Patroclus

Patroclus came to Peleus as an exile. In Iliad Book 23 his ghost reminds Achilles why. As a little boy in Opus he killed the son of Amphidamas in anger over a game of dice, though he did not mean to. His father Menoetius brought him to Phthia, where Peleus reared him and named him Achilles's squire. Apollodorus's Library gives the dead boy a name, Clitonymus. Strabo reports that the people of Opus called him Aeanes.

In the Iliad Patroclus is Achilles's steadiest companion. In Book 1 he leads out Briseis when Agamemnon's heralds come to take her. In Book 9 he sits alone across from Achilles when the embassy arrives. In Book 11 Achilles sends him to Nestor, and the poet says this was the beginning of his doom. Nestor reminds him of Menoetius's parting advice: Achilles is higher in birth, but Patroclus is the elder and should counsel him.

Nestor also gives him the plan that kills him. If Achilles will not fight, Nestor says in Book 11, let him send Patroclus in his armor. The Trojans might take him for Achilles and draw back. In Book 16 Patroclus weeps before Achilles and calls him pitiless. Achilles lends him the armor and the Myrmidons, but orders him to come back once the Trojans are driven from the ships.

Patroclus does not come back. He drives the Trojans from the ships and kills Sarpedon, a son of Zeus. Then he chases the rout to the walls of Troy. Three times he climbs the wall and three times Apollo pushes him off. At the fourth attempt Apollo warns him that Troy is not fated to fall to him. Later, charging the Trojans a fourth time, Patroclus meets Apollo, who strikes him from behind and knocks the helmet from his head. Euphorbus spears him in the back, and Hector drives a spear into his belly.

Dying, Patroclus tells Hector that fate and Apollo killed him, and among men Euphorbus. Hector is only the third. He warns Hector that he will soon fall to Achilles. Menelaus stands over the body in Book 17, and the Greeks fight through Book 17 to carry it back. When Achilles hears the news in Book 18, he tells Thetis he wants to die at once, since he failed to help his friend.

Achilles returns to battle, kills Hector and gives Patroclus a hero's funeral. The ghost comes to him in Book 23 and asks for one thing: that their bones lie together in the golden urn Thetis gave. Achilles burns twelve Trojan youths on the pyre, and the Greeks gather Patroclus's bones into a golden urn. In the Odyssey's underworld, the ghost of Agamemnon tells Achilles that his bones now lie mingled with those of Patroclus.

Homer names Patroclus's father, Menoetius son of Actor, and gives him Opus as a home. Apollodorus adds a mother, and cannot settle on one. She is Sthenele, daughter of Acastus, or Periopis, daughter of Pheres, or, as Philocrates says, Polymele, daughter of Peleus. The last would make Patroclus the nephew of Achilles's father. Pindar's ninth Olympian Ode adds a deed from outside the Iliad: Patroclus alone stood beside Achilles when Telephus routed the Greeks on the plain of Teuthras.

Whether the two were lovers is a question the ancient sources already argued. The Iliad calls them companions and never says more. Aeschylus's lost tragedy the Myrmidons made them lovers. Athenaeus quotes one of its lines, a reproach over too frequent kisses. In Plato's Symposium, the speaker Phaedrus accepts they were lovers but says Aeschylus has the roles backwards. Achilles, he argues, was the younger and beardless one, as Homer says.

Apollodorus's Library takes the later view as settled. After telling how Patroclus fled to Peleus, it says he became Achilles's beloved. Its Epitome retells Iliad Book 16 in brief: the Trojans took Patroclus for Achilles, he killed Sarpedon, and Hector killed him after Euphorbus wounded him first. Ajax, it adds, rescued the body with difficulty. The wider war is told in the Trojan War and the Trojan Cycle.