Iliad, Book 16 — The Aristeia and Death of Patroclus

Reading Troy — chapter 16 of 74 · Iliad, Book 16

Iliad, Book 16 — The Aristeia and Death of Patroclus (Day 26 of the Iliad continuing into dusk; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; the Greek camp at the ships and the plain before Troy)

Patroclus reaches Achilles's tent in tears as a dark-water spring runs down a sheer rock-face. Achilles teases him gently for weeping like a little girl pulling at her mother's skirt, then asks what is the matter. Patroclus answers with the speech that ends the wrath: the Greek captains are wounded — Diomedes, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Eurypylus, all in the surgeon's tent; the wall is down; Hector is at the ships; Achilles, your father Peleus was not your father, your mother was not Thetis, the grey sea bore you and a sheer cliff brought you forth, for your heart is hard. Let Achilles at least send him, Patroclus, in Achilles's armour, so that the Trojans will think Achilles has returned and run. Achilles agrees — but with a strict condition: drive the Trojans from the ships and come back. Do not pursue them to the wall of Troy. Do not strip Hector's armour. Achilles speaks the warning three times.

At the same moment Ajax on the ship's deck is forced down by Hector's hand striking the pike-haft from his grip; the long pike breaks; the ship of Protesilaus is set on fire. The smoke rises as the smoke that rises from a mountain town on the night when an enemy has stormed it. Achilles sees the smoke and tells Patroclus: go now.

Patroclus arms in Achilles's armour — the great cuirass and greaves Peleus had given Achilles at his marriage, the silver-studded sword, the high-crested helmet with the gleaming horsehair plume, the round shield. He does not take Achilles's great Pelian ash spear — which only Achilles can wield, the gift to Peleus from Chiron of the Pelion ridge. Automedon yokes the immortal horses Xanthus and Balius (gifts to Peleus from Poseidon at his wedding, sired by Zephyrus the West Wind on the harpy Podarge) and a trace-horse Pedasus, a mortal but very swift. The fifty Myrmidon companies form up in five battalions; their captains' names are read out. Achilles pours a libation from a special cup he keeps wrapped in his chest, used only for libations to Zeus, and prays to Zeus of Dodona, lord of the Pelasgians, dweller in cold Dodona by the prophetic oak whose priests the Selloi sleep on the ground with unwashed feet: grant Patroclus to drive the Trojans from the ships and come back safely. Homer gives us the unusual editorial gloss: Zeus heard him. The first he granted; the second he denied.

Patroclus and the Myrmidons charge. The Trojans see the gleaming armour and recognise the Myrmidon emblems and break in terror, believing Achilles has returned. The fire is extinguished. Patroclus drives the Trojans back across the wall's wreckage, across the ditch (where his horse Pedasus is killed by Sarpedon's spear), across the open plain. Sarpedon, watching his Lycians driven back, dismounts to meet Patroclus. On Olympus, Zeus turns to Hera with grief: I weigh in my heart whether to rescue Sarpedon and set him in his Lycian home. Hera answers fiercely: do that, and every god will want to rescue his own son; you have many such favourites on the field; let him die, let Death and Sleep carry him home to Lycia, where his brothers may bury him with a barrow and a stone, for that is the right of the dead. Zeus weeps tears of blood that fall upon the earth in honour of his son and lets him die. Patroclus kills Sarpedon with a spear through the diaphragm; Sarpedon calls his dying speech to Glaucus — do not leave my body for the Greeks to strip; defend it as you would your wife or child. Glaucus, wounded in the arm, prays to Apollo, is healed, and rallies the Trojans. The fight over Sarpedon's body is one of the cycle's set-pieces. Apollo eventually carries Sarpedon's body out of the press, washes it in the river, anoints it with ambrosia, and gives it to Sleep and Death to carry to Lycia for burial.

Patroclus, against Achilles's warning, drives on. He kills nine named Trojans. Cebriones, Hector's charioteer, falls beneath his spear; the two warriors fight over the body like two lions over a slain deer until evening. Then Patroclus, in his heart's pride, attempts a fourth charge at the wall of Troy itself — and Apollo at last comes for him. The god stands behind Patroclus in mist; with the flat of his hand he strikes him between the shoulder-blades; the world reels around Patroclus; the helmet rolls from his head into the dust under the horses' feet and the horsehair plume was fouled with blood; the spear shatters in his hand; the shield falls; the cuirass comes loose at the straps. Then Euphorbus the young Trojan spear-shaft pierces him between the shoulder-blades — the first mortal wound. Then Hector, seeing Patroclus stunned and disarmed, spears him in the lower belly. Patroclus falls. Hector taunts him — did you think to sack Troy, fool? Patroclus answers with his own death-prophecy: boast while you can, Hector, for you yourself will die soon at Achilles's hand. Then his eyes are closed and his soul flies down to Hades bewailing its fate, leaving manhood and youth. Hector tries to drive his spear out through the body to fetch out the soul; the body resists him. The book closes on Hector pulling at his spear in Patroclus's flesh and the news running back to Achilles in the camp.

Analysis

The cycle's most famous death

Book 16 contains the death that destroys the wrath. The Iliad's whole structural arc — Achilles withdraws in Book 1, refuses the embassy in Book 9, sends Patroclus in Book 16 — converges here. Patroclus's plea to Achilles is the moment the wrath cracks; Achilles's release of him is the choice that brings the death; Patroclus's death is the moment the cycle's tragic engine becomes irreversible. The rest of the Iliad (Books 17–24) is the slow assimilation of this single fact. Read Book 16 carefully: every speech-act of the next eight books is a response to it.

The threefold warning

Watch Achilles's instruction to Patroclus: drive the Trojans from the ships and come back; do not pursue them to the walls of Troy; do not strip Hector's armour. The warning is spoken three times in different forms, and Patroclus disobeys it three times: he drives the Trojans past the ditch (first disobedience), he drives them across the open plain (second), he attempts the wall of Troy itself in three charges, with a fourth that triggers Apollo (third). The pattern of the threefold disobedience is the Iliad's clearest single piece of structural fault-architecture. Patroclus is not a fool; he has caught the aristeia fever, the divine illumination that drives every great warrior past his proper limit. The same fever will kill Achilles in his own pursuit-arc against Hector in Book 22 (the wrong man circles the city three times). The cycle's three great deaths (Patroclus in 16, Hector in 22, Achilles in Posthomerica 3) are all engineered by the aristeia's tendency to exceed its proper limit. Book 16 establishes the pattern.

Zeus weeping tears of blood

The Sarpedon-passage is the Iliad's most theologically extraordinary single passage. Zeus considers rescuing his own son, is dissuaded by Hera, and weeps tears of blood that fall upon the earth in honour of his son. This is the only time in the Iliad that Zeus is shown emotionally helpless. The bloody-rain image is unique in the poem. Homer is making the principle clear: even Zeus cannot save his own son from death; the rule that mortals must die is older than the king of the gods. The passage is the cycle's most concentrated single statement of the relation between divine power and mortal limit, and the rest of the cycle reads it. Virgil quotes the passage twice: at Pallas's death in Aeneid 10 (Jupiter himself watches from on high and accepts the death) and at Lausus's death (Jupiter says nothing as Aeneas kills him). Quintus quotes it in Posthomerica 3 (Apollo weeps for Achilles, blood-tears falling). The image of the divine parent who cannot rescue is the cycle's hardest single picture.

Sleep and Death bearing the body to Lycia

The image of the twin gods Sleep and Death (Hypnos and Thanatos) carrying Sarpedon's body home to Lycia is one of the Iliad's most beautiful single divine pictures, and the cycle's clearest single articulation of the principle that even the foreign dead must be brought home to be buried by their own. Sleep and Death are described as twin brothers, dark-cloaked, identical in form. The image was so iconic in antiquity that it became the standard image of the prothesis of the dead on archaic Greek vases (the Sarpedon krater by Euphronios, now in the Cleveland Museum, is one of the most famous surviving vases for exactly this image — Sleep and Death lifting Sarpedon's body, Hermes guiding). The cycle returns to the image at Aeneid 6 (Charon ferrying souls; Anchises explaining the transmigration), at Odyssey 24 (Hermes leading the suitors' souls to the asphodel), and at Quintus's funeral of Achilles (Posthomerica 4). Book 16 puts the death-and-burial-as-tender-craft picture in the cycle's frame.

Patroclus's death-prophecy

Watch the moment Patroclus, dying, answers Hector's taunt with prophecy: boast while you can, Hector, for you too will die soon at Achilles's hand. This is one of the cycle's three great death-prophecies (Patroclus to Hector here; Hector to Achilles in 22; Achilles to Priam in 24). Each is spoken by the man dying to the man killing him. The cycle is treating the dying as a moment of unusual clarity — the man on the threshold of death can see backward and forward in the same instant. Quintus quotes the pattern at Achilles's death (Achilles dying speaks his own prophecy back at Paris); Virgil quotes it at Pallas's death (Pallas's last words foretell Turnus's death); the Odyssey quotes it at Antinous's death (Eurymachus, dying, names Odysseus correctly for the first time). Book 16's death-prophecy is the structural template.

The armour as instrument of confusion

The Achilles-armour stratagem — Patroclus puts on Achilles's armour so the Trojans take him for Achilles — has multiple structural consequences. First: it works initially (the Trojans break and run). Second: it gets Patroclus killed; he believes himself invulnerable in Achilles's gear and overreaches. Third: Apollo strips the armour from him before the kill, so the killing-blow falls on a man already unarmed; the killing is therefore not by Hector's superiority but by divine arrangement. Fourth: Hector then takes the armour from Patroclus's body and wears it himself in Books 17 and 22 — meaning that when Achilles finally kills Hector, he kills a man wearing Achilles's own armour. The cycle's principle of armour-as-identity is established here: armour is not a piece of equipment but a piece of self, and the swapping and stripping of armour is the cycle's clearest single image of identity-confusion. The Posthomerica's judgement of the arms (Book 5) is built on this principle; Virgil's Aeneid borrows the principle for Aeneas's shield and for the recurring armour-stripping scenes of the Italian books.

Butler's prose and the great death

Butler's plainness suits Book 16's structural weight. The death-speeches are short and formal; the killing-formulae are repeated as in any battle-book; the divine machinery is named without amplification. Where Butler's plainness shows its hand is in the great pictorial moments — Apollo striking Patroclus between the shoulder-blades, the helmet rolling fouled with blood, the soul leaving the body bewailing its fate, leaving manhood and youth. Pope makes these moments grander; Lattimore sharper; Butler keeps them at the Iliad's own pace, refusing to slow time for the great death. The reader who wants the death's full structural weight should read it in Butler in one sitting; the reader who wants its lyric weight should read it in Fagles or Lattimore. The cycle's central death deserves both.

What to watch for

Watch Hector putting on Achilles's armour at the close of the book (Book 17 will dramatise it). Watch the immortal horses Xanthus and Balius. They survive Patroclus and will weep over his body in the next book — the cycle's only sustained image of weeping horses, and a passage that Virgil quotes for the horses at Pallas's funeral. Watch Glaucus — wounded since Book 12, healed by Apollo here, rallying the Lycians around Sarpedon's body — his arc is the cycle's clearest single picture of a warrior's day from wound through healing to grief-driven action. Watch Sarpedon's body lifted by Sleep and Death; the image will recur as the cycle's only sustained picture of foreign-dead-brought-home, and will inform the long return-of-the-bodies motif of Book 24 (Priam's ransom of Hector). And watch Achilles in his tent at the book's close — he does not know yet. The news is running across the camp; the rest of the cycle is built on the moment he hears it. Book 17 will hold the news from him; Book 18 will deliver it; Book 19 will arm him; Books 20–22 will execute the consequences.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 16 is the long-form payoff of Books 1, 9, and 11. The wrath that began with Agamemnon's taking of Briseis ends here with Patroclus's taking of Achilles's armour; the embassy that failed in Book 9 to bring Achilles back to the field is replaced by Patroclus's plea, which succeeds because it is personal rather than political; the errand Patroclus ran in Book 11 to ask Nestor about Machaon was the beginning of evil for him, and Book 16 is the end of that long chain. Achilles's prayer to Dodonan Zeus from the special cup answers the divine address-pattern Achilles used in Book 1 (the prayer to Thetis), with the difference that the answer this time is half-granted. The threefold warning to Patroclus echoes the threefold pattern Homer has used throughout the cycle (the three failed duels, the three flight-proposals of Agamemnon, the three Iris-missions of Zeus); the cycle's number-three is built on the Book-16 pattern of obey-and-disobey-three-times. And the great death recapitulates every previous Iliadic death in compressed form: the obscure named dead of Book 4, the aristeia-target dead of Book 5, the duellist-felled of Book 7, all converge into this one death that the entire cycle is built on.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. The rest of the Iliad (Books 17–24) is the slow assimilation of this one death. Book 17 is the fight over the body; Book 18 is the news reaching Achilles and the forging of new armour; Book 19 is the reconciliation; Books 20–22 are the avenging; Book 23 is the funeral; Book 24 is the answering funeral of Hector. Patroclus's death-prophecy to Hector (you too will die at Achilles's hand) is fulfilled in Book 22. Apollo's strip-and-strike-from-behind pattern is the template for Apollo's role in Achilles's death in the cycle's larger frame (Posthomerica 3). The immortal horses' weeping in Book 17 is set up by their introduction here. Hector wearing Achilles's armour in Books 17 and 22 is the moment-of-confusion that makes Hector's death feel like a suicide-by-self-armour.

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus's Book 3 (the death of Achilles) is built scene for scene on Iliad 16. Apollo guides Paris's arrow into Achilles as he guided Patroclus's death; Achilles's dying speech to Paris echoes Patroclus's dying speech to Hector; the same divine machinery (Apollo as ambush-engineer, the favourite of the patron-god as victim) governs both deaths. Quintus quotes Sarpedon-and-Sleep-and-Death directly in Posthomerica 2 (Memnon's body carried home to Ethiopia by Eos's mourning); Penthesilea's body in Posthomerica 1 is similarly returned with honour. The cycle's death-and-return-of-the-body pattern is established in Iliad 16 and Quintus works the pattern explicitly. Briseis at the bier of Patroclus in Iliad 19 (forecast here) is rehearsed by Quintus for Briseis at the bier of Achilles in Posthomerica 3 — the same woman, the same lament-position, the same wider grief.

Into the Aeneid. Virgil reads Patroclus's death as the template for Pallas's death in Aeneid 10. The two deaths are paired: a young warrior under the favour of an older one (Patroclus / Pallas), sent into battle with strict instructions (do not exceed your authority / do not stray from Aeneas's flank), the same warning broken, the same aristeia-fever, the same single-warrior killing-spree, the same divine intervention (Apollo for Patroclus, Hercules / Jupiter for Pallas), the same kill (Hector by Apollo's hand and Hector's hand; Pallas by Turnus's hand under Jupiter's averted gaze), the same grief-driven revenge-arc that follows (Achilles for Patroclus; Aeneas for Pallas). Aeneid 10's whole structure is Book 16 rewritten. The blood-tears of Zeus over Sarpedon are quoted at the deaths of Lausus and Pallas (Jupiter watches both, denies both). Aeneid 12's final lines — Aeneas killing Turnus over Pallas's belt — are the consequence of the Pallas-death and therefore the consequence, at one remove, of Book 16.

Into the Odyssey. Patroclus's ghost appears to Odysseus in the Nekyia (Odyssey 11) but does not speak — the silence is the cycle's structural acknowledgement that Patroclus's story is finished and his role complete. Achilles's ghost in the Nekyia speaks the great post-Iliadic line I would rather be a serf to a poor man on earth than king of all the dead — the line that is the Odyssey's structural critique of the Iliad's kleos-system, and Achilles can only speak it because Patroclus's death in Book 16 has taught him what is lost when honour is bought with death. The Odyssey's whole alternative ethics (the long life, the nostos, the homecoming) is built on the lesson of Book 16. The immortal horses weeping for Patroclus prefigure the dog Argus weeping for Odysseus in Odyssey 17 — the cycle's pair of pictures of animals' grief at the loss of the master. The bow that Apollo's strike replaces with death is the structural seed for the bow that Odysseus uses to strike his suitors in Odyssey 22 — the same god-of-archery's hand behind both. Apollo opens the wrath's last consequence here; the cycle's last book reverses the figure.

The wrath is broken. The cycle's last quarter begins.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Patroclus — pleads with Achilles in tears; arms in Achilles's armour; the aristeia; killed by Apollo's hand, Euphorbus's spear, and Hector's
• Achilles — releases Patroclus with the threefold warning; prays to Dodonan Zeus from his special cup; does not yet know he is dying
• Hector — knocks Ajax's pike from his hand, fires the ship; kills Patroclus and tries to drive the spear through to fetch out the soul
• Ajax Greater — fights on the ship's deck until Hector strikes the pike from his hand; the ship goes up in flames
• Sarpedon — dismounts to meet Patroclus; killed by spear through the diaphragm; the cycle's only divine-bloody-rain death
• Glaucus — wounded, prays to Apollo and is healed; rallies the Lycians around Sarpedon's body
• Zeus — considers rescuing Sarpedon; weeps tears of blood; lets him die
• Hera — dissuades Zeus from the rescue with the every-god-his-own-son argument
• Apollo — strikes Patroclus between the shoulder-blades; later lifts Sarpedon's body, washes it in the river, gives it to Sleep and Death
• Automedon — yokes the immortal horses Xanthus and Balius with the mortal Pedasus

Mentioned / off-stage

• Thetis — invoked in Patroclus's the grey sea bore you taunt
• Peleus — Achilles's father, named in the armour's gift-history
• Chiron — the centaur, named as the giver of the Pelian ash spear
• Agamemnon — among the wounded in the surgeon's tent
• Diomedes — among the wounded in the surgeon's tent
• Odysseus — among the wounded in the surgeon's tent
• Eurypylus — among the wounded; Patroclus has just left his tent
• Andromache — implied behind Hector
• Helen — the cause; not named in this book

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.