The Song of Achilles

"This book by Madeline Miller extrapolates from The Iliad the ostensible love story between Achilles and [his comrade-in-arms] Patroclus. It is a novelisation of that, told in the first person by Patroclus – which among other things is difficult technically, because Patroclus dies in book 16 but the story goes beyond that. So at a certain point you’re wondering, as a reader, how this guy is talking. Another problem is that the book unbelievably trivialises the spirit of the original. I’ll never forget when, as an undergraduate, a professor whom I greatly admired told me after something silly I had said that “the classics is serious business”. It’s not like you can’t write a book like this. The ancient Greeks thought there was something going on between Achilles and Patroclus – that it wasn’t just card games and beer drinking – so the kernel was already there for an erotic reading of the relationship. Aeschylus did it, Plato did it. But spare me the soft porn descriptions. I don’t want to know what Achilles did in bed, frankly. I don’t want to go there, as my students like to say. If you want to play with the big boys, fine, but don’t turn The Iliad into a Twilight novel. Mary Renault, a mentor of mine, said that descriptions of sex are the ketchup of literature – a really good dish doesn’t need ketchup. If I know who Achilles is, I don’t need to know what he did in bed. Yes I have, and I would definitely nominate this book. Well, there is nothing in The Iliad to indicate otherwise. Achilles merely refers to Patroclus as his “best-beloved companion”. But we do know that in classical times it was more or less assumed that they had a typical homo-erotic relationship. In Plato’s Symposium , what they are debating is who was on top – not whether, but where. And a lost play of Aeschylus called The Myrmidons seemed clearly to treat it as an erotic relationship. So the classical poets read it that way. But Mitchell is correct, there’s nothing in the text itself that says as much. And I don’t care either way. It’s not going to change my life if Achilles is gay, unless he calls me up and asks me out for a date. I’m always the first person in line on the day a new toga and sandals epic film is released. And some of them are great fun. To my mind, that movie suffered from a mistake that Aristotle identified in the Poetics . Instead of actually being a film version of The Iliad , which could work, it was about everything to do with the Trojan war, from the abduction of Helen to the fall of Troy, which is not in The Iliad . So it has an “everything but the kitchen sink” feel to it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I don’t think Brad was terrible. I thought there were some good moments in the film, such as the initial assault on Troy and the encounter between Priam and Achilles near the end. So it’s not that it can’t be done, it just has to be done intelligently, and with enormous consultant fees to willing classicists. I know, it’s a famous thing. I want to put a footnote from now on at the bottom of every piece I write, saying that I’m available at a sizeable fee to consult before these people make the terrible mistakes that I later identify when I review their movies."

"Yes, this is by Madeline Miller who is an American academic. It was her debut novel and it won the Orange Prize. For some reason I came across it when it first came out, before anyone else knew about it, and I absolutely loved it. I really appreciated the deft, spare beauty of the writing and I like the way it came at the story from Patroclus’s point of view. At the beginning Patroclus is the underdog. Then he makes friends with Achilles, this golden, god-like boy and they go off to the centaur Chiron and are educated by him. Then, of course, they go to the Trojan War. The book might shock people because there’s some quite graphic sex scenes in it. One of the reasons I loved it is that I’ve always thought of Achilles as a slightly spoiled brat but told through the eyes of Patroclus I understood him much better. I just loved the richness of the language, the descriptions. She really made me feel I was in ancient Greece — the smells, the whole environment. And, again, it’s just such a good story. I knew how it ended, of course. It’s like Othello, you always know how it’s going to end, but I still always hope that it’s going to end differently. I hope against hope that somehow it’s going to have a happy ending. Then of course it doesn’t and it’s almost a double blow… Oh I did cry. That whole tenderness of male friendship and love, it was very moving. To source material, absolutely. She clearly knows her Homer and associated sources. She researched and researched and researched in order to get all the details right. One of the things about writing a semi-historical book like that is that for ancient stuff there really isn’t all that much you can go back to. You just have to do your best. Everything she has in there is pretty authentic — or as authentic as it possibly can be."

"Even though Miller’s prose doesn’t say, “Hey, let’s get with the program” – I mean, she doesn’t use modern language – she does inject a bit of modern sensibility. But I’ll get to that… It’s called The Song of Achilles. It’s not called the wrath of Achilles, which is how Homer starts his story. So the ‘Song’ of Achilles immediately softens him, because what we know of Achilles from Homer is that he’s this big warrior, and he has a foul temper, and he’s incredibly selfish, and he’s very happy to sulk. He’s very childish; he sulks in his tent while people are being massacred because Agamemnon has stolen one of his concubines, Briseis. But it’s back to what I said before, about seeing the story from a different point of view… It’s narrated by Patroclus, Achilles’s great friend and lover. So it’s understandable that Patroclus, as the narrator, would write the Song of Achilles. We know how the story ends. Patroclus doesn’t. They know that Achilles has chosen to have a short, glorious life versus a long, dull life – which at eight years old, when I first read these myths, I always thought was a terrible choice. Who would choose just to be famous after their death? I thought that was very foolish. So again, this story gives a different angle on the hero. The question that Miller is trying to answer, I think, is: why does Achilles go back into the fight, after his sulk? Why does he just forget all about his tantrum? And it’s because Hector kills Patroclus. So obviously their relationship had to be something of supreme importance for him to just cast aside the sulking and the tantrum. And then the true wrath of Achilles comes out. So it’s very much a love story, and has an almost domestic focus, even though she writes battle scenes. A modern bit she interjects is that Patroclus and Achilles set up a little tent for the women, to try to save the women from being raped, which I’m not sure they would have really been too bothered about then. But fair enough. She’s not doing a translation of the story. She is a modern writer, she’s a woman, and she is putting her own spin on it – and if Patroclus is a gentle, wounded, exiled person, why wouldn’t he be concerned about the women? It’s not unreasonable. It’s unlikely, but it’s not unreasonable, and she is looking at this war from a modern point of view, and the consequences for women. Just as Achilles-the-lover is brought to the foreground, so the consequences of war for women are also brought to the foreground in this telling. People who are just mentioned, who are just names, can step forward in retellings. It’s a bit like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. You get a chance to see and hear the story from a different point of view, and it does change your perspective. It widens, it deepens."