The War That Killed Achilles (20 page)

Who is Patroklos? In the
Iliad,
he is wholly defined by his relationship to Achilles; he is Achilles'
therápōn,
or “comrade,” “comrade-at-arms,” “follower,” “retainer,” or “henchman.” A
therápōn
attends his royal master by greeting guests and serving wine, assisting in sacrifices, acting as a messenger to other chiefs, driving a chariot, and fighting by his commander's side; Patroklos' epithets
hippeús,
“fighting from a chariot,” and
hippokéleuthos,
“horse-driving,” reflect this last duty.
¹
Accordingly, Patroklos helped greet the Embassy, saw to the accommodation of Phoinix, and, at Achilles' bidding, sprinted off to find out news about Machaon and his wound. A
therápōn
is a nonkinsman of noble but dependent status to his lord—an “esquire, not servant” as one old dictionary wor riedly emphasizes, fearful one might imagine that Patroklos was not a gentleman.
²
As important, he is also Achilles'
phílos hetaros
, his own, his dear, his beloved companion.
³

Although central to the dramatic action of the
Iliad,
outside of the
Iliad
Patroklos has a remarkably slight presence, suggesting that he was mostly developed by Homer for the specific role he plays in this epic. An ancient commentator reports that “Hesiod says that Patroclus' father Menoetius was Peleus' brother, so that accordingly they were each other's first cousins.”
⁴
No mention of the familial relationship is made in the
Iliad,
which is rather wholly focused on the relationship between the two men as comrades-in-arms. In the
Iliad,
Patroklos enters Achilles' life when he flees from Opous in Lokris, in east-central Greece, following a childhood misdeed (the accidental murder of a playmate), with his father, to Phthia.
⁵
This accident apart, nothing is said of the life—or existence—of Patroklos prior to his inclusion in Achilles' orbit, by the
Iliad
or any other tradition.

The name of Patroklos, who in the
Iliad
stands closest to Achilles of all his companions, is suspiciously reminiscent of the name of the person closest to Meleager, who figured so prominently in Phoinix's wildly scattered parable in the Embassy scene. In that rambling paradigm, it will be remembered, Meleager, whom Phoinix intended to stand as an example to Achilles, was finally moved to rejoin his companions in battle by the entreaties of his wife, Kleopatra. Kleo-patra, Patro-kleos—both names mean “renown of the father”
⁶
—and it may be that the old folktale of Meleager was Homer's inspiration for both the name of Achilles' closest friend and the role he plays as mediator between the angry hero and his community. The implications of this resemblance will shortly be seen.

The adventures of paired or inseparable heroes are a favorite theme of myth and legend. In Greek mythology, to choose one example, we find Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, closely paired in a number of exploits with Peirithoös of Thessaly.
⁷
A more ancient and striking parallel, long noted, is found in the Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh, dating to at least 1700 B.C. The emotional heart of this saga of the deeds of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk (now in Iraq), is his close friendship with the wild man Enkidu, whose death drives the grieving Gilgamesh to the limits of mortal existence.
⁸

Achilles and Patroklos perform no heroic deeds together. In fact, Achilles'
therápōn
has no life at all outside his death, and he performs no deed except the grand, last mission that will kill him. Homer worked hard to ensure that this outline of a figure whose single, simple role is so transparent be invested with as much humanity as his poetic art could muster in short compass: the death of Patroklos simply
must
be pathetic,
must
stir emotion, or the whole grand scheme of the
Iliad
fails. Consequently, man and god give rare tribute to the character of Achilles' doomed
therápōn;
Patroklos “ ‘was gentle, and understood how to be kindly toward all men,' ” according to a companion. Zeus himself knows Patroklos as “ ‘strong and gentle.' ”

“Groaning heavily,” Patroklos replies by listing the heroes who have been wounded; then, cursing Achilles as pitiless, he makes the request that Nestor urged—to send him out with Achilles' men, disguised in Achilles' armor:

Patroklos, for all his good intentions, has bungled his mission. Faithfully, he echoed the latter part of Nestor's speech—but he forgot its major point: Nestor intended for Patroklos to persuade
Achilles
to return to battle, and only if this entreaty failed was he to request that he, Patroklos, return in Achilles' armor. This blunder represents Patroklos' second missed cue. Previously, in the Embassy, Phoinix's obscure parable of Meleager offered one clear lesson: an entreaty by the person closest to the angry hero—spelled out for emphasis as Kleo-patra—could induce him back to battle. Achilles stormed past the parable without consideration; but so, too, more fatefully, did Patroklos, who, as the
Iliad
took pains to point out, was standing by, watching and listening. In the Embassy, Patroklos did not hear the hint; now he registers Nestor's hints but embraces the wrong one.

“Deeply troubled,” Achilles answers Patroklos, briefly defending his anger against Agamemnon. Nonetheless, swiftly and without altercation, he accedes to Patroklos' request. Directing him to draw his “ ‘glorious armour' ” about his shoulders, Achilles gives Patroklos command of the Myrmidons, and last stern injunctions:

No one speaks like Achilles. The astounding vision—the annihilation of enemy and ally alike, with the survival only of the two companions—reveals not only Achilles' closeness to Patroklos but also how wholly disassociated he believes himself to be from anything to do with this war. Also manifest within his stern, thrice-repeated injunctions are his deepest fears—that he lose honor, that Patroklos not return to him alive. While they talk, the storm of battle has risen around Aias, who had been defending the ships with almost single-handed courage. Under a barrage of spears, this solitary and stalwart warrior at last retreats. The Trojans fling firebrands at Achilles' ship and the flames stream over it:

Events have taken a bewildering turn: Patroklos had come intending to arouse Achilles, but it is Achilles who now rouses Patroklos. It is he who will muster the Myrmidons. Achilles had pledged not to return “ ‘until that time came / when the fighting with all its clamour came up to my own ships.' ” Now the fighting and the flames have surely arrived; if Patroklos had not offered himself, might it not be Achilles setting forth?

As Achilles musters his men, the legendary Myrmidons, Patroklos arms himself in the borrowed armor. The scene is typical of the three other great arming scenes in the epic, belonging respectively to Paris, to Agamemnon, and, most magnificently, and yet to come, to Achilles. Together, the four scenes demonstrate how traditional set pieces such as arming can be adapted, and in this case personalized for each hero.
⁹
First, Patroklos puts on his greaves with their silver fastenings, then the corselet, “starry and elaborate of swift-footed Aiakides,” then the sword and the great shield:

Patroklos may be clad, head to foot, in Achilles' armor, but he cannot wield Achilles' spear. Used here eloquently to signify how out of his depth Patroklos is, the spear is one of three remarkable gifts to Peleus that were in turn handed down to his son. The
Cypria
relates how “at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis the gods gathered on Pelion to feast, and brought gifts for Peleus, and Chiron cut down a fine ash and gave him it for a spear. They say that Athena planed it and Hephaestus fashioned it.”
¹⁰
The other gifts were a pair of horses, Xanthos and Balios, born of the mare Podarge and the West Wind, “swift and immortal / horses the gods had given as shining gifts to Peleus”; and the armor, described as
ámbrota,
or “armour of non-dying, invincible armour,”
¹¹
which “the gods gave Peleus, a glorious present, for that day they drove [Thetis] to the marriage bed of a mortal.”

In folklore and saga, gifts from fairies or higher powers to a mortal prince are usually magical. A magic spear would return to its master when hurled; magic horses would convey him safely out of battle; and magic armor would make the hero invulnerable.
¹²
Typically, Homer has suppressed all such outlandish protection; no hero fighting at Troy has any charm or power to escape death.
¹³
Nonetheless, as will shortly be revealed, remnants of the original attributes of each of Peleus' divine gifts are discernible in the
Iliad,
although transformed and turned by Homer to tragic effect.

At Patroklos' bidding, Automedon, Achilles' charioteer, harnesses the immortal horses,

Many images have been used to convey the mayhem and bloodshed of war, but for sheer chilling glamour, few can match this mustering of the Myrmidons, wolf-hungry for battle, with the immortal horses straining at their traces. “Fifty were the fast-running ships wherein Achilles / beloved of Zeus had led his men to Troy, and in each one / were fifty men.” The origins of the Myrmidons are obscure and the usual explanation of their name is highly unsatisfactory. According to Hesiod, Aiakos, Achilles' grandfather and a mortal son of Zeus, found himself to be the only human on the desolate island of Aigina; lonely, he prayed to his father for companions, and Zeus transformed the island's ants—
múrmēkes
—into humans, who became the Myrmidons.
¹⁴
Later writers theorized they were so called for their antlike habits, such as living in caves and digging up soil.
¹⁵
Attempts to correlate either explanation with the warrior tribe of Achilles remain mostly unconvincing—ants are industrious and have exemplary social organization; they are fierce and ravenous and fight in a “pack”; Aigina's defining central mountain is conical and looks like an anthill, and so forth.
¹⁶
It is difficult not to view these explanations as a whimsical folk etymology confronted with an old and mysterious name. In the apocryphal Acts of Andrew (dating to the third century A.D.), there is a “city of the cannibals,” which is identified as Myrmidon; it is possible that this account taps into some more ancient, and savage, lost tradition.
¹⁷