The Song of Achilles

Miller takes the Western canon's greatest war story and hands the microphone to its quietest figure, turning an epic of kings and gods into an intimate love story. It won the Orange Prize, and it reads like a confession: tender, sensual, and devastating. Read it if you love mythology, romance that ends in ruin, or stories where the hero is not the loudest man in the room.

1. 1

   Act 1

   The Exile and the Golden Boy

   You meet Patroclus as a disappointment. He is the son of King Menoetius of Opus, born a disappointment to his father, who hoped for a strong, heroic son. He is presented as a suitor for Helen of Sparta and swears the Oath of Tyndareus, a blood oath to defend her marriage to whoever she chooses. Patroclus accidentally kills Clysonymus, the son of one of Menoetius's nobles, when the boy attacks him over a game of dice (knucklebones). His father, shamed, exiles him to Phthia. There he sees Achilles for the first time: the golden son of King Peleus and the sea goddess Thetis, all grace and light. To his astonishment, Achilles chooses Patroclus as his therapon (companion). They become inseparable—Achilles teaches him to run and wrestle, and Patroclus, who has never been chosen for anything, is chosen. Thetis despises the low-born mortal clinging to her godlike son. She sends Achilles to train with the wise centaur Chiron on Mount Pelion, expecting the separation to end the friendship. Instead, Patroclus runs away from Phthia and follows him up the mountain. Chiron allows him to stay, and among the herbs and lyre-lessons, the boys become lovers. Their idyll is brief. Thetis arrives on Pelion and reveals she has told Peleus the boys are lovers; to separate them she takes Achilles to Skyros, where he is hidden in the court of King Lycomedes disguised as a woman, and forces him to marry Deidamia. Patroclus follows Achilles to Skyros, where Achilles, disguised as one of Lycomedes's daughters, is forced into marriage with Deidamia, who later bears Achilles's son Neoptolemus (called Pyrrhus); they live together there until Odysseus and Diomedes discover Achilles and recruit him for the war.

2. 2

   Act 2

   The War Comes for Them

   Odysseus and Diomedes come to Skyros seeking Achilles. Odysseus's trick—laying out gifts including weapons among the girls and sounding a war alarm—reveals Achilles, who instinctively grabs a spear, exposing himself. Patroclus is bound to the war by the oath he swore to defend Helen's marriage. Achilles goes too, though he knows the prophecy: his greatest glory waits at Troy, and so does his death. He makes himself a loophole—he vows never to fight Hector, believing that will let him win fame without dying. At Aulis, the fleet is becalmed by Artemis, and the seer Calchas declares the goddess demands the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia. Agamemnon lures her to Aulis with the promise of marriage to Achilles and sacrifices her. When the truth comes out, Patroclus is horrified, and Achilles' contempt for Agamemnon hardens into something permanent. In Troy's war camp, Achilles takes the Trojan woman Briseis as his war prize to save her from Agamemnon's men; because Achilles killed her husband and brothers, he avoids her. She and Patroclus instead form a close friendship that settles into a devoted, sibling-like bond. The war drags for nine years. Patroclus serves as a healer in the field hospital, earning the affection of the common soldiers, while Achilles wins fame in raids and skirmishes but refuses to fight Hector.

3. 3

   Act 3

   Pride, Plague, and the Armor

   Agamemnon claims Chryseis, daughter of the priest Chryses. When Chryses comes to ransom her and is refused, Apollo sends a plague that kills many Greeks. Achilles demands Agamemnon return Chryseis to end the plague; Agamemnon complies but takes Briseis from Achilles as compensation, publicly dishonoring him. Furious at the insult, Achilles swears he will not fight until his honor is repaired and begs Thetis to convince Zeus to favor the Trojans so the Greeks will suffer and regret wronging him. Zeus grants Thetis' request, and the Trojans begin to win the war. The Greeks suffer heavy losses, and many warriors are killed. Agamemnon later offers Achilles a private settlement—Briseis returned plus lavish gifts—but Achilles refuses, demanding a public apology. Patroclus tries to convince Achilles to help the Greeks, but Achilles stubbornly refuses. Patroclus is torn between his love for Achilles and his compassion for the dying soldiers. As the Trojans burn the Greek ships, Patroclus, desperate to save the men he has healed, tricks Achilles: he dons Achilles's famous armor and leads the Myrmidons into battle. Fighting in Achilles's armor, Patroclus kills Sarpedon, Zeus's son, and drives the Trojans from the ships. Apollo strikes him—knocking off his helmet and armor—revealing his true identity. Hector kills Patroclus outside the walls of Troy. Achilles, who arrived too late, grieves over the body and vows to kill Hector, accepting his own prophesied death.

4. 4

   Act 4

   The Vow Fulfilled

   Achilles learns of Patroclus' death and is consumed by grief. He vows to kill Hector, despite knowing that Hector's death will lead to his own. Achilles tells Thetis he will die soon after Hector; he asks that when he dies, his ashes be mixed with Patroclus's in the same golden urn. Thetis weeps for her son. Achilles holds funeral games for Patroclus. He refuses to bury Patroclus until the ghost of Patroclus appears to him, asking to be buried. Achilles returns to battle, wearing new armor forged by the god Hephaestus. He kills Hector in single combat outside the walls of Troy, and drags Hector's body behind his chariot around Patroclus's funeral mound. Paris, aided by the god Apollo, shoots the arrow that kills Achilles as he fights at the Scaean gates. Achilles's ashes are mixed with Patroclus's in a golden urn as he requested. A tomb is built for them on the shore near Troy. Neoptolemus, Achilles' son, arrives at Troy to take his father's place. He is cruel and arrogant. When Briseis refuses his advances and reveals that Achilles and Patroclus were lovers, he kills her. The Greeks build a tomb for Achilles and Patroclus, but at Neoptolemus's insistence Patroclus's name is left off the inscription, so Patroclus's shade cannot cross into the underworld and is bound to the tomb. After the war, Thetis returns to the tomb to mourn Achilles. Patroclus's spirit speaks with her, and she shares her memories of Achilles. Thetis, moved by Patroclus' devotion, writes Patroclus' name on the tomb. Patroclus' spirit is freed, and he is reunited with Achilles in the afterlife.

• PPatroclusThe narrator: a clumsy, exiled prince whom nobody wanted—until Achilles chose him. He becomes a healer, the conscience of the Greek camp, and the man who dies wearing his lover's armor.
• AAchillesThe golden son of a sea goddess, beautiful and peerless, who wants glory without death. His loophole—never fighting Hector—collapses when love makes him choose the prophecy after all.
• TThetisA cold sea goddess who despises the mortal clinging to her son and schemes to separate them. Grief, not argument, is what finally softens her.
• BBriseisA Trojan woman claimed as a war prize by the man who killed her family. She finds friendship with Patroclus instead, and dies for telling the truth about the two of them.
• AAgamemnonThe Greek high king whose pride sacrifices his own daughter and strips Achilles' honor. His arrogance sets the plague, the feud, and the catastrophe in motion.
• NNeoptolemusAchilles' son by Deidamia, cruel and arrogant, who arrives to inherit his father's war. He erases Patroclus' name from the tomb and kills Briseis.
• OOdysseusThe cunning king whose trick with gifts and a war alarm exposes Achilles on Skyros. He is the machine that pulls both lovers into the war.

The golden urn

Achilles asks that his ashes be mixed with Patroclus' in one golden urn—the dead man's version of a marriage vow. It stands for the only union no king, goddess, or prophecy can annul, and the book honors it: the mixing is carried out exactly as he asked.

Achilles' armor

The armor is the legend itself—wearing it, Patroclus briefly becomes Achilles, kills a god's son, and dies for it. It stands for borrowed glory and its cost: the world sees the shining shell, and only Apollo sees the man inside.

The tomb inscription

A tomb built for two men that names only one. The missing name is erasure as policy—legend deciding whose love gets recorded. Thetis carving Patroclus' name is the story's last, hardest-won act, and the gate to the afterlife opens with it.

The heel

The one vulnerable point on a godlike body, and the place Apollo aims Paris' arrow. It stands for the truth the whole novel tells: what makes Achilles killable is not a flaw in his armor but a person he cannot bear to lose.

The ending does two things at once: it completes a love story and indicts the one that recorded it. Patroclus' shade is stranded at the tomb because legend—embodied by Neoptolemus—refused to write his name beside Achilles'. The erasure is the point: epics are written by the victors and the proud, and the people who loved the hero get edited out. What finally frees him is not battle or fate but Thetis, the woman who spent the whole book trying to separate them, moved by hearing her son remembered through the eyes of the man who loved him. Read one way, it is a happy ending smuggled inside a tragedy—the reunion in the dark, hands meeting, light pouring in. Read another, it is bitter: it takes a goddess's grief and a mortal's decades of devotion to correct one line of inscription. It lands because the final image is not war or glory but two shadows reaching for each other—the thing the whole story was actually about, finally given its name.

1. 1.Whose story is the Iliad? Argue whether Miller's Patroclus-narrated version corrects the original or simply builds a new myth on top of it.
2. 2.Achilles tries to outsmart prophecy by vowing never to fight Hector. Is his final choice—accepting death after Hector—an act of love, of despair, or of pride?
3. 3.Thetis begins as the story's antagonist and ends as its redeemer. Trace what changes her, and whether the novel earns her transformation.

Anyone who devoured mythology as a child and suspects the old stories were leaving something out—especially queer readers hungry for a love story at the center of the canon. Also ideal for book clubs that want a tragedy everyone can argue about.

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