Book XVI

The Patrocleia: Patroclus goes out in Achilles' armor, quenches the fire, kills Sarpedon — and dies at the wall, struck by a god, a boy, and Hector, in that order.

Translator’s note on Book 16

Book 16 is the poem's pivot, and it knows it: the narrator turns eight times to address Patroclus by name — "you answered, Patroclus, horseman" — an intimacy of grammar shown to no one else in the Iliad (note 2). Every promissory note the epic has issued since Book 9 is called in. The dark-spring tears reuse Agamemnon's simile from 9.14-15; Patroclus repeats Nestor's plan of 11.794-803 nearly word for word, and the narrator stamps it before Achilles can answer: "So he spoke, begging — the great fool: it was his own death and evil doom he was begging for" (46-47, note 4). Achilles' consent comes wrapped in the conditions that will be violated one by one — drive them from the ships, then come back; do not push on toward Ilion, "lest one of the everlasting gods step in: the worker-from- afar, Apollo, loves them" (93-94) — the death spoken as a warning by the man who will mourn it (note 6). The Dodona prayer asks two things, and "the father granted one, and refused the other" (note 18).

At the center, the poem's theology pays its highest price. Zeus watches his son Sarpedon come against Patroclus and asks Hera whether he may save him; her answer — every god has sons in this war — holds the door of fate shut from inside, and the compromise is the poem's most beautiful invention: Sleep and Death, the twin brothers, to carry the body home to Lycia for tomb and grave-stone, "for that is the honor-right of the dead" (457, 675). Zeus consents and rains blood; Apollo washes the body in the river and hands it to the twins — the lines Zenodotus deleted and athetized, and the scene painted on the Euphronios krater three centuries later (notes [25], [35]). Between father and corpse the poem sets its most pitiless couplet: the extra hour of glory Zeus grants Patroclus is deliberated over his head like a sentence (note 34).

The death itself is built as an un-arming: Apollo, hidden in mist, strikes the flat-handed blow, and the arming-scene of line 130 runs backwards — helmet rolling under the hooves ("before this it was not lawful for that helmet to be fouled with dust"), spear shattered, shield down, corslet loosed by the god's own hands (note 41); then Euphorbus's dart from behind, and only third, Hector, into the belly. The dying prophecy counts the killers in order and adds Hector to the list of the dead (note 44); the soul-flight lines — "wailing its fate, leaving manhood and youth" — are fixed here for their verbatim return at 22.361-363, where Hector will speak a dying prophecy of his own. The book ends with Hector answering a corpse and the immortal horses, "the gods' shining gifts to Peleus," carrying Automedon out of his reach.

Register notes: 16.3-4 = 9.14-15; 16.36-45 ≈ 11.794-803 (16.44-45 = 11.802-803 exactly); 16.112 reuses the fixed Muse-invocation; 16.215-217 = 13.131-133; 16.482-484 = 13.389-391; 16.742-743 reuses the diver of 12.385-386; the apostrophe roll-call line (16.692-693) adapts the fixed "Whom first, whom last."

1So they fought on around the well-benched ship;

and Patroclus stood beside Achilles, shepherd of the people,

letting fall hot tears like a spring of dark water¹

that pours its black stream down a goat-proof cliff.

5And swift-footed brilliant Achilles saw him, and pitied him,

and speaking winged words he addressed him:

"Why are you in tears, Patroclus — like a little girl

running at her mother's side, begging to be carried,

clutching her skirt, dragging at her hurrying steps,

10and looking up at her in tears until she lifts her:

that is you, Patroclus — spilling soft tears just so.

Have you some news for the Myrmidons, or for me myself?

Some message out of Phthia that you alone have heard?

They say Menoetius, Actor's son, is still living,

15and Peleus, Aeacus' son, lives among his Myrmidons —

the two whose deaths would grieve us most of all.

Or are you mourning for the Argives, watching them perish

by the hollow ships for their own high-handedness?

Speak out: hide nothing. Then we will both know."

20Then, groaning heavily, you answered, Patroclus, horseman:²

"Achilles, son of Peleus, far greatest of the Achaeans,

do not be angry: such grief has overmastered the Achaeans.

For all the men who before were our best

lie by the ships, hit from afar or stabbed close.

25Hit is Tydeus' son, strong Diomedes;

stabbed is Odysseus, famed with the spear; and Agamemnon;

and hit too is Eurypylus, by an arrow in the thigh.

Around these men the healers with their many drugs

are busy, tending their wounds. But you, Achilles — there is no dealing with you.

30May such anger never take me as this anger you nurse,

cursed in your valor! What good will any late-born man get of you³

if you will not beat back shameful ruin from the Argives?

Pitiless man: the horseman Peleus was no father of yours,

nor Thetis your mother — the grey sea bore you,

35and the sheer cliffs, so unbending is the mind in you.

But if in your heart you are dodging some prophecy,⁴

something your lady mother has told you from Zeus,

then send me out at least, and let the rest of the army

of Myrmidons follow, and I may be a light to the Danaans;

40and give me your own armor to buckle on my shoulders,

so that the Trojans may take me for you, and hold back

from the fighting, and the warlike sons of the Achaeans catch their breath,

worn as they are; for the breathing-spaces of war are few.

Fresh men, with one shout, could easily push men weary

45of battle back on the city, away from the ships and the huts."

So he spoke, begging — the great fool: it was his own

death and evil doom he was begging for.

And deeply troubled, swift-footed Achilles answered him:

"Ah, Zeus-sprung Patroclus — what a thing you have said.

50I care for no prophecy, none that I know of,

nor has my lady mother told me anything from Zeus.

But this bitter grief keeps coming at my heart and spirit:⁵

when a man is minded to rob his own equal

and take his prize back, just because he outranks him in power.

55That is my bitter grief; I have suffered it to the heart.

The girl the sons of the Achaeans picked out as my prize —

won with my own spear when I sacked her walled city —

her the lord Agamemnon took back out of my hands,

Atreus' son, as if I were some vagrant without honor.

60But we will let that be — a thing done and past. It seems there was

no way, after all, to be angry in my heart forever;

and yet I said I would not lay my wrath aside

until the moment the war-shout and the fighting reached

my own ships. So: you put my famous armor on your shoulders,

65and lead the war-loving Myrmidons into the fight,

since the dark cloud of Trojans has closed hard

around the ships, and the Argives are penned against

the surf-line of the sea, and hold only a little strip

of ground; and the whole city of the Trojans has come out

70emboldened — because they do not see the face of my helmet

blazing near them. Soon enough they would be running

and choking the gullies with their dead, if the lord Agamemnon

knew how to deal kindly with me. Instead they besiege the camp.

For no spear rages in the hands of Diomedes,

75Tydeus' son, to beat destruction off the Danaans;

and I have not yet heard the voice of Atreus' son

shouting from his hated head. It is man-slaughtering Hector's

voice that breaks around them, calling the Trojans on; and they

hold the whole plain with their war-cry, beating the Achaeans in battle.

80Even so, Patroclus — beat the ruin off the ships:

fall on them with all your power, or they will burn

the ships with blazing fire and take away our own dear homecoming.

But obey me — here is the whole end of my word, laid in your mind —

so that you may win me great honor and glory⁶

85in the eyes of all the Danaans, and they send back

the beautiful girl, and bring shining gifts besides:

once you have driven them from the ships, come back. And if

the loud-thunderer, Hera's lord, grants you your hour of glory,

do not go lusting after battle apart from me

90against the war-loving Trojans — you will strip my honor thinner;

and do not, exulting in the war and the slaughter,

killing Trojans, lead the way to Ilion:

one of the everlasting gods from Olympus may step in —

the worker-from-afar, Apollo, loves them dearly.

95Turn back, once you have set the light of safety in the ships,

and leave the rest to cut each other down across the plain.

For — O father Zeus, Athena, Apollo — would⁷

that not one Trojan might escape death, of all there are,

and not one Argive; and that we two alone might slip destruction,

100so that alone we might undo Troy's holy coronal of towers."

So the two of them spoke such things to one another.

But Ajax could hold no longer: the missiles pressed him too hard.⁸

The mind of Zeus was breaking him, and the proud Trojans

with their throwing; and the bright helmet at his temples

105rang terribly under the blows — struck and struck again

on its well-made cheek-pieces; and his left shoulder ached,

steady so long under the glittering shield; yet they could not

shake him loose for all the missiles they leaned against him.

And always he labored, gasping hard, the sweat streaming

110down from every limb of him, and he could nowhere

catch his breath: everywhere evil was propped on evil.

Tell me now, Muses, who keep your homes on Olympus —⁹

how the fire first fell on the ships of the Achaeans.

Hector, coming close, struck the ash spear of Ajax

115with his great sword, behind the point at the socket,

and sheared it clean off; and Telamonian Ajax

brandished a docked shaft, useless in his hand, while far away

the bronze point rang on the ground where it fell.

And Ajax knew in his blameless heart, and shuddered at it:

120the work of gods — that Zeus who thunders on high was shearing off

all the plans of his fighting, and willed victory to the Trojans.

He drew back out of range. And onto the swift ship they hurled

unwearying fire; and the quenchless flame poured over it at once.

So the fire wrapped the stern of the ship. And Achilles

125struck both his thighs and spoke to Patroclus:

"Up, Zeus-sprung Patroclus, master of horses!

I see the rush of consuming fire at the ships.

Before they take them, and there is no escaping left —

get into the armor, quick, and I will gather the men."

130So he spoke; and Patroclus armed himself in the flashing bronze.¹⁰

First he set the greaves along his shins,

fine greaves, fitted with silver ankle-pieces;

second, he put the corslet about his chest,

the intricate, star-bright corslet of the swift-footed son of Aeacus.

135Around his shoulders he threw the sword, silver-studded,

bronze; and after that the shield, great and heavy;

and on his powerful head he set the well-made helmet,

horsehair-crested; the plume nodded terribly above it.

And he took two stout spears, fitted to his grip —

140only the spear he did not take of Aeacus' blameless son:

heavy, huge, compact — no other of the Achaeans

could swing it; Achilles alone knew how to swing it —

the Pelian ash that Chiron gave his dear father

from the peak of Pelion, to be death for heroes.

145The horses he told Automedon to yoke, and quickly —

the man he honored most after Achilles breaker of men,

and trustiest at his post to await the shout of battle.

So Automedon led the swift horses under the yoke,

Xanthus and Balius, the pair who flew with the winds:¹¹

150the harpy Podarge conceived them by the West Wind

as she grazed in a meadow beside the stream of Ocean.

And in the side-traces he put blameless Pedasus,

whom Achilles brought home when he took Eëtion's city:

a horse who, mortal as he was, kept pace with immortal horses.

155And Achilles went down the huts and armed the Myrmidons,

all of them, in their war-gear. And they, like wolves¹²

that eat flesh raw, hearts full of unspeakable courage,

who have brought down a great antlered stag in the mountains

and tear it, and every muzzle among them is red with blood;

160and in a pack they go to a spring of dark water

to lap with their thin tongues the black surface-water,

belching up clotted gore; and the heart in their chests

is fearless still, though every belly is stretched:

such were the leaders and lords of the Myrmidons

165streaming round the brave aide of the swift-footed son of Aeacus;

and among them stood Achilles the warlike,

urging on the horses and the shield-bearing men.

Fifty were the swift ships that Achilles,¹³

dear to Zeus, led to Troy, and in each one

170fifty men, companions at the oar-benches;

and he made five men leaders, and trusted them

to command, while he himself in his great power was king.

One line was led by Menesthius of the glittering corslet,

the son of Spercheius, the sky-fed river:

175Peleus' daughter bore him, beautiful Polydora,

a woman bedded with a god, to tireless Spercheius —

though in name to Borus, Perieres' son, who wed her

openly before men, and gave bride-gifts past counting.

The second was led by warlike Eudorus, born

180out of wedlock: Polymele, beautiful in the dance,

bore him — Phylas's daughter. Strong Hermes, the slayer of Argus,

fell in love with her, his eyes catching her among the singers

in the dancing-choir of Artemis of the golden distaff, the huntress-crier;

and straightway he climbed to her upper room and lay with her

185in secret — Hermes the gracious — and she gave him a shining son,

Eudorus, quick beyond all men to run, and a fighter.

And when Eileithyia of hard labor had brought him

out into the light, and he had seen the rays of the sun,

the strong might of Echecles, Actor's son,

190led her home to his house, once he had given countless bride-gifts;

and old Phylas reared the boy well, and cherished him,

wrapping him round with love, as though he were his own son.

The third was led by warlike Peisander,

Maemalus's son, who outshone all the Myrmidons

195in spear-fighting, after Peleus' son's own companion.

The fourth the old horseman Phoenix led;

the fifth, Alcimedon, Laerces' blameless son.

Now when Achilles had set them all with their leaders,

duly marshaled, he laid this hard word upon them:¹⁴

200"Myrmidons — let no man forget for me the threats

you made beside the swift ships against the Trojans

all through my wrath, when every one of you accused me:

'Cruel son of Peleus — your mother reared you on bile!

Pitiless — holding your companions by the ships against their will!

205Let us at least sail home again in our seagoing ships,

since this ruinous anger has fallen on your heart.'

So you would gather and mutter at me. Now here it is —

the great work of battle you were lusting for, in plain sight.

Now let each man fight the Trojans with a stout heart."

210So speaking he stirred the fury and the heart of every man,

and the ranks locked tighter, once they heard their king.

As when a man fits close the stones of a high house's wall,¹⁵

building against the strength of the winds,

so close were fitted the helmets and the bossed shields:

215buckler pressed on buckler, helmet on helmet, man on man,

and the horsehair crests on the bright ridges touched

as they nodded, so close they stood to one another.

And in front of them all two men armed themselves,

Patroclus and Automedon, of one mind between them:

220to fight in the forefront of the Myrmidons. But Achilles

went into his hut, and lifted the lid of a chest,

beautiful, intricate, that silver-footed Thetis¹⁶

had put aboard his ship to carry, filled with tunics

and wind-proof cloaks and thick-piled rugs.

225And in it lay a wrought cup: no other man

drank the fire-bright wine from it, and to no god

did he pour from it, except to Zeus the father.

This he took from the chest and cleansed with sulphur

first, then washed it in fair streams of water,

230and washed his own hands, and drew off the fire-bright wine.

Then he prayed, standing in the middle of the yard, and poured the wine

looking up into heaven; and Zeus who delights in thunder marked him well:

"Zeus — lord — Dodonaean — Pelasgian — dweller far off,¹⁷

ruling over wintry Dodona; and around you the Selloi

235live, your interpreters, men of unwashed feet, who sleep on the ground.

Once before, when I prayed, you heard my word:

you did me honor, and struck the Achaean army hard.

So now again accomplish this desire for me.

I myself will stay in the gathering-place of the ships,

240but I am sending out my companion, with many Myrmidons,

to fight. Send glory out with him, wide-seeing Zeus,

and make the heart bold in his chest, so that even Hector

may learn whether our aide knows how to make war

alone — or whether his hands rage invincible only

245when I myself go into the grind of the war-god.

But when he has driven the fighting and the war-cry from the ships,

then let him come back to me at the swift ships unhurt,

with all his armor, and his close-fighting companions."

So he spoke in prayer, and Zeus the counselor heard him;

250and the father granted him one thing, and refused the other:¹⁸

that Patroclus should push the war and battle back from the ships

he granted; and refused that he come back safe out of the fighting.

So Achilles, having poured and prayed to Zeus the father,

went into his hut again and laid the cup in the chest,

255and came out and stood before the hut; for his heart still longed

to watch the dread struggle of Trojans and Achaeans.

And they, armed all together with great-hearted Patroclus,

marched until they charged the Trojans, thinking great things.

At once they came pouring out like roadside wasps¹⁹

260that boys are forever provoking, forever tormenting —

wasps with their nests along the road — as boys will,

the little fools: they make a common evil for many.

If some traveling man going by then stirs the wasps

without meaning it, out they come with fearless hearts,

265every one flying at him, defending their young:

with their heart and courage the Myrmidons then

came pouring from the ships; and the quenchless roar rose.

And Patroclus called to his companions with a great shout:

"Myrmidons, companions of Achilles, Peleus' son —

270be men, my friends; remember your rushing courage;

so we may honor Peleus' son, who is far the best

of the Argives by the ships — he, and his close-fighting aides —

and so that Atreus' son, wide-ruling Agamemnon,

may know his blindness: that he honored not at all the best of the Achaeans."²⁰

275So speaking he stirred the fury and the heart of every man,

and they fell on the Trojans in one mass; and around them the ships

echoed terribly under the shouting of the Achaeans.

But the Trojans, when they saw the stout son of Menoetius,

himself and his aide beside him, blazing in their armor,

280the heart was shaken in all of them, and the battle-lines wavered:

they thought the swift-footed son of Peleus by the ships

had thrown away his wrath and taken back friendship;

and each man looked about him for escape from sheer destruction.

Then Patroclus first cast with his shining spear,

285straight into the middle, where the most men were driven

in confusion around the stern of the ship of great-hearted

Protesilaus, and he struck Pyraechmes — who led the Paeonians,²¹

who fight from chariots, out of Amydon, from the wide-flowing Axius —

in the right shoulder; and he went down on his back in the dust

290with a groan, and around him his companions panicked,

the Paeonians: for Patroclus had driven the panic among them all,

killing their leader, who was their best in battle.

He drove them from the ships, and quenched the blazing fire;

and the ship was left there, half-burnt. And the Trojans fled

295with an unearthly din, and the Danaans poured after them

along the hollow ships; and the roar rose unabating.

As when from the high crest of a great mountain

Zeus who gathers the lightning moves a close-packed cloud,

and all the lookout-peaks show clear, and the jutting headlands,

300and the glens; and from heaven the measureless air breaks open:

so the Danaans, having thrust the enemy fire from the ships,

caught their breath a little. But there was no pause in the war:

for the Trojans, before the Achaeans dear to Ares, were not yet

turned in headlong flight away from the black ships —

305they still stood facing them, giving ground from the ships only by need.

Then man killed man, as the battle scattered,

among the leaders. First the stout son of Menoetius

hit Areïlycus in the thigh, just as he turned,

with his sharp-pointed spear, and drove the bronze clean through;

310the spear shattered the bone, and he came down on his face

to the ground. Then warlike Menelaus wounded Thoas

where the chest showed bare beside the shield, and unstrung his limbs.

And Phyleus' son, watching Amphiclus as he charged in,

was quicker: he lunged and hit the top of his leg,

315where a man's muscle is thickest, and around the spear-point

the sinews were torn through; and darkness covered his eyes.

And of Nestor's sons, one — Antilochus — stabbed Atymnius

with his sharp spear, and drove the bronze point through his flank;

he fell forward. But Maris, close in, rushed Antilochus

320with his spear, in fury for his brother,

standing in front of the corpse; but godlike Thrasymedes

was quicker: he lunged before he could stab — and did not miss —

straight at the shoulder; and the spear-point tore the arm's base

away from the muscles, and cracked the bone clean through:

325he fell with a thud, and darkness covered his eyes.

So those two, beaten down by two brothers,

went to Erebus — the brave companions of Sarpedon,

spearmen sons of Amisodarus, the man who reared

the raging Chimaera, an evil to many men.²²

330And Ajax, Oïleus' son, sprang on Cleobulus

and took him alive, tangled in the crush; but there and then

he unstrung his strength, driving the hilted sword through his neck:

the whole blade ran hot with blood, and down over his eyes

came purple death, and fate the overpowering.

335Peneleos and Lycon ran together: with their spears

they had missed each other, both casts thrown in vain,

so they ran together again with swords. There Lycon

hacked at the ridge of the horsehair-crested helmet,

and the sword shattered at the hilt; but Peneleos struck

340his neck below the ear, and the whole blade sank in,

and only skin held: the head lolled sideways, and his limbs were unstrung.

And Meriones, overtaking Acamas on quick feet,

stabbed his right shoulder as he was mounting his chariot;

he crashed from the car, and mist poured down over his eyes.

345And Idomeneus stabbed Erymas in the mouth

with the pitiless bronze: the bronze spear passed straight through,

up under the brain, and split the white bones;

his teeth were shaken out, and both his eyes

filled up with blood; and blood through his open mouth

350and through his nostrils he blew as he gaped; and death's black cloud wrapped round him.

These, then, were the Danaan leaders, and each killed his man.

As ravaging wolves fall on lambs or on kids,

snatching them out from the flocks, when in the mountains

a shepherd's carelessness has let them scatter — the wolves see,

355and swiftly seize the young whose hearts have no courage:

so the Danaans fell on the Trojans; and the Trojans remembered

the harsh clamor of rout, and forgot their rushing courage.

And the great Ajax strained forever to cast his spear

at Hector of the bronze helmet; but Hector, in his war-craft,

360his broad shoulders covered by the bull's-hide shield,

watched the whistle of arrows and the thud of javelins.

Truly he knew the tide of the battle had turned;

but even so he stood, and tried to save his loyal companions.

As when a cloud comes from Olympus into heaven²³

365out of the clear upper air, when Zeus stretches the squall,

so the shouting and the rout came from the ships;

and in no good order they crossed back. Hector's own swift horses

carried him off, armor and all; and he left the Trojan army

penned against their will by the dug ditch;

370and in the ditch many swift chariot-teams

snapped the pole at the tip and abandoned their lords' cars.

But Patroclus followed, calling hard to the Danaans,

with evil intent for the Trojans; and they in their shrieking rout

choked every path, once their lines were cut; and high up the dust-squall

375scattered under the clouds, and the whole-hoofed horses strained

back toward the city, away from the ships and the huts.

And wherever Patroclus saw the most men driven in confusion,

there he steered with a shout; and men kept falling under his axles

face-first from their chariots, and the cars went clattering over.

380Straight across the ditch the swift horses leapt —

the immortal horses the gods gave Peleus as shining gifts —

straining onward; and his heart cried out for Hector,

hot to strike him; but Hector's swift horses carried him away.

And as the whole black earth is weighed down under a storm

385on a day of harvest-season, when Zeus pours down

his most violent water, when in rage he turns bitter

against men who by force render crooked judgments in the assembly

and drive justice out, careless of the gods' vengeance:

all their rivers rise in flood as they run,

390and the torrents cut the hillsides into gullies,

and down to the darkening sea they roar headlong

from the mountains, groaning huge, and the works of men are diminished:

so huge was the groaning of the Trojan mares as they ran.

And Patroclus, when he had cut off the front battle-lines,

395turned and penned them back against the ships, and would not let them

climb to the city for all their straining, but in the space between

the ships and the river and the high wall

he swept and killed, and exacted the blood-price for many.²⁴

There first he hit Pronous with his shining spear

400where the chest showed bare beside the shield, and unstrung his limbs:

he fell with a thud. Then Thestor, Enops's son —

his second rush — Thestor, who sat hunched

in his polished chariot, struck out of his wits, the reins

slipped from his hands: Patroclus came close and stabbed him

405through the right jaw, and drove the spear on through his teeth,

and hauled him by the spear-shaft over the chariot-rail — as a man

sitting on a jutting rock hauls a sacred fish

out of the sea with his line and his glittering bronze:

so he hauled him gaping from the chariot on the shining spear

410and tumbled him down on his face; and the life left him as he fell.

Then Erylaus, running in — he struck him with a stone

full mid-skull, and the whole head split in two

inside the heavy helmet; and he dropped face-first

to the ground, and death that breaks the spirit poured round him.

415Then one upon another — Erymas and Amphoterus and Epaltes,

Tlepolemus Damastor's son, and Echius and Pyris,

Ipheus and Euippus and Polymelus, Argeas' son —

he brought them all, in heaps, to the earth that feeds so many.

But Sarpedon, when he saw his companions of the unbelted tunics²⁵

420broken under the hands of Patroclus, Menoetius's son,

called out, rebuking the godlike Lycians:

"Shame, Lycians! Where are you running? Now be quick — against him.

I will meet this man myself, and learn

who it is that conquers here — who has worked the Trojans

425so much evil already, and unstrung the knees of many good men."

He spoke, and leapt with his weapons from the chariot to the ground;

and Patroclus on the other side, seeing him, sprang from his car.

And they — like hook-clawed, crook-beaked vultures

screaming great cries on a high rock-face as they fight —

430so they rushed screaming at one another.

And the son of crooked-counseled Cronos saw them, and pitied,

and spoke to Hera, his sister and his wife:

"Ah me — my Sarpedon, dearest to me of men,

is fated to be broken under Patroclus, Menoetius's son.

435And my heart is divided as I ponder it:

whether to snatch him living out of the tearful battle

and set him down in the rich country of Lycia,

or to break him now under the hands of Menoetius's son."

Then ox-eyed lady Hera answered him:

440"Most dread son of Cronos, what a word you have spoken!

A man — a mortal, long since doomed to his fate —

and you mean to release him back out of harsh-sounding death?

Do it. But we other gods will not all approve you.

And I will tell you another thing — lay it away in your mind:

445if you send Sarpedon living to his own house,

consider: some other god may likewise choose

to send his dear son out of the strong encounter —

for many sons of the immortals fight around Priam's great city,

and you will set loose terrible resentment among their fathers.

450But if he is dear to you — if your heart grieves for him —

then let him be broken in the strong encounter

under the hands of Patroclus, Menoetius's son;

but when his soul and his life have left him,

send Death to carry him, and painless Sleep,

455until they come to the country of wide Lycia;

and there his brothers and kinsmen will give him burial

with a tomb and a grave-stone: for that is the honor-right of the dead."

So she spoke, and the father of men and gods did not refuse her;

but he rained down drops of blood upon the earth,

460honoring his dear son, whom Patroclus was about

to destroy in deep-soiled Troy, far from his fatherland.

And when they were close, advancing on one another,

Patroclus struck far-famed Thrasymelus,

the brave aide of lord Sarpedon,

465in the lower belly, and unstrung his limbs.

And Sarpedon, casting second, missed his man

with the shining spear, but wounded the horse Pedasus²⁶

in the right shoulder; and he screamed away his life,

and went down crying in the dust, and his spirit flew from him.

470The two yoke-horses reared apart, the yoke creaked,

and the reins fouled over them, with the trace-horse lying in the dust.

But spear-famed Automedon found the remedy:

drawing the thin-edged sword from his massive thigh,

he sprang and cut away the trace-horse, and did not fumble;

475the pair righted themselves and pulled taut in the harness;

and the two men came together again in heart-devouring strife.

Then Sarpedon missed again with his shining spear:

over Patroclus's left shoulder the point of the spear

passed, and did not strike him. But Patroclus in his turn

480rose with the bronze; and his shot did not go in vain from his hand,

but struck where the beating heart is closed in the midriff.

He fell as an oak falls, or a white poplar,²⁷

or a towering pine, that carpenters up in the mountains

cut down with fresh-whetted axes to be a ship's timber:

485so he lay stretched out before his horses and chariot,

bellowing, clawing at the blood-soaked dust.

As a lion kills a bull, coming in among the herd —

a fiery, great-hearted bull among the shambling cattle —

and it perishes groaning under the lion's jaws:

490so under Patroclus the leader of the Lycian shield-men

raged as he was killed; and he called his dear companion by name:

"Glaucus, old friend — fighter among men — now above all

you must be a spearman and a daring man of war;

now let evil battle be your desire, if you are quick at all.

495First go everywhere and rouse the leaders of the Lycians

to fight for Sarpedon's body;

and then fight for me yourself with the bronze.

For I will be your shame and your hanging head

all your days, forever after, if the Achaeans

500strip my armor here where I fell in the gathering-place of the ships.

Hold on with all your strength, and drive on the whole army."

As he was speaking so, the end that is death covered him —

his eyes and his nostrils. And Patroclus, setting his heel on his chest,

drew the spear out of his flesh, and the midriff followed it:

505he pulled out his life and the spear-point together.²⁸

And the Myrmidons held the snorting horses there,

plunging to bolt, now they had left their masters' chariot.

But on Glaucus came terrible grief at the sound of that voice,

and his heart was churned, that he could not help him.

510He gripped his own arm and pressed it hard, for the wound

wore at him — the wound Teucer's arrow had dealt him as he stormed

the high wall, beating harm away from his companions.

And he spoke in prayer to Apollo who strikes from afar:²⁹

"Hear me, lord — you who are somewhere in the rich country of Lycia

515or here in Troy: you have power everywhere to hear

a man in grief, as grief has come on me now.

For I have this powerful wound; my arm is pierced

with sharp pains through and through, and the blood

will not dry; my shoulder is heavy under it;

520I cannot hold my spear steady, cannot go

and fight the enemy. And the best of men has perished —

Sarpedon, son of Zeus; and Zeus does not defend even his own child.

But you, lord — heal me this powerful wound;

lull the pains, and give me strength, so I may call

525my Lycian companions and drive them to the fighting,

and fight myself for the body of the dead man."

So he spoke in prayer, and Phoebus Apollo heard him.

At once he stilled the pains, and on the grievous wound

he dried the dark blood, and threw strength into his heart.

530And Glaucus knew it in his heart, and was glad

that the great god had heard his prayer so quickly.

First he went everywhere and roused the leaders of the Lycians

to fight for Sarpedon's body;

then he went with long strides after the Trojans —

535after Polydamas, Panthous's son, and brilliant Agenor,

and after Aeneas, and Hector of the bronze helmet;

and standing close he spoke winged words:

"Hector — now you have wholly forgotten your allies,³⁰

who for your sake, far from their friends and their fatherland,

540breathe out their lives; and you will not help them.

Sarpedon lies dead — the leader of the Lycian shield-men,

who kept Lycia safe by his judgments and his strength:

brazen Ares has broken him on Patroclus's spear.

Friends, stand by him! Feel the outrage in your hearts,

545or the Myrmidons will strip his armor and defile his body,

in anger for all the Danaans we have killed,

the men our spears cut down beside the swift ships."

So he spoke; and grief seized the Trojans, head to foot,

unbearable, not to be borne down — for he was a stay of their city,

550foreigner though he was: many men had followed him,

and he himself was their best in battle.

They went straight for the Danaans, hot; and Hector led them,

angered for Sarpedon. But the Achaeans were driven on

by the shaggy heart of Patroclus, Menoetius's son:

555he spoke first to the two Ajaxes, eager as they already were:

"You two Ajaxes — now let your pleasure be defense,

the men you were among men before — or braver.

The man lies dead who first leapt inside the wall of the Achaeans:

Sarpedon. If only we could take him and defile him,

560and strip the armor from his shoulders, and break

some companion of his defending him, with the pitiless bronze."

So he spoke; and they themselves were furious to beat the enemy off.

And when on both sides they had strengthened their battle-lines,

Trojans and Lycians, Myrmidons and Achaeans,

565they clashed together to fight around the dead man's body

with a terrible war-shout; and the men's armor rang loud.

And Zeus stretched a deadly night over the strong encounter,³¹

so that around his dear son the deadly toil of battle might be waged.

And the Trojans at first pushed back the bright-eyed Achaeans,

570for a man was hit who was by no means the worst of the Myrmidons:

brilliant Epeigeus, son of great-hearted Agacles,³²

who was king once in well-peopled Budeum —

before: but having killed a noble cousin,

he came a suppliant to Peleus and silver-footed Thetis,

575and they sent him to follow Achilles, breaker of men,

to Ilion of the fine colts, to fight the Trojans.

He was laying hold of the corpse when glorious Hector

struck him with a stone full on the head; and the whole head split in two

inside the heavy helmet; and he dropped face-first

580over the dead man, and death that breaks the spirit poured round him.

And grief came over Patroclus for his fallen companion,

and he swept straight through the front-fighters like a swift hawk

that sends the daws and starlings scattering:

straight so, Patroclus, master of horses, you swept

585at the Lycians and Trojans, with anger in your heart for your companion.

And he struck Sthenelaus, Ithaemenes' dear son,

on the neck with a stone, and tore the tendons from it;

and the front-fighters gave ground, and glorious Hector.

As far as the carry of a long throwing-spear

590a man sends flying, testing his strength in the games

or in war, against enemies who break the spirit:

so far the Trojans gave, and the Achaeans pushed them.

Then Glaucus first, the leader of the Lycian shield-men,

turned, and killed great-hearted Bathycles,

595the dear son of Chalcon, whose home was in Hellas —

a man who stood out among the Myrmidons for riches and wealth:

him Glaucus stabbed full in the chest with his spear,

wheeling suddenly, just as the man's pursuit had caught him.

He fell with a thud; and close grief took the Achaeans,

600so good a man went down; and the Trojans rejoiced greatly,

and came and stood in a mass around him. But the Achaeans

did not forget their courage: they carried their fury straight at them.

Then Meriones took a Trojan fighter, helmed in bronze —

Laogonus, daring son of Onetor, who was priest

605of Idaean Zeus, and honored like a god by the people:

he struck him below the jaw, under the ear; and quickly the spirit

went out of his limbs, and the hateful darkness took him.

And Aeneas let fly his bronze spear at Meriones,

hoping to catch him as he came on under his shield;

610but he saw it coming and dodged the bronze spear,

ducking forward; and behind him the long spear

stuck fast in the ground, and the butt-end stood quivering;

and there at last massive Ares stilled its fury —

and the point of Aeneas's spear went quivering

615into the earth, hurled in vain from his massive hand.

And Aeneas was angered at heart, and called out:

"Meriones — dancer though you are, my spear³³

would have stopped your dancing for good, if I had only hit you."

And spear-famed Meriones answered him:

620"Aeneas — strong as you are, it is hard for you

to quench the fury of every man who stands

against you in defense. You too were made mortal.

And if I hit you square in the middle with the sharp bronze,

strong as you are, and sure of your hands, you would quickly

625give the triumph to me, and your soul to Hades of the famed colts."

So he spoke; and the stout son of Menoetius rebuked him:

"Meriones — you are a brave man: why speechify?

Old friend, the Trojans will not back away from the corpse

for insults. The earth will hold down some of them first.

630In hands lies the outcome of war; of words, in council.

So there is no need to pile up speech, but to fight."

So speaking he led the way, and the other followed, a man like a god.

And from them — as the din of woodcutting men rises

in the mountain glens, and the sound carries far:

635so from the wide-wayed earth their pounding rose,

of bronze and leather and well-made oxhide shields,

stabbed at with swords and double-curved spears.

And by now not even a discerning man could have known

brilliant Sarpedon, wrapped from his head clean down

640to the soles of his feet in missiles and blood and dust.³⁴

And they crowded round the corpse always — as flies

in a farmstead buzz about the brimming milk-pails

in the season of spring, when the milk wets the vessels:

so they crowded round the corpse. And Zeus never once

645turned his shining eyes away from the strong encounter,

but gazed down at them always, and pondered in his heart,

brooding long over the killing of Patroclus:³⁵

whether now, in the strong encounter, over godlike

Sarpedon, glorious Hector should cut him down

650with the bronze, and strip the armor from his shoulders —

or whether he should swell the sheer toil for still more men.

And as he pondered, this seemed to him the better course:

that the brave aide of Achilles, Peleus' son,

should drive the Trojans and Hector of the bronze helmet

655back toward the city once more, and take the life from many.

And in Hector first he put a strengthless heart:

he climbed into his chariot and turned to flee, and called

the other Trojans to fly; for he knew the sacred scales of Zeus.

Then not even the powerful Lycians stood, but panicked

660all of them, when they saw their king struck through the heart,

lying under the pile of dead — for many had fallen

over him, once the son of Cronos stretched the strife taut.

And the Achaeans stripped the armor from Sarpedon's shoulders,

bronze and glittering; and the stout son of Menoetius

665gave it to his companions to carry to the hollow ships.

And then Zeus the cloud-gatherer spoke to Apollo:³⁶

"Up now, dear Phoebus: go cleanse Sarpedon of the dark

clotted blood, out of the range of the missiles, and carry him

far away, and wash him in the running river,

670and anoint him with ambrosia, and put immortal clothing round him;

and send him to be carried by swift escorts,

the twin brothers Sleep and Death, who quickly

will set him down in the rich country of wide Lycia.

There his brothers and kinsmen will give him burial

675with a tomb and a grave-stone: for that is the honor-right of the dead."

So he spoke, and Apollo did not disobey his father,

but went down from the mountains of Ida into the dread din,

and at once lifted brilliant Sarpedon out of the missiles,

and carried him far away, and washed him in the running river,

680and anointed him with ambrosia, and put immortal clothing round him;

and he sent him to be carried by swift escorts,

the twin brothers Sleep and Death, who quickly

set him down in the rich country of wide Lycia.

But Patroclus, calling to his horses and Automedon,³⁷

685went after the Trojans and Lycians — and was greatly blinded,

the fool: had he kept the word of Peleus' son,

he would have escaped the evil doom of black death.

But always the mind of Zeus is stronger than men's:

he sends even the brave man running, and strips away victory

690easily — and then again himself drives a man to fight;

and it was he who now put the fury in Patroclus's chest.

Then whom first, whom last did you strip of his arms,

Patroclus, when the gods were calling you deathward?

Adrestus first, and Autonous, and Echeclus,

695and Perimus, Megas's son, and Epistor, and Melanippus,

and after them Elasus, and Mulius, and Pylartes:

these he took; and the rest were each man minded to run.

And then the sons of the Achaeans would have taken high-gated Troy

by the hands of Patroclus — such was his raging spear-charge —

700had not Phoebus Apollo taken his stand on the well-built tower,

with deadly thoughts for him, siding with the Trojans.

Three times Patroclus set his foot on the angle of the high wall,

and three times Apollo slapped him back and away,

thrusting at the shining shield with his immortal hands.

705But when for the fourth time he came on like more than man,

the god shouted terribly, and spoke winged words:

"Back, Zeus-sprung Patroclus! It is not your portion

that the proud Trojans' city fall to your spear —

no, nor to Achilles', who is a far better man than you."

710So he spoke; and Patroclus gave back a long way,

dodging the wrath of Apollo who strikes from afar.

But Hector held his whole-hoofed horses at the Scaean Gates,

divided: whether to drive back into the confusion and fight,

or shout for the army to gather inside the wall.

715And as he pondered, Phoebus Apollo came and stood by him³⁸

in the likeness of a man young and strong,

Asius — the uncle of horse-taming Hector,

own brother of Hecuba, and son of Dymas,

who lived in Phrygia on the streams of Sangarius;

720in his likeness Apollo, son of Zeus, spoke to him:

"Hector, why have you dropped out of the fighting? It is not right.

Would that I were as much stronger than you as I am weaker:

then you would soon and bitterly regret this skulking from the war.

Come — drive your strong-hoofed horses at Patroclus,

725and you may take him yet, and Apollo hand you the glory."

So speaking, the god went back into the toil of men;

and glorious Hector ordered war-minded Cebriones

to lash the horses into the battle. And Apollo

sank into the crowd, and hurled an evil rout

730among the Argives, and handed glory to the Trojans and Hector.

And Hector let the other Danaans be — killed none of them —

but drove his strong-hoofed horses straight at Patroclus;

and Patroclus, facing him, sprang from his chariot to the ground

with his spear in his left hand; and in the other he caught up a stone,

735jagged marble, glittering — his hand just closed around it —

and planted himself and hurled it, not shrinking long from the man;

and his missile was not wasted: he struck Hector's charioteer —³⁹

Cebriones, a bastard son of far-famed Priam —

with the reins in his hands, full on the forehead with the sharp stone.

740The stone crushed both brows together; the bone did not hold;

and his eyes dropped to the ground in the dust

there at his feet; and like a diver he plunged

from the well-wrought chariot, and the life left his bones.

And mocking him you spoke, Patroclus, horseman:

745"Well, well — how nimble the man is! What easy tumbling!

If ever he found himself on the fish-teeming sea,

this man could feed a whole crew, diving for oysters,

leaping overboard even in rough weather —

as easily as he tumbles now from his chariot onto the plain.

750So: there are acrobats among the Trojans too."

So speaking he went for the hero Cebriones

with the spring of a lion who, ravaging the farmsteads,

has been struck in the chest — and his own courage kills him:

so, Patroclus, you leapt on Cebriones, blazing.

755And Hector on the other side sprang from his chariot to the ground;

and the two fought over Cebriones like two lions

that on a mountain's peaks, over a slain hind,

both of them hungry, fight with towering hearts:

so over Cebriones the two masters of the war-shout,

760Patroclus, Menoetius's son, and glorious Hector,

strained to hew each other's flesh with the pitiless bronze.

Hector had him by the head, and would not let go;

Patroclus, opposite, held a foot; and around them the rest,

Trojans and Danaans, joined the strong encounter.

765As the East Wind and the South contend with one another⁴⁰

in the mountain glens, to shake the deep timber —

oak and ash and smooth-barked cornel-tree,

that hurl their long slim branches each against each

with a prodigious noise, and the crash of them breaking:

770so Trojans and Achaeans, springing at one another,

cut men down, and neither side thought of ruinous flight.

And around Cebriones many sharp spears stood fixed,

and winged arrows leaping from the bowstrings,

and many great stones battered against the shields

775of the men fighting round him. And he in the whirl of dust

lay mighty in his mightiness, his horsemanship all forgotten.

So long as the sun bestrode the middle heaven,⁴¹

so long the missiles of both sides struck home, and the people fell;

but when the sun turned toward the unyoking of oxen,

780then, beyond their portion, the Achaeans proved the stronger.

They dragged the hero Cebriones out of the missiles,

out of the Trojans' clamor, and stripped the armor from his shoulders;

and Patroclus, with evil intent for the Trojans, charged them.

Three times he charged then, the equal of swift Ares,

785screaming terribly, and three times he killed nine men.

But when for the fourth time he came on like more than man —

then, Patroclus, the end of your life showed clear:

for Phoebus met you in the strong encounter,

terrible. And Patroclus did not see him coming through the confusion,

790for he came against him wrapped in thick mist,

and stood behind him, and struck his back and broad shoulders

with the flat of his hand; and his eyes spun.

And Phoebus Apollo knocked the helmet from his head:⁴²

it rolled ringing away beneath the horses' hooves,

795the socketed helmet, and the plumes were fouled

with blood and dust. Before this it was not lawful

for that horsehair-crested helmet to be fouled with dust:

it guarded the head and the gracious brow of a godlike

man, Achilles. But then Zeus gave it to Hector

800to wear on his own head; and his destruction was near him.

And the long-shadowed spear was shattered whole in his hands,

heavy, huge, compact, helmeted in bronze; and from his shoulders

the fringed shield with its baldric dropped to the ground;

and the lord Apollo, son of Zeus, loosed the corslet off him.

805Blindness took his mind; his shining limbs were unstrung;

he stood dazed. And from behind, at close range, a Dardanian

struck him with a sharp spear between the shoulders:

Euphorbus, Panthous's son, who outshone all men of his age⁴³

at the spear, at horsemanship, and in the race on foot;

810indeed he had already brought down twenty men from their horses,

though he came the first time with his chariot, still learning war.

He it was who first sent a missile into you, Patroclus, horseman,

and did not break you; and he ran back and merged with the crowd,

snatching the ash spear out of the wound — he did not stand

815against Patroclus, even unarmed as he was, in the combat.

And Patroclus, broken by the god's blow and the spear,

drew back into the band of his companions, dodging doom.

But Hector, when he saw great-hearted Patroclus

drawing back, wounded by the sharp bronze,

820came close on him through the ranks, and stabbed with his spear

into the pit of his belly, and drove the bronze clean through:

he fell with a thud, and hugely grieved the Achaean army.

As a lion overpowers a tireless boar in combat⁴⁴

when the two fight, towering-hearted, on a mountain's peaks

825over a little spring, both set on drinking,

and the lion by main strength breaks the boar as he gasps:

so the son of Menoetius, killer of many, was robbed

of his life at close quarters by Hector, Priam's son, with the spear;

and vaunting over him Hector spoke winged words:

830"Patroclus — no doubt you said you would raze our city,

and take from the women of Troy the day of freedom,

and carry them off in your ships to your dear fatherland —

fool! Before them the swift horses of Hector

stride full-stretch to the fighting; and I with my spear

835am chosen out among the war-loving Trojans, I who beat off

the day of necessity for them. But you — the vultures will eat you here.

Poor wretch: not even Achilles, brave as he is, was any use to you,

who stayed behind, I suppose, and gave you strict orders as you left:

'Do not come back to me, Patroclus, master of horses,

840back to the hollow ships, before you have torn the bloody

tunic around the chest of man-slaughtering Hector.'

So he must have talked to you — and persuaded your witless heart."

And with the little strength left you, you answered, Patroclus, horseman:

"Boast your fill now, Hector. Yours is the victory —⁴⁵

845given by Zeus, the son of Cronos, and by Apollo: they broke me

easily; for they themselves took the armor from my shoulders.

Twenty men like you could have come against me,

and all of them would have died here, broken under my spear.

No — deadly fate has killed me, and Leto's son,

850and of men, Euphorbus. You are only the third at my stripping.

And I will tell you another thing — lay it away in your mind:

you yourself have no long life left. Already

death stands close beside you, and fate the overpowering:

you will be broken under the hands of Achilles, Aeacus' blameless son."

855Even as he spoke, the end that is death covered him;

and his soul, flying from his limbs, went down to the house of Hades,

wailing its fate, leaving its manhood and its youth.

And glorious Hector spoke to him — though he was dead:

"Patroclus — why prophesy my sheer destruction?

860Who knows whether Achilles, the son of lovely-haired Thetis,

may not be hit first by my spear, and lose his own life?"

So speaking, he set his heel on him and drew the bronze spear

out of the wound, and shoved him backward off the spear.

And at once he went with the spear after Automedon,

865the godlike aide of the swift-footed son of Aeacus —

hot to strike him; but the swift horses carried him away,

the immortal horses the gods gave Peleus as shining gifts.

Notes

1 lines 2–11 — Patroclus's tears reuse Agamemnon's simile from 9.14-15, our English kept — "like a spring of dark water that pours its black stream down a goat-proof cliff": the general wept so for his army's ruin; the friend weeps so for the same army now. Achilles answers with the poem's tenderest teasing: the little girl running at her mother's skirt, begging to be carried — mockery whose every detail is affection, and whose image (the child who will not be put down until she is lifted) is exactly what Patroclus is about to ask for and receive. ↩

2 line 20 — "you answered, Patroclus, horseman" — the narrator's apostrophe, used of Patroclus eight times in this book (20, 584-587, 693-695, 744-746, 754-756, 787-789, 812-814, 843-845) — far more than anyone else receives in the whole poem (elsewhere chiefly Menelaus). The grammar itself breaks neutrality: the singer cannot keep the third person for this man. Antiquity already read the device as pathos; nothing else in the Iliad marks a character as loved by the poem itself. ↩

3 lines 29–35 — "you and your cursed valor" — αἰναρέτη, a word invented for this line (excellence-in-disaster, valor that curses); then the great disowning: "the horseman Peleus was no father of yours, nor Thetis your mother — the grey sea bore you, and the sheer cliffs." The gentlest man in the poem delivers its harshest genealogy (he had feared to hear a smaller version at 11.654); Patroclus's twin charges — pitiless (νηλεές) and unbending (ἀπηνής) — are the exact vocabulary the poem will need again for Achilles in Book 24. ↩

4 lines 36–47 — The plan repeats Nestor's lines (11.794-803) nearly verbatim, our English kept — the fatal scheme now carried by its victim, in the first person ("send me out... give me your own armor"). The narrator's seal, before Achilles can answer: "So he spoke, begging — the great fool (μέγα νήπιος): it was his own death and evil doom he was begging for." The poem's strongest use of its fool-formula: not blindness to a detail, but a prayer with its object inverted. ↩

5 lines 49–63 — Achilles denies the prophecy excuse — no oracle, nothing from his mother (though 9.410-416 told us of the two fates; the poem lets the contradiction stand as suppression rather than ignorance) — and restates the grievance in the quarrel's oldest words: the prize taken back "as though I were some vagrant without rights" (ἀτίμητον μετανάστην, the phrase of 9.648). Then the concession that has already expired: "I said I would not lay my wrath aside until the war-shout reached my own ships" — it has; the fire is minutes away. ↩

6 lines 64–96 — The conditions. Drive them from the ships; win me honor so they return the girl "and bring shining gifts besides" (the Book 9 offer, still wanted — the wrath's economy intact); and then the double interdiction: come back; do not lead toward Ilion, "one of the everlasting gods may step in — the worker-from-afar, Apollo, loves them dearly." Achilles speaks his friend's actual death as a hypothesis, naming the god. Zenodotus compressed 93-96 into a single line ("lest Hector of the flashing helmet catch you stripped bare") — tidier, and deaf to the point: the danger Achilles fears is not a man. ↩

7 lines 97–100 — The prayer that ends the speech: may every Trojan die, and every Argive, "and that we two alone might slip destruction, so that alone we might undo Troy's holy coronal of towers." Zenodotus and Aristarchus athetized the lines (Aristarchus noting that Zenodotus "suspected" them — ancient readers already heard how much the wish contains). It is the wrath's logical terminus: the army abolished, the war reduced to the two of them — spoken to the man whose death will prove they were never separable from the rest. ↩

8 lines 102–111 — Ajax's last stand at the ship, told in pure physiology: the helmet ringing "struck and struck again," the left shoulder aching under the shield, the gasping, the sweat that "could nowhere catch its breath" — and the summary line ancient critics loved to quote: "everywhere evil was propped on evil" (κακὸν κακῷ ἐστήρικτο). The bravest man in the army is described entirely from inside his fatigue. ↩

9 lines 112–124 — The fixed Muse-invocation (= 2.484) — summoned not for a catalogue but for a single fact: "how the fire first fell on the ships." This is the flare Zeus has waited for since 15.599-600. Hector shears the head off Ajax's ash spear — the docked shaft brandished "useless in his hand" — and Ajax reads the theology correctly and withdraws; the flame pours over Protesilaus's ship (the war's first casualty again, 15.705); and Achilles, watching, sees exactly what Zeus sees, and slaps his thighs: "Up, Zeus-sprung Patroclus!" One ship burns for one book: the pivot's mechanism, precise as a clock. ↩

10 lines 131–145 — The arming — the register's standard sequence (greaves, corslet, sword, shield, helmet, spears) with one exception the poem underlines: "only the spear he did not take of Aeacus' blameless son... the Pelian ash that Chiron gave his dear father from the peak of Pelion, to be death for heroes." No other Achaean can even swing it. Zenodotus omitted the lines; they are the scene's whole meaning: the disguise is complete except for the one thing that is Achilles — and the poem measures Patroclus by the weapon he cannot lift, exactly as it will measure Hector by the armor he cannot fill. ↩

11 lines 145–155 — The team: Xanthus and Balius, foaled by the harpy Podarge to the West Wind in the meadow by Ocean — wind-grandsons; and in the side-traces "blameless Pedasus," the war-prize from Eëtion's city, "who, mortal as he was, kept pace with immortal horses." The poem builds the team as it built the expedition: an immortal pair with one mortal running beside them, keeping up. The trace-horse's death (467-471) is the book's first fatality among Achilles' own. ↩

12 lines 156–164 — The Myrmidon wolf simile — the pack at its most physical in Homer: raw flesh, muzzles red, "belching up clotted gore," the thin tongues lapping black spring-water, bellies stretched and hearts still fearless. The dark spring of Patroclus's tears (3-4) returns as the wolves' watering hole: the book's imagery runs on dark water. ↩

13 lines 168–198 — The Catalogue of Myrmidons: fifty ships, fifty men each, five battalions — a miniature of Book 2, complete with erotic biographies. Menesthius, son of the river Spercheius by Peleus's daughter Polydora ("though in name" a mortal's son — the double-paternity formula); and Eudorus, the παρθένιος, born of Hermes' love for Polymele, seen dancing in Artemis's choir — seduction, secret bed, bride-price, grandfather's rearing: a complete romance in twelve lines. Phoenix (Book 9's tutor) commands the fourth battalion; Alcimedon (who will matter at 17.466ff) the fifth. The muster the wrath had parked since Book 2 stands up again. ↩

14 lines 200–210 — Achilles quotes his own army's grumbling back at them — "Cruel son of Peleus — your mother reared you on bile... Let us at least sail home" — the only place we hear the Myrmidons' opinion of the wrath, and it matches Patroclus's ("pitiless," "cruel"). Achilles repeats it without rebuttal and points them at the work: the speech of a commander who knows exactly what has been said of him and considers the account now settled. ↩

15 lines 212–218 — The wall-builder simile (close-set stones against the wind) introduces the phalanx lines repeated from 13.131-133, our English kept: "buckler pressed on buckler, helmet on helmet, man on man." There the formation was defensive despair; here it is an offensive spring compressed — the same order, opposite potential energy. ↩

16 lines 220–233 — The cup: from the chest Thetis packed — the poem's one glimpse of a mother provisioning her son for war (tunics, wind-proof cloaks, rugs) — a cup reserved for one man and one god: "no other man drank from it, and to no god did he pour from it, except to Zeus the father." Sulphur, clean water, washed hands: the private liturgy of a prince who deals with heaven bilaterally. No other hero in the poem has a personal cult protocol. ↩

17 lines 233–248 — The Dodona prayer: "Zeus — lord — Dodonaean — Pelasgian — dweller far off" — the oldest oracle in Greece (Herodotus agrees), with its astonishing priesthood: "the Selloi, your interpreters, men of unwashed feet, who sleep on the ground" — holiness as permanent contact with the earth (ancient scholars debated Selloi/Helloi, whence "Hellenes"). Achilles prays past every Olympian courtesy to something older and darker than Olympus, in the correct contract-form ("Once before, when I prayed, you heard my word") — the Book 1 plague answered him; now he asks the second favor: glory for Patroclus, and his safe return "with all his armor, and his close-fighting companions." ↩

18 lines 249–253 — "And the father granted him one thing, and refused the other." The poem's most economical sentence of doom: prayer processed as paperwork, one clause approved, one denied, no notification issued. Achilles will stand at his hut believing both clauses filed. ↩

19 lines 259–267 — The wasp simile — with the poet's editorial inside it: boys provoke the roadside nest "as boys will, the little fools: they make a common evil for many." The second child-image of the day's fighting (the sand-castle god, 15.362); this one indicts the war itself — someone poked the nest, and the passer-by gets stung. The Myrmidons ("ant-men" by folk-etymology) fight under insect colors: wasps, then flies (641-644). ↩

20 lines 269–283 — Patroclus's field-speech turns the private grievance public: fight "so that Atreus' son... may know his blindness (ἄτην), that he honored not at all the best of the Achaeans" — the register's ἄτη, deployed by the wrath's gentlest partisan. And the disguise works precisely once, in the aggregate: the Trojans do not identify the man; they identify the armor and infer the reconciliation — "each man looked about him for escape from sheer destruction." The armor is the argument. ↩

21 lines 287–305 — Pyraechmes of the Paeonians — mustered at 2.848 with the same river-formula ("out of Amydon, from the wide- flowing Axius") — is the first kill, and the tactical one: the fire is quenched, "and the ship was left there, half- burnt" (ἡμιδαής, a word occurring nowhere else — the poem coins a term for its own precise scorch-line). The clearing simile that follows — Zeus moving one cloud off a peak, "and the prodigious upper air breaks open from heaven" — measures the relief exactly: light, but "no pause in the war." ↩

22 lines 317–330 — The sons of Nestor kill the sons of Amisodarus — "the man who reared the raging Chimaera": the monster of Bellerophon's tale (6.179-183) resurfaces as someone's livestock, one genealogical step from the battlefield. The paired-brothers kill (Antilochus and Thrasymedes against Atymnius and Maris) is the book's small mirror of its great theme: companionship as a fighting unit. ↩

23 lines 364–394 — The rout at the ditch — Hector's horses carry him clear while the army snaps its chariot-poles behind him — rises into the great storm simile of divine justice: Zeus's worst autumn deluge falls "when in rage he turns bitter against men who by force render crooked judgments in the assembly and drive justice out, careless of the gods' vengeance." Nowhere else does the Iliad's Zeus mind human justice at all — this is the Zeus of Hesiod's Works and Days, surfacing for nine lines to make the routed army's panic a moral weather. That the flood "diminishes the works of men" while the crooked judges sit indoors is the simile's quiet sting. ↩

24 lines 399–419 — The angler: Thestor, huddled witless in his chariot, is hooked through the jaw and hauled "gaping" over the rail "as a man sitting on a jutting rock hauls a sacred fish out of the sea with his line and his glittering bronze." The most horrifying transformation in the poem's killing- repertoire — a man landed as a catch — done with a fisherman's leisure. ("Sacred fish": ancient guesses ranged from a species to a fish grown temple-fat; the adjective's unplaceability is half its power.) Then the nine-name sweep, "in heaps, to the earth that feeds so many." ↩

25 lines 419–461 — Sarpedon sees his "companions of the unbelted tunics" (the Lycians' native dress, without the Greek war- belt) going down, and the poem mounts its highest scene: Zeus asks Hera whether he may save his son. Her answer is the constitution of the poem's universe: "Do it. But we other gods will not all approve... many sons of the immortals are fighting around the great city of Priam" — fate as the equality of bereavement; if one father cheats, all may. The compromise she offers becomes the poem's tenderest machinery: Death and painless Sleep to carry him home, "with a tomb and a grave-stone: for that is the honor-right of the dead" (τὸ γὰρ γέρας ἐστὶ θανόντων — γέρας, the quarrel's own word for honor's portion, given its final meaning). Zeus consents and "rained down drops of blood upon the earth, honoring his dear son": the sky's grief, the blood-dew of 11.53 made personal. Zenodotus struck the entire dialogue out (432-458) — deleting the theology of the poem to spare Zeus the tears. ↩

26 lines 462–477 — The duel's first exchange kills an aide and a horse: Sarpedon's miss finds Pedasus, and the mortal trace- horse "screamed away his life" — the poem's only equine casualty, and the death that previews everything: the mortal yoked beside immortals dies; the immortal pair tangle and rear; and it takes Automedon's sword — cutting the dead weight loose — to right the team. The allegory is left entirely to the reader. ↩

27 lines 477–507 — Sarpedon falls with the shipwright simile repeated from 13.389-391 (our English kept) — Asius's death- tree now felling the man whose Book 12 speech justified every death in the poem — and then the bellowing bull under the lion. His dying speech is not of Lycia, wife, or son, but of the body and the shame-economy: "I will be your disgrace and your hanging head all your days... if the Achaeans strip my armor here." Patroclus's extraction of the spear is the grimmest anatomical clause in Homer: "he pulled out his life and the spear-point together" — the midriff following the bronze, soul and weapon in one motion. ↩

28 lines 508–533 — Glaucus's prayer pays off the wound Teucer dealt him at 12.387-391 (concealed then; crippling now) and briefly indicts heaven itself: "the best of men has perished — Sarpedon, son of Zeus; and Zeus does not defend even his own child." Apollo — hearer "everywhere" of "a man in grief" — stills the pain and dries the blood: the god acting in his oldest capacity, healer, minutes before he acts in his darkest. ↩

29 lines 538–553 — Glaucus's rebuke of Hector states the allied grievance (men dying "far from their friends and their fatherland" for a city not theirs) and the city's debt: Sarpedon "kept Lycia safe by his judgments and his strength" — δίκῃσι, the justice-word, in the obituary of the man the justice-storm (385-393) did not protect. The Trojan grief- line is the poem's tribute to the foreigner: "he was a stay of their city, foreigner though he was." ↩

30 lines 567–570 — Zeus stretches "a deadly night over the strong encounter, so that around his dear son the deadly toil of battle might be waged" — darkness as paternal mourning-veil, the counterpart of the blood-rain: the god cannot save him, so he dims the lights over the body. ↩

31 lines 570–582 — — see note [32]. ↩

32 lines 570–607 — The battle over the body opens with Epeigeus: once a king in Budeum, then a cousin-killer, then a suppliant of Peleus and Thetis, then Achilles' man, now dead across Sarpedon's corpse — the third homicide-exile biography in four books (Medon, Lycophron), and the closest to Patroclus's own (23.85-90). The Myrmidon court at Phthia absorbs killers and re-employs them; the poem keeps burying them in order. Bathycles (richest of the Myrmidons) and Laogonus (priest of Idaean Zeus) follow — wealth and priesthood, the two exemptions that never exempt. ↩

33 lines 617–633 — The dancer taunt: Aeneas mocks Meriones' dodge as Cretan dancing (Crete's dancers were proverbial); Meriones answers with mortality-arithmetic; and Patroclus's rebuke closes the exchange with the poem's own poetics of action: "In hands lies the outcome of war; of words, in council. So there is no need to pile up speech, but to fight." The gentlest speaker in the epic states the genre's law — battle is not a debate — and the poem, which loves its taunts, lets him. ↩

34 lines 633–646 — The signature of this battle: Sarpedon's body made anonymous — "not even a discerning man could have known brilliant Sarpedon, wrapped from his head clean down to the soles of his feet in missiles and blood and dust" — while around it the armies cluster "as flies in a farmstead buzz about the brimming milk-pails in the season of spring." Homer dares the smallest, homeliest life against the largest death: spring, milk, plenty — and men as flies. The corpse the flies swarm cannot be told from the field it lies on; Apollo's bath (note [36]) exists to reverse exactly this. ↩

35 lines 644–660 — Zeus's gaze never leaves the fight, "brooding long over the killing of Patroclus: whether now... or whether he should swell the sheer toil for still more men." The decision — more — is mercy indistinguishable from sentence: the extra hour of glory is granted the way the prayer was half-granted (note [18]). Hector's panic is knowledge: "he knew the sacred scales of Zeus" — the balance of 8.69 and 22.209 felt from inside, tipping. ↩

36 lines 666–683 — The funeral of Sarpedon: Apollo lifts him from the missiles, washes him in the running river, anoints him with ambrosia, wraps him in immortal clothes, and gives him to "the twin brothers Sleep and Death" for the journey home to Lycia — Zeus's orders repeated in execution almost word for word, as the poem's rituals must be. Zenodotus athetized the whole passage; against him stand the gentlest lines any death receives in the Iliad — and the scene's afterlife: on the Euphronios krater (Athens, c. 515 BC), winged Sleep and Death lift the bleeding Sarpedon while Hermes watches — the single most famous painted image of the Iliad in ancient art. The promise of 14.231 ("Sleep, the brother of Death") completes itself: the pair Hera bribed with a Grace now carry her rival's son to burial. What the honor-right of the dead looks like, the poem shows once, here, done by gods. ↩

37 lines 684–711 — The turn: "the fool (νήπιος): had he kept the word of Peleus' son, he would have escaped the evil doom of black death. But always the mind of Zeus is stronger than men's." The apostrophized roll-call follows ("whom first, whom last did you strip of his arms, Patroclus, when the gods were calling you deathward?" — the fixed register question turned, for the first time, on the poem's beloved), then the thrice-and-fourth at the wall's very angle — Apollo slapping the shield back with immortal hands — and the warning that grades all mortals in one line: not your portion, "no, nor Achilles', who is a far better man than you." Patroclus backs off "dodging the wrath of Apollo" — μῆνιν, the poem's title- word, now the god's. ↩

38 lines 712–726 — Apollo as Asius — Hecuba's brother, the third bearer of the name (the doomed captain of Book 12-13; the disguise of Book 10's era) — turns Hector around with a taunt at his skulking. The god who has just saved the wall now aims its defender at Patroclus: the same power working both sides of the same death. ↩

39 lines 726–752 — Cebriones: the stone crushes both brows, "and his eyes dropped to the ground in the dust there at his feet; and like a diver he plunged" — the diver of 12.385 (our phrase kept), now with the eyes watching from the ground. Patroclus's mock-eulogy — the oyster-diver who "could feed a whole crew... even in rough weather... there are acrobats among the Trojans too" — is the war's blackest comedy, and its placement is the point: the poem's kindest man, one god-blow from death, is granted the gallows-wit of the doomed. He has become, for thirty lines, Achilles. ↩

40 lines 756–778 — Over the body: Hector by the head, Patroclus by the foot — the tug-of-war of the whole poem in one grip — while East and South Wind thrash the mountain timber overhead. And beneath it, the line that outlives the battle: Cebriones "in the whirl of dust lay mighty in his mightiness, his horsemanship all forgotten" (κεῖτο μέγας μεγαλωστί, λελασμένος ἱπποσυνάων). The Odyssey will use the verse of Achilles himself (24.39-40): the poem's ultimate epitaph, first spent on a charioteer. ↩

41 lines 777–790 — The clock: sun at mid-heaven, stalemate; sun at "the unyoking of oxen," and the Achaeans prevail "beyond their portion" (ὑπὲρ αἶσαν — the day's ration of fate overdrawn). Thrice nine men fall; the fourth rush comes "like more than man" (δαίμονι ἶσος — the register phrase, twice in this book); "then, Patroclus, the end of your life showed clear." The formula-system itself has been counting: three-and-the-fourth is the poem's rhythm of trespass (5.436-439, 16.702-705), and the fourth time always finds the god. ↩

42 lines 790–807 — The un-arming. Apollo, wrapped in mist, strikes the flat-handed blow — the only time a god personally strikes a mortal dead-on in the poem — and then dismantles the arming scene of 131-139 in reverse: helmet rolling under the hooves ("Before this it was not lawful for that horsehair-crested helmet to be fouled with dust: it guarded the head and the gracious brow of a godlike man, Achilles. But then Zeus gave it to Hector to wear on his own head; and his destruction was near him" — the armor-transfer chain announced with its invoice attached); the spear shattered — the one he could carry; the shield down; "and the lord Apollo, son of Zeus, loosed the corslet off him." A god undresses the man for death. ἄτη — blindness — takes his wits; he stands dazed, naked in the crowd: the poem's most terrifying image of what it is to lose divine favor — not to be struck, but to be unwrapped. ↩

43 lines 806–817 — Euphorbus: the beautiful new fighter — best of his age with spear, horse, and foot, twenty men down in his first campaign, "still learning war" — spears the dazed man from behind and runs, "and did not stand against Patroclus, even unarmed as he was." He will die for it at 17.9-60, where his blood wets hair "like the Graces'." Fame followed him strangely: Pythagoras claimed Euphorbus's soul as a former life of his own, and proved it (the story goes) by recognizing the shield Menelaus took, hung in Hera's temple — the poem's minor duelist became antiquity's test-case for transmigration. ↩

44 lines 818–844 — Hector, third, into the belly. His vaunt invents a quotation — Achilles supposedly ordering Patroclus not to return "before you have torn the bloody tunic around the chest of man-slaughtering Hector... So he must have talked to you" — the exact inversion of the truth we heard (87-96: come back; avoid the wall; fear Apollo). Hector's tragedy is compressed into his reconstruction of an order that was its opposite: he cannot imagine the restraint that was Achilles' actual love, and so misreads the man he must soon face. ↩

45 lines 843–869 — The dying prophecy: "You are only the third at my stripping" — the killers ranked (fate and Apollo; of men, Euphorbus; Hector last), the boast priced ("twenty men like you"), and then the forward sentence: "Already death stands close beside you... you will be broken under the hands of Achilles." The soul-flight couplet — "his soul, flying from his limbs, went down to the house of Hades, wailing its fate, leaving its manhood and its youth" — recurs verbatim at 22.361-363 for Hector himself: reuse this English there; the two deaths are one sentence spoken twice (Plutarch and Athenaeus were still quoting it). Hector answers the corpse — "Who knows whether Achilles... may not be hit first by my spear?" — hope addressed to a dead prophet; then the heel, the spear withdrawn, and the lunge for Automedon, foiled by the book's last image: "the swift horses carried him away, the immortal horses the gods gave Peleus as shining gifts." The gods' wedding-present outruns the man wearing the gods' other gift; Book 17 opens over the body. ↩