Iliad, Book 17 — The Fight over Patroclus's Body

Reading Troy — chapter 17 of 74 · Iliad, Book 17

Iliad, Book 17 — The Fight over Patroclus's Body (Day 26 of the Iliad continuing into dusk; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; the plain before Troy)

Menelaus is the first Greek to reach the fallen Patroclus. He stands over the body as a heifer stands over her first calf. Euphorbus, the young Trojan who put the first spear in Patroclus's back, comes to claim the armour. He challenges Menelaus formally — give up the body and the armour, or I shall kill you here. Menelaus mocks his youth and kills him with a single spear-thrust through the throat. Euphorbus falls as a young olive-shoot, raised in a sheltered place by a clear stream, that the wind has blown over and laid in the dust.

Apollo, watching, comes to Hector in the shape of his cousin Mentes the Cician and tells him that Menelaus stands over Patroclus's body and is killing Euphorbus. Hector, who had been pursuing the immortal horses (Automedon had fled with them across the plain), turns back at once. He charges the body. Menelaus, alone against Hector, retreats reluctantly — I will not stand against Hector, for whom the god is fighting; he calls Telamonian Ajax. Hector reaches the body, strips Patroclus of Achilles's armour, retires to a clear space and puts the armour on himself. Zeus watching from Olympus shakes his head in pity: Hector, you do not know what you put on; the man whose gear you wear is the man who will kill you. But Zeus grants him one last day of glory in it.

Ajax arrives. He stands over Patroclus's body as a lion stands over its cubs when hunters meet it leading them through the forest. He calls Menelaus back; Menelaus calls Antilochus, Idomeneus, Meriones, the lesser Ajax, the rest. The Greeks form a defensive ring. The Trojans press. The fight over the corpse is the longest single combat-sequence in the Iliad — three hundred lines of pure scrum. Hector and Aeneas lead the Trojans; the two Ajaxes and Menelaus anchor the Greeks. The body is dragged this way and that; the corpse is bruised in the pulling.

Meanwhile Achilles's immortal horses, having run with Automedon to a clear space, will not move. They stand weeping, their long manes hanging down on the ground, dust-streaked. Zeus pities them — unhappy creatures, why did we give you to a mortal master? Of all creatures on the earth and in the air, man is the most wretched. He pours strength into them; Automedon mounts the chariot and drives back to the line, fighting from the chariot-platform with Alcimedon as charioteer.

The day darkens unnaturally. Ajax cries the cycle's most famous brief prayer: Father Zeus, deliver the Achaeans out of this darkness; make clear sky, give us back the light; let us see, and kill us in the light if you will. The prayer was so famous in antiquity that it became the title of Longinus's example of sublimity. Zeus hears, parts the mist, returns the light.

Menelaus is dispatched to find Antilochus the messenger and send him to Achilles with the news. Antilochus runs to the Greek camp weeping. The Greeks at last begin to drag Patroclus's body toward the ships under cover of Ajax and Menelaus; the two Ajaxes turn at the rear and beat off the pursuing Hector and Aeneas like boars driving away dogs and hunters from their tracks. The book closes on the body being lifted toward the camp, the Trojans pursuing, the ships visible at the horizon — and Antilochus running ahead with the news Achilles has not yet heard.

Analysis

A book about a body

Book 17 is the cycle's only sustained book-length scene built around a single corpse. The body of Patroclus is the picture's centre, and every action in the book is staged around it: who stands over it, who reaches it first, who strips its armour, who tries to drag it away, who beats the pursuers off. The Iliad has been a poem about dying bodies for sixteen books; in Book 17 it becomes, for one book, a poem about a dead body, and the change is structural. The body is no longer the man; the man (the psyche, the soul) has gone down to Hades in Book 16. What is left is a sacred object to be defended, fought for, returned. The cycle's later body-fights — Achilles's body in Posthomerica 3 and 4, Memnon's in Posthomerica 2, Pallas's in Aeneid 10, Hector's in Iliad 22 and 24 — all descend from Book 17's structural innovation: a body is worth a book.

Menelaus's quiet centrality

Watch how often Menelaus is the figure who anchors the book. He is the first Greek to reach the body. He kills Euphorbus. He retreats from Hector only when no other course is possible. He calls Ajax. He stays beside Ajax through the long fight. He carries the news to Antilochus to be carried to Achilles. He is at every structural pivot. The Iliad gives Menelaus this quiet centrality almost only in Book 17 (he is otherwise overshadowed by Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus, Ajax); but in the book of the body, he is the moral centre. The reader should mark it: the man whose wife was the war's nominal cause is the man who guards the body of the wrath's nominal cause, and the symmetry is one of the cycle's most quiet pieces of architecture. The Odyssey will return Menelaus to centrality in Book 4 — and the Menelaus of Odyssey 4, the grave host telling the long story of Egypt, is the Menelaus we recognise from his quiet long endurance here.

The Euphorbus simile

The simile of Euphorbus falling as a young olive-shoot, raised in a sheltered place by a clear stream, that the wind has blown over and laid in the dust is one of the cycle's three or four most quoted similes after the campfires-stars (Book 8), the leaves-of-men (Book 6), and the Ilioneus-poppy (Book 14). It does what Iliadic similes consistently do: pairs the moment of greatest violence with the moment of greatest tenderness, and pairs the warrior with the rural object of close care. The young olive is grown by a farmer in a sheltered spot for years before it is killed by a single sudden wind; Euphorbus's father raised him, his mother nursed him, his sisters embroidered his clothes, and a single Spartan spear has laid him in the dust. The simile carries forward to Aeneid 9 (Euryalus's death, as a purple flower cut by a plough lays its head down), to Posthomerica 1 (Penthesilea falls as a tall slender tree the woodman has felled), to Odyssey 6 (Nausicaa appears as a young palm-shoot — the only Odyssean use of the olive-simile vocabulary, now for life rather than death).

Hector wearing Achilles's armour

The single most fraught image of the book is Hector taking off his own Trojan armour, putting on Achilles's armour, and going back into the line. Zeus's reaction is the cycle's clearest piece of divine pity-irony: Hector, you do not know what you put on; the gear you wear is the gear of the man who will kill you. The cycle is treating armour-as-identity at maximum intensity. Hector becomes, for one book and one battle, a counterfeit Achilles — and the counterfeit will be unmasked in Book 22 when the real Achilles wears the new god-forged armour and finds Hector in the old. The transfer is also a piece of dramatic irony: the original Myrmidon armour goes back to Peleus, who got it as a wedding-gift from the gods, who got it (perhaps) from Hephaestus; the armour Hephaestus will forge for Achilles in Book 18 is therefore the second god-forged Achilles-armour, made because the first was lost to a Trojan. The cycle's principle is that identity is materially transferable but always belongs to its original owner; Hector wearing Achilles's armour is Hector borrowing a death-warrant.

Ajax's prayer for light

Father Zeus, deliver the Achaeans out of this darkness; make clear sky, give us back the light; let us see, and kill us in the light if you will. The prayer is the cycle's most quoted brief speech. Longinus, in On the Sublime, cites it as the perfect example of sublimity by simplicity: no ornament, no rhetoric, only the request to die in the light. The prayer is also the cycle's clearest theology of mortal dignity: Ajax does not ask not to die; he asks to die seeing. The image of the warrior insisting on visibility at the moment of death is the cycle's recurring picture — Achilles in Book 21 fighting the river under clear sky, Hector in Book 22 turning to face Achilles in the open, Achilles in Posthomerica 3 falling under a clear Trojan dawn. The Iliad treats the desire to die in the light as the deepest mortal claim against the gods.

The immortal horses' grief

The image of Xanthus and Balius standing still in the field weeping, the long manes hanging down on the ground, dust-streaked, is the cycle's only sustained passage of animal grief. Zeus's comment — of all creatures on the earth and in the air, man is the most wretched — is the Iliad's most explicit philosophical statement about the human condition, and it is delivered to two immortal horses who refuse to fight because their charioteer is dead. The image carries forward to Aeneid 11 (the horse of Pallas, Aethon his warhorse, his head bowed, weeping great tears) and to Posthomerica 4 (the funeral games of Achilles, where the horses Xanthus and Balius are again present, dragging the funeral chariot, still grieving). The cycle's principle that animals grieve their masters is one of its quiet emotional through-lines, and the Odyssey will give it its most concentrated expression in Argus the dog of Odyssey 17 — the dog who has waited twenty years and dies the moment he sees his master, the image directly descended from the horses of Book 17.

Butler's prose and the long body-fight

Book 17 is the longest single combat-sequence in the Iliad — three hundred lines of unbroken scrum over a single corpse — and Butler's plain prose is at its most patient. The book in Butler reads as a slow accumulating pressure: the same kinds of action repeated, the same captains coming and going, the same simile-types (lion, boar, hunter, herdsman) repeated with slight variation. The plainness is exactly right; the book is meant to feel like grinding labour. Pope's couplets do not have the structural patience; Lattimore's hexameter has it but slows the action; Butler reads at the right pace. The reader who feels Book 17 is "long" is feeling exactly what Homer intended — the labour of recovering a body is the labour of the book.

What to watch for

Watch Antilochus running to Achilles. He is one of the cycle's three messengers of bad news (Antilochus to Achilles here, Hermes to Priam in 24, the swift Achaean to Penelope in Odyssey 24); each is treated with quiet dignity. Antilochus is also Patroclus's structural mirror — the young companion of an older hero (Antilochus's older hero is Achilles himself), and his role in Posthomerica 2 will be to die saving Nestor his father, in the structural mirror of Patroclus's death saving the Greek line. Watch Hector in Achilles's armour. The image will return in Book 22 when Achilles in his new god-forged armour finds Hector still wearing the old; the killing will look like Achilles erasing his own former self. Watch the body's bruises. Homer notes that Patroclus's body is bruised by the pulling; the body that Achilles will lay on the bier in Book 18 is already disfigured by the recovery, and the disfigurement is part of the wound that drives the wrath's redirection from Agamemnon to Hector. And watch Menelaus's quiet centrality — it will be the seed of his Odyssey-4 portrait, the grave host of Sparta whose long endurance has made him the cycle's wisest of the survivors.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 17 is the long-form structural response to Book 16. The death of Patroclus required a book to assimilate; Book 17 is the assimilation, and the body-as-object is the cycle's first sustained image of what a fallen comrade is for those who survive him. Menelaus's anchoring presence pays off his role in Book 3 (the husband whose duel was supposed to end the war) — the man who first articulated the war's legitimate cause is the man who first guards the war's most important corpse. Hector wearing Achilles's armour answers Patroclus wearing it in Book 16 — both warriors take on the gear of an absent man and both will die in it. The horses Xanthus and Balius weeping pays off their introduction in Book 16. Apollo sending Hector back to the body answers his Book-16 stripping of Patroclus's armour: the same god, the same favourite, the same fatal arrangement. Ajax's prayer for light is the long-form structural response to the Greek camp's loss of confidence through Books 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 — the warrior asking only for visibility at his death is the warrior who has not had visibility for five books.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. The Antilochus-runs-to-Achilles arc concludes in Book 18 when Antilochus reaches the Myrmidon ships and Achilles hears the news. Hector wearing Achilles's armour is the picture-setting for Book 22, where Achilles in new god-forged armour will kill Hector in the old. The body of Patroclus brought back to the ships at the end of this book is the body Achilles will lay on the bier in Book 18 and burn on the pyre in Book 23. Ajax's prayer for light foreshadows the strange dimming of the air at Hector's death in Book 22; the cycle's atmosphere is being managed in the same vocabulary across the books. The two Ajaxes covering the rear of the body-recovery prefigures Book 17's role in the cycle's final pyre — Telamonian Ajax will be the chief mourner at Patroclus's pyre in Book 23 and the funeral-games' great competitor.

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus's Books 3 and 4 are structural quotes of Iliad 17. The fight over Achilles's body in Posthomerica 3 is Iliad 17 transposed — Ajax and Odysseus stand over the body of Achilles as Ajax and Menelaus stood over the body of Patroclus; the body is contested, dragged, rescued, brought back to the ships. The funeral of Achilles in Posthomerica 4 mirrors the funeral of Patroclus in Iliad 23, and the cycle's symmetry — the friend-killed-first, the friend-killed-second, each receiving the same body-rituals — is the cycle's clearest structural pattern. Quintus also quotes Ajax's prayer for light at Posthomerica 5 (Ajax's suicide), where the warrior who once asked Zeus for light now kills himself in his own darkness — the structural inversion is one of the Posthomerica's most painful single moments. The Euphorbus-as-olive-shoot simile is Quintus's template for Penthesilea's death in Book 1 and Memnon's death in Book 2.

Into the Aeneid. Virgil reads Iliad 17 as the model for Aeneid 10's whole structure. The body of Pallas at the centre of Aeneid 10 is the body of Patroclus at the centre of Iliad 17; Aeneas standing over Pallas's corpse with grief and rage is Menelaus and then Ajax standing over Patroclus; the Latins trying to strip the body are Hector and the Trojans here. The horses of Pallas grieving in Aeneid 11 are directly quoted from the horses of Achilles weeping here (Aeneid 11.89–93). Virgil's Drances in Aeneid 11 and his account of the body-recovery is built on Menelaus's quiet centrality here. The whole Pallas-arc of Aeneid 10–12 is the Aeneid's longest single quotation of the Iliad, and Book 17 is its core source.

Into the Odyssey. Menelaus's quiet centrality here is the structural seed for his Odyssey-4 portrait — the grave Spartan host whose long endurance has made him the wisest of the survivors. The dog Argus of Odyssey 17 (the dog who has waited twenty years for Odysseus, who dies the moment he sees his master) is the direct structural descendant of the horses Xanthus and Balius here — the cycle's two great pictures of an animal's grief at a master's fate. The body-as-sacred-object pattern of Book 17 governs the Odyssey's repeated stagings of recognition-as-bodily-care — Eurycleia washing the disguised Odysseus's feet (Book 19), Penelope laying the wedding-bed (Book 23). The body is the cycle's most reliable carrier of truth — Patroclus's body is unmistakeable to Menelaus, the scar is unmistakeable to Eurycleia, the bed is unmistakeable to Penelope. The principle is the same; Iliad 17 is its source.

The body is recovered. The news is on the way. Achilles will know in the morning.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Menelaus — first to reach the body; kills Euphorbus; calls Ajax; carries the message; the book's quiet centre
• Ajax Greater — stands over the body as a lion over its cubs; cries the famous prayer for light
• Hector — strips Achilles's armour from Patroclus and puts it on; Zeus's pity-irony lands on him
• Aeneas — leads the Trojan press with Hector
• Ajax Lesser — fights alongside his namesake at the rear of the body-recovery
• Antilochus — chosen as the messenger; runs to Achilles with the news
• Automedon — flees on the immortal horses, returns when Zeus grants them strength
• Apollo — sends Hector back to the body in the shape of Mentes the Cician
• Zeus — pities the horses, grants light, grants Hector one day in the armour; the unhappy creatures speech

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — in his tent at the ships, not yet knowing
• Patroclus — the body; the picture's silent centre
• Thetis — implicit in every reference to Achilles
• Andromache — implicit in Hector's day
• Helen — the cause; not named in this book
• Euphorbus — the young Trojan spearman, killed by Menelaus

---

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.