Iliad, Book 23 — The Funeral Games of Patroclus

Reading Troy — chapter 23 of 74 · Iliad, Book 23

Iliad, Book 23 — The Funeral Games of Patroclus (Day 27 evening into Day 28 of the Iliad; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; the Greek camp by the ships)

Achilles brings Hector's body back to the ships and throws it face-down in the dust beside Patroclus's bier. He gathers the Myrmidons in their armour, drives the chariots three times around the body of his friend in formal mourning, and weeps. Then he holds a great funeral feast for the army; bulls, sheep, swine, and goats are slaughtered in such number that the fat ran in streams from the carcasses. The captains beg Achilles to come and eat with Agamemnon. He refuses; he will not eat or wash until Patroclus is burned.

That night Patroclus's ghost comes to Achilles in a dream. Achilles, sleeping? You forget me. Bury me quickly so that I may pass through the gates of Hades; the shades will not let me cross till the pyre has burned my body. And one thing more: do not let our bones be parted; bury us in the same urn, as your father took me in when I was a boy and we grew up together. Achilles reaches out his arms to embrace the ghost — and like smoke it went underground, gibbering. Achilles rises weeping at the strangeness of the dream: even in Hades the dead keep their form and their character, but they are no longer alive.

At dawn the army cuts wood on Mount Ida for the pyre. The pyre is a hundred-feet-square. Patroclus's body is laid on it; locks of every Myrmidon's hair are cut and laid around him; Achilles cuts his own long auburn lock — which his father Peleus had vowed to dedicate to the river Spercheius if his son came home alive — and lays it in Patroclus's hand. Sheep and oxen are slaughtered around the pyre; jars of honey and oil are poured along it; four chariot-horses are slaughtered and added; two of Patroclus's nine table-dogs are killed and added; and at last twelve young Trojans — the youths bound on the river-bank in Book 21 — are slaughtered at the pyre's edge and added. Achilles wrought evil in his heart against them. He calls on the winds; Iris flies to Boreas and Zephyrus; they come storming in and fan the pyre through the night. Achilles paces the ashes at dawn weeping.

The bones are gathered, wrapped in double layers of fat, and laid in a two-handled golden urn (Patroclus's bones; Achilles's will go in the same urn one day). A barrow is heaped over the urn.

Then the funeral games. Achilles offers prizes from the funeral stores. Eight contests follow, each with a careful description of the prizes, the entrants, the play, and the outcome:

Chariot race. Five entrants: Eumelus, Diomedes, Menelaus, Antilochus son of Nestor (advised by his old father), Meriones the Cretan. The course goes out around a far turning-post (a dead tree-stump on the plain) and back. Eumelus leads until Athena breaks his chariot-yoke and he falls; Diomedes leads to the finish; Antilochus, by sharp dangerous driving, slips past Menelaus at a narrow place and finishes second; Menelaus protests; Antilochus apologises gracefully and offers him the mare; Menelaus, mollified, lets him keep it. The whole episode is one of the cycle's most charming pieces of mortal good-humour.

Boxing. Epeius (the eventual builder of the Wooden Horse — the first cycle-mention of him) defeats Euryalus with one great blow that lifts him off his feet.

Wrestling. The two giants Ajax and Odysseus contest the prize. Ajax lifts Odysseus; Odysseus kicks the back of Ajax's knee and brings him down; Achilles, seeing they could go on forever, declares them equal and splits the prize.

Foot-race. Three runners: the lesser Ajax leading until the last lap, when Odysseus prays to Athena who trips Ajax in a heap of cow-dung from the funeral sacrifices; Ajax wins second laughing and spitting dung, and the army laughed at him; Odysseus first.

Armed combat to first blood. Telamonian Ajax and Diomedes face one another with full hoplite gear and spears; the captains intervene before either is wounded; the prize is split.

Throwing the iron mass. A great pig of unsmelted iron — enough for a farmer's tools for five years — is thrown by Polypoetes the farthest.

Archery. Two doves are tied alive to the mast of a ship by long strings; Teucer shoots the string, releasing one bird; Meriones shoots the bird itself in mid-flight.

Javelin. Achilles invites Agamemnon to throw against Meriones; the king accepts; Achilles declares Agamemnon winner without contest, for you are king and best at every art. The diplomatic gesture closes the games.

The book ends with the army eating and drinking by Patroclus's barrow; Achilles still sleepless, dragging Hector's body daily around the pyre, the body preserved by Apollo's hand against decay. Eleven days will pass before the next book.

Analysis

The longest peacetime book

Book 23 is the cycle's only sustained book-length scene of peacetime — or what passes for peacetime in a war-camp. The funeral and the games take up the entire book without combat, and Homer's eye is on the army itself rather than on individual heroes. The captains who have been the cycle's subjects (Diomedes, Odysseus, the two Ajaxes, Menelaus, Idomeneus, Meriones, Antilochus) take turns competing in genteel disputes. The book is therefore the cycle's portrait of the Greek army as a community — not a fighting force, but a body of men who eat, contest, joke, settle disputes, laugh at each other's misfortunes. Reading Book 23 is necessary preparation for the Odyssey, which is also a poem about communities (Ithaca, Pylos, Sparta, Phaeacia); Book 23 is where Homer first shows us how a Greek community functions in non-combat mode.

Patroclus's ghost

The ghost-visit is the cycle's first sustained look at the dead. Patroclus's shade comes in dream, asks for burial, asks for shared burial when Achilles dies (the two bones in one urn), and — when Achilles tries to embrace him — passes through Achilles's arms like smoke, gibbering. The image is the cycle's first articulation of the principle that the dead retain shape and character but not substance. The Odyssey will develop the principle at length in Book 11 (the Nekyia) and Book 24 (the second Nekyia); the Aeneid will develop it in Book 6 (Aeneas trying to embrace Anchises in the underworld and failing in the same way). Patroclus's ghost is also the cycle's first explicit reference to the principle that the unburied dead cannot pass through Hades's gates. Achilles's later treatment of Priam in Book 24 — the agreement to return Hector's body for burial — is the moral application of what Patroclus's ghost has taught him: the body is owed to its survivors for the rites.

The human sacrifice

The slaughter of the twelve young Trojans at the pyre is one of the cycle's hardest single passages. Homer's editorial gloss is the cycle's only such — Achilles wrought evil in his heart against them. The human-sacrifice scene is the cycle's most uncomfortable single ritual, and Homer marks it as evil even as he prints it. The image is the structural culmination of the dehumanisation that began in Book 20 (Tros's failed supplication), continued in Book 21 (Lycaon's failed supplication, the die, friend speech), and reached its peak in Book 22 (the eat your flesh raw threat and the dragging of Hector). The funeral pyre's twelve dead Trojans are the last act of the wrath in its hardened form; Book 24's ransom of Hector will pull Achilles back from this threshold. The Iliad is the only ancient Greek war-epic to stage human sacrifice as part of an aristocratic ritual; the gesture is unique in the cycle, and the editorial Achilles wrought evil is unique in its self-criticism.

The games as community-portrait

The eight contests of the games are the cycle's most extended single piece of communal portrait. Each contest is a small drama: the chariot-race (Antilochus's cheating and apology); the wrestling (the two giants stalemating); the boxing (Epeius's single great blow, with the implicit foreshadowing of his role as the Horse-builder); the foot-race (the lesser Ajax tripped in cow-dung); the armed combat (split before injury); the iron-mass (an unusual prize, suggesting Mycenaean ironwork); the archery (Teucer the string, Meriones the bird); the javelin (Achilles's diplomatic concession to Agamemnon). The cycle's principle is that competition is the structural alternative to war: the same men who killed Trojans in the morning are now disputing over chariot-prizes in the afternoon, with bad-temper and good-humour and Athena's mischief in equal measure. The Aeneid quotes the structure for Aeneid 5 (the funeral games of Anchises in Sicily) directly — five contests in Virgil (boat-race, foot-race, boxing, archery, equestrian display); the structural template is exactly Iliad 23. The Posthomerica's Book 4 (the funeral games of Achilles) is the same structure again.

The cycle's only Wooden-Horse mention so far

Watch the small detail of the boxer Epeius. Homer notes him only as the boxer with the great blow. The reader who knows the cycle knows that Epeius will be the carpenter who builds the Wooden Horse (Posthomerica 12 stages the building; the Odyssey 8's Demodocus-song reports it). The Iliad gives him only this one passing mention. The principle of the cycle is consistent: famous cycle-events are not narrated within the Iliad but are alluded to in passing — Aeneas's survival (Book 20), Achilles's death (Book 22's prophecy), the Wooden Horse (here), the sack of Troy (Book 6 and other forecasts). The Iliad lets the cycle's other epics fill in the gaps; it does not pre-empt them. Quintus, Virgil, and the Odyssey are all writing into the spaces Homer has left.

The shared urn

Watch the detail that Patroclus's bones are to share the urn with Achilles's bones when he dies. The promise is paid off in Odyssey 24 (where Agamemnon's ghost reports the funeral of Achilles to the new-arrived ghosts of the suitors: Achilles and Patroclus were buried in one urn, the amphiphoreus with two handles, a gift of Dionysus to Thetis, the work of Hephaestus). The Posthomerica 4 narrates the funeral and the urn directly. The cycle's principle is that the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus is so structural that not even death separates them; they share one cup of ash. The image is the cycle's clearest single statement of the male-male bond as the war-epic's deepest emotional structure. Plato in the Symposium will quote the bond as the model for erôs between men; Aeschylus in the lost Myrmidons will dramatise it directly; the cycle's classical-era reception is built on this one detail.

Butler's prose and the games-narrative

Butler's plain English is at its best in Book 23's games. The contest-by-contest narrative needs clarity above music; Butler prints each game cleanly with the prizes listed, the contestants named, the play recounted, the outcome decided. Pope made the games heroic-couplet vignettes (each a small set-piece); Lattimore restores the cool. Butler's prose is the right model for a book that is primarily about the rules and the play of communal competition; the reader who wants the games as social portrait should read Book 23 in Butler.

What to watch for

Watch Patroclus's ghost — the cycle's first underworld-vision, the structural seed of every later underworld in the cycle (Nekyia in Odyssey 11; Aeneid 6; the second Nekyia in Odyssey 24). Watch the twelve sacrificed Trojans — the cycle's most uncomfortable single passage, the last act of the hardened wrath, marked by Homer himself as evil. Watch Antilochus — his cheating and apologising in the chariot-race is the cycle's clearest portrait of his character; he will die saving his father Nestor in Posthomerica 2, and the gracefulness shown here is part of what makes that death weigh. Watch Epeius — the cycle's first mention of the Horse-builder, made in the cycle's most peaceful book. Watch the shared urn — the promise paid off in the Odyssey and Posthomerica, the cycle's clearest statement of the Achilles-Patroclus bond. And watch the body of Hector. Achilles drags it daily for eleven days; Apollo preserves it; the cycle's last book is the resolution that all this preparation has been building toward.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 23 is the formal closing of the Patroclus-arc opened in Book 16 and the structural counterweight to Book 22's catastrophe. The pyre-vow Achilles made in Book 18 (twelve Trojan youths slaughtered at the pyre) is fulfilled here; the youths bound on the river-bank in Book 21 are the ones who die. The shared-urn promise echoes the Briseis-lament of Book 19 (Patroclus had promised her she would be Achilles's lawful wife at Phthia — the promise of shared household life). The chariot-race's tactics-lecture from Nestor to Antilochus is the structural quote of Nestor's military-tactics speeches of Books 2, 4, 7, 8, and 11 — the old man teaching the young in the only mode available to him. The games' celebration of communal competition is the structural answer to the cycle's twenty-two books of communal warfare; the same captains who have been fighting now contest.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. The cycle's last book (24) is the resolution that Books 22 and 23 prepare. Hector's body, dragged daily by Achilles, preserved by Apollo, will be returned in Book 24. Patroclus's ghost-visit is paid off in Achilles's eventual acceptance of his own death and the shared urn. The funeral pyre is the structural model for the pyre of Hector that closes the Iliad.

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus's Book 4 (the funeral games of Achilles) is built scene for scene on Iliad 23. The structural quote is exact — chariot-race, wrestling, boxing, foot-race, armed combat, throwing-events, archery — and the cycle's pattern of the dead-friend-honoured-by-games is established by Iliad 23 for Quintus to repeat. Quintus's Book 4 is also where the shared urn is realised: Patroclus's bones are joined in the urn by Achilles's bones, fulfilling Book 23's dream-promise. The cycle's most concentrated single piece of male-male friendship is paid off in the Posthomerica's most concentrated single funeral.

Into the Aeneid. Virgil reads Iliad 23 as the cycle's master-template for Aeneid 5 (the funeral games of Anchises in Sicily). Five contests in Virgil (boat-race substituting for chariot-race; foot-race; boxing; archery; equestrian display by Ascanius's young company); the structural template is exactly Iliad 23. Aeneid 5 is one of the cycle's longest games-passages because it is consciously written as the Aeneid's quote of Iliad 23. The Patroclus-ghost is the structural model for Anchises's ghost-visit to Aeneas at the end of Aeneid 5 — the dead friend's request that Aeneas come to the underworld and meet him; the Book-6 underworld-journey is the consequence of the Book-5 ghost-visit, in direct quote of Iliad-23's ghost-visit-to-Achilles. The pyre-vow's twelve-youths-sacrifice has its Aeneid equivalent at Aeneid 11 (eight Italian prisoners sent to be sacrificed at Pallas's pyre — Virgil's deliberate quote of the Iliadic ritual, with the same uncomfortable moral charge).

Into the Odyssey. Patroclus's ghost is the structural seed of the entire Odyssean underworld. The Nekyia of Odyssey 11 and the second Nekyia of Odyssey 24 are both built on the principle Iliad 23 establishes — the dead retain shape and character but not substance; they pass through arms like smoke. The Odyssey's Achilles in Book 11 says I would rather be a serf to a poor man on earth than king of all the dead — the line is the long-form answer to Iliad 23's even in Hades the dead keep their form but not their life. The shared urn is realised in Odyssey 24, where Agamemnon's ghost reports the urn to the new-arrived ghosts of the suitors. The cycle's continuity is built on Iliad-23's promise. The funeral games are quoted obliquely in Odyssey 8 (the Phaeacians' contests at Alcinous's court — boxing, wrestling, foot-race, dancing); the same communal-portrait function is performed in the same way. The Iliad's only peacetime book is the structural source of the Odyssey's many peacetime scenes.

The funeral is held. The Iliad has one book to go.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Achilles — presides over the funeral and games; cuts his lock of hair for Patroclus; slaughters the twelve Trojans; declares the contests' winners
• Patroclus — ghost comes to Achilles in dream; asks for burial and the shared urn; passes through Achilles's arms like smoke, gibbering
• Diomedes — wins the chariot-race
• Antilochus — second in the chariot-race by sharp driving; apologises gracefully to Menelaus
• Menelaus — fourth in the chariot-race; protests Antilochus's pass; mollified
• Odysseus — wrestles Ajax to a draw; wins the foot-race after Athena trips the lesser Ajax in cow-dung
• Ajax Greater — wrestles Odysseus to a draw; fights Diomedes to a draw in armed combat
• Ajax Lesser — second in the foot-race after a comic fall in cow-dung
• Agamemnon — accepts Achilles's diplomatic concession of the javelin prize
• Nestor — gives Antilochus his pre-race lecture on cornering tactics

Mentioned / off-stage

• Hector — body dragged daily around the pyre; preserved by Apollo
• Apollo — preserves Hector's body from decay
• Helen — the cause; not named in this book
• Andromache — implicit in Hector's body
• Thetis — implicit in every reference to Achilles
• Peleus — Achilles's father, named in the hair-lock vow to the Spercheius
• Epeius — the boxer who will build the Wooden Horse; the cycle's first mention

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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.