drive the war from the ships, but will not return alive.

The Myrmidons go out like wasps. Patroclus urges them to honor the son of Peleus and to make Agamemnon recognize the blindness of having dishonored the best of the Achaeans. The Trojans, seeing Patroclus and his squire gleaming in their armor, suppose that Achilles has laid aside his wrath and made peace, and each looks for a way to flee. Patroclus throws first, kills the chief of the Paeonians, Pyraechmes, drives the Trojans from the ships and puts out the fire, and the ship is half burned. The Danaans breathe again, but the fighting does not cease. Hector flees in his chariot and leaves the army, many chariots break in the trench, and Patroclus pursues the fugitives, prevents them from returning to the city, and kills them between the ships, the river and the wall.

Sarpedon rebukes the Lycians, dismounts from his chariot and goes to face Patroclus, to learn who it is that has done so much harm. Zeus sees the two and tells Hera that he is divided: fate decrees that Sarpedon, the dearest of men to him, shall die at the hand of Patroclus, and he is considering snatching him alive from the people of Lycia. Hera answers that he may do so, but that the other gods will not approve, and others will also remove their own sons from the combat. Zeus yields and lets drops of blood fall upon the earth, in honor of his son. In the fight, Patroclus kills Sarpedon's squire, Sarpedon misses twice and wounds the horse Pedasus, Automedon cuts the strap that holds it, and Patroclus strikes Sarpedon in the heart. Dying, Sarpedon asks Glaucus to defend him and not let the Achaeans take his armor, and Patroclus pulls the spear from the body.

Glaucus, wounded by Teucer, prays to Apollo, who staunches the blood and gives him strength. He gathers the Lycians and rebukes Hector for forgetting the allies who die because of him. Grief without consolation strikes the Trojans, because Sarpedon, though a foreigner, was the mainstay of the city. Hector leads the attack, Patroclus sets the two Ajaxes in motion, and around the body of Sarpedon Zeus spreads a deadly night over the combat, so that the effort for his son will be hard. The Trojans push the Achaeans back first; Patroclus, furious at the death of a companion, kills Sthenelaus and makes the Trojans draw back. Aeneas throws at Meriones and misses him, and taunts him; Meriones answers, and Patroclus rebukes them both: war is decided by hands, and words belong to the council. The body of Sarpedon is already unrecognizable under the dust and blood. Zeus considers whether to let Hector kill Patroclus right there, and concludes that it is better for Achilles' squire to push the Trojans back toward the city; he infuses Hector with a spirit without strength, and Hector flees in his chariot, for he has recognized the sacred scales of Zeus. The Lycians flee with him, and the Achaeans strip Sarpedon's armor. Zeus orders Apollo to clean the body, anoint it, and give it to Sleep and Death, who carry it to Lycia for the funeral.

Patroclus sends Automedon and the horses after the Trojans and the Lycians, and commits a great folly, in the narrator's words: had he kept Achilles' word, he would have escaped the evil fate, but the mind of Zeus is stronger than that of men. He kills a series of warriors and would have taken Troy had Apollo not been on the tower, wishing him ill and helping the Trojans. Three times Patroclus climbs the angle of the wall, three times Apollo pushes him back; the fourth time, the god tells him that it is not fate that Troy should fall to his spear, nor to Achilles'. Patroclus withdraws. Hector, at the Scaean Gates, hesitates between returning to the fight and calling the army inside the wall, and Apollo, in the form of Asius, uncle of Hector, urges him to go against Patroclus. Hector orders his charioteer Cebriones to drive the chariot; Patroclus gets down and strikes Cebriones on the forehead with a stone, and mocks him as one would a diver. The two struggle over Cebriones' body like two lions, and the combat lasts until the sun declines, when the Achaeans get the upper hand and carry off the body and the armor.

Patroclus charges three more times, and kills nine men each time. On the fourth, Apollo meets him, wrapped in mist, and strikes his back with an open hand; his eyes spin, the helmet falls and rolls under the hooves, the spear breaks, the shield drops to the ground, and the god loosens his breastplate. Stunned, Patroclus is wounded from behind by Euphorbus, who pulls out the spear and flees without facing him unarmed. Patroclus withdraws to the group of his companions, but Hector, seeing him wounded, goes to him and strikes him in the lower belly. Hector boasts: Patroclus was thinking of sacking Troy and carrying off the Trojan women, but Hector is the one who defends the city, and the vultures will eat him; not even Achilles helped him, though he had told him not to return without tearing the bloodied tunic from Hector's body. Patroclus, with little strength, answers that Zeus and Apollo defeated him and took his armor, that twenty like Hector would have died at his spear, that fate, Apollo and Euphorbus killed him and Hector is the third; and he prophesies that Hector will soon die at the hands of Achilles. Death covers him, and the soul flies to Hades, lamenting its fate and leaving behind its vigor and youth. Hector answers the dead man: who knows whether Achilles will not lose his life first, struck by Hector's spear? He pulls the spear from the body and goes after Automedon, who escapes because the immortal horses carry him away.

Analysis

The book sets up Patroclus's mission around a switch of identity and its conditions. The armor does what he foresaw, for the Trojans flee, judging that Achilles has returned, and the warning Achilles gave him is the same one Apollo repeats on the walls. When Apollo strips him of the armor, what remains is a man whom Euphorbus wounds from behind and whom Hector pierces. The poem thus shows the price of taking another man's place.

Patroclus's death comes in three layers, and his own speech enumerates them: fate and Apollo, then Euphorbus, and only last Hector. The narrator assigns the error to him and at the same time to the spirit Zeus loosened in him, and does not choose between the two causes. The scene of Sarpedon, before, had already shown the mechanism: a fixed destiny, a god who wants to revoke it, and a goddess who stops him with an argument from precedent.