He Does His Own Stunts: Achilles and Patroclus and the the Melding of Identity

Introduction

The close relationship of the heroes Achilles and Patroclus has been famous for as long as Homer’s Iliad has had an audience. When Achilles withdraws from the Trojan war, the poet makes sure the audience knows that Patroclus is with him. Indeed, “the poem gradually builds a feeling of ‘we two together’ between him and Achilles.” When Achilles re-enters the story proper in book 9, he is found in his tent, playing the lyre and singing songs of heroes past while Patroclus looks on as his sole companion. That scene in particular “elevates Patroklos to a unique level of companionship, since he accompanies Achilles in a moment unparalleled in the poem, and since the narrator is careful to note that Patroklos accompanies him alone.”

This characteristic of their relationship, the persistent “and” joining their names, is particularly interesting when viewed through the lens of mythical “twinning”

and the idea that one can serve as a “body double” for another.

Through the progression of the Iliad, the identities of Achilles and Patroclus become fuzzy at the edges, and by the time Patroclus wears Achilles’s armor into battle and is killed, there is an overwhelming sense that in doing so the two characters all but merge into one. Patroclus is described by Achilles as philos; he is without question “the very best friend of Achilles.” The word philos means something like “nearest and dear” or “belonging to the self” as an adjective,

and it effectively “defines identity by way of measuring how much you can identify with someone else: the more you love someone, the more you identify with this special someone—and the closer you get to your own self.”

Achilles and Patroclus take this closeness of identity to the extreme, to the effect that their personal identities are entangled with each other. I will examine the swapping of armor and Patroclus’s death in book 16 as the turning point in this double-identity the heroes share. I will examine the lamentation for Patroclus in book 18, which serves as a lamentation for the now-doomed Achilles as well. Additionally, I will examine Patroclus as a ghost, when he reappears in book 23, and what that means for Achilles. Through these three scenes, I hope to create a clearer picture of the “twinning of identity” that occurs with these two heroes, as their fates are intertwined.

Interchangeable Armor and Identity

The first and most overt instance of Patroclus and Achilles’s fused identity is the famous armor swap of book 16. Achilles refuses to help his comrades and fight the Trojans, so Patroclus implores Achilles to let him fight in his place, donning the armor of the best of the Acheans. In doing so, he hopes that from afar the Trojans will mistake Patroclus for Achilles and retreat in fear. Interestingly, the Iliad does not actually include any scenes of Achilles and Patroclus fighting together. However, the poem clearly implies that to do so is their normal state. Achilles warns “do not attempt to fight the warlike Trojans without me,” implying that it is most normal for the two of them to fight together.

This makes Patroclus’s solo aristeia in book 16 all the more evocative– as the audience, it is hard not to feel the weight of the absence of Achilles as Patroclus takes on the Trojans without him.

Achilles and Patroclus display a dynamic that is often used by mythical twins in both Indo-European and Greek tradition. In both cultures, it is common to see a set of twins whose states are entangled this way, where the state of one determines the state of the other. The myths usually take one of two forms, exemplified in the Greek world by the Dioscuri: in one myth, the mortal twin dies and is brought back to life by the other, and in the other form, the mortal twin dies and the immortal takes his place as a warrior. As Patroclus enters the battlefield alone, he starts to morph into Achilles; “[f]rom the moment he dons Achilles’ armor, Patroclus gradually loses his identity: as he ‘becomes’ Achilles, he takes on Achilles’ warrior personality as well, but not the equivalent martial prowess.”

And “[w]hen Patroclus takes Achilles’s place in battle Achilles is, of course, not dead, but only out of action. Patroclus’s deed is nevertheless viewed in the Iliad through the prism of this second form of the twin myth.”

Achilles and Patroclus fall into the first category ultimately, because we know that Achilles is quick to follow Patroclus in death. The fact that Patroclus is defeated by Hector (assisted heavily by Apollo), however, is not necessarily illustrative of a failure to fulfil this role; on the contrary: “[Patroclus] becomes a second Achilles, and he plays the part perfectly. Patroclus’s death in Achilles’ armor should be seen not as a failure to embody Achilles but as the ultimate success, since Achilles’ fate is also to die in battle before the gates of Troy (22.357–360).”

It is important to note too the importance of the increasing frequency with which the poet of the Iliad apostrophizes Patroclus throughout book 16. These apostrophes, whether the poet intended them to or not, contribute heavily to the audience’s feeling that Patroclus’s identity is not his own. As the narrator breaks his characteristic removed stoicism, Patroclus is himself, and “you”, and Achilles, all at once. The same sense of doom that follows Patroclus through his aristeia has quietly followed Achilles for the entire story, and will continue to shape his actions until he fulfills his prophecy and dies. So the apostrophes to Patroclus at the end of book 16 show us the death of Patroclus through the eyes of Achilles, the person who addresses him the most. Indeed,

As the audience witnesses the death of Patroclus, it is the inevitability of his own death that we see Achilles come to terms with. The whole scene does not merely show us Patroclus’ death through Achilles’ eyes; it is also simultaneously a ‘rehearsal’ of Achilles’ own death, as seen by Achilles.The apostrophe serves as a reminder that Patroclus both is and is not Achilles—the distinction of their identities being made clear from the mere fact that ‘Achilles’ here addresses Patroclus in the second person. Muellner calls attention to this point: “…The otherwise rigidly third-person narrator of the Iliad actually addresses in the second-person singular, as a ‘you,’ right before the moment of his death. That is a grammatical symptom of the special sympathy and philotês his character evokes and expresses. One could characterize Patroklos’ substitution for Achilles as the combination of a character that embodies solidarity (a ‘you’) with one who embodies remoteness (a ‘he’) because each is the other’s ‘I.’

After Patroclus dies, we will see that it leaves Achilles narratively unbalanced. Patroclus is the half of Achilles that is compassionate, even human, and without him Achilles teeters on the edge of estrangement.

Whether you take Patroclus to be Achilles’s shadow, mirror, or mythical twin, the two of them being unable to exist in the same state together dooms Achilles to follow Patroclus in death. Indeed, in wearing Achilles’s armor when he dies, Patroclus is wearing the identity of his companion: “the epic identity of Achilles, as expressed by the epithets they share. These heroic epithets, such as the ones that make them both ‘equal to Arēs’, will predestine both of them to live the same way and to die the same way.”

Patroclus is the attendant of Achilles and we don’t see him act on his own before his aristeia in book 16. This lack of singular identity means that Patroclus “can succeed only if he fights together with Achilles” and will die otherwise, such that “Patroklos is doomed to die as the other self of Achilles.”

Lamentation for Two

After the death of Patroclus, all of the Greeks mourn. News reaches Achilles and the Greek camp at large, and it is so utterly soul-rending that Achilles immediately tries to end his own life and follow his companion.

The death of Patroclus is the event that shapes the entire rest of the poem: it is the death of Patroclus that spurs Achilles to fight, to kill Hector, to desecrate his body, and finally, to fulfill his own prophecy and be himself killed by Apollo acting through Paris. In analyzing the lamentation for Patroclus in book 18, it becomes even clearer that the two fighters, Patroclus and Achilles, are of a joint identity.

The lamentations for Patroclus are intense. The whole camp mourns with Achilles, as does Thetis and a myriad of nereids she brings from the sea. Thetis’s lamentation is of particular interest, however, because she begins her grieving before Achilles has the chance to tell her the fate of his partner. Thetis’s grief is for Patroclus, but it is mostly directed at her son. In this way, book 18 describes a double-lament. Thetis and the Greeks are mourning Patroclus and Achilles at the same time, as if they perished simultaneously. There is precedent for this too elsewhere in the poem.

In the final book of the Iliad, in the meeting between Achilles and Priam, the two of them “both remembered those whom they had lost…Priam sobbed desperately for murderous Hector. Achilles wept, at times for his own father, and sometimes for Patroclus.”

Earlier in book 19, Briseis and the enslaved women of the Greek camp express their grief for the loss of Patroclus, so that “[u]sing the lamentation for Patroclus, each of the women wept for their own troubles.”

So, Thetis also expresses her grief for Achilles in the lamentation for Patroclus. Thetis has been in constant understanding that Achilles will soon die; in a way, he and Patroclus are both dead, doomed as soon as the story begins. Achilles even calls himself dead, as “he blames himself for “killing” Patroclus (18.82) and connects his friend’s death with his own by stating that he no longer has the will to live, for he is but “a dead weight on the earth” (18.90–91 and 104 respectively).”

Through death and lamentation, the twin identities of Achilles and Patroclus converge, and Achilles is dead as soon as Patroclus falls.

Ghosting and Funerary Games

The funeral for Patroclus, taking place in book 23, is the only funeral we see in the Iliad of a major hero on the side of the Greeks. Similar to the lamentation of Thetis, it serves as a funeral for both Achilles, who oversees the funeral games in a narrative break from the heavy events of the last book, and Patroclus. The narrator makes a comment early on that implies that the funerary pyre is for the both heroes, “Achilles planned a mighty burial ground for Lord Patroclus and himself.”

When Patroclus appears to Achilles as a ghost and instructs him how to build the funerary pyre, Achilles is unbalanced. He is operating far outside the realm of the other heroes, as his “other self” is gone. But Patroclus is still able to visit Achilles— just as Achilles is figuratively “half-alive,” Patroclus is too, as a shade wandering and unable to join the dead before his funerary pyre is able to be burnt. We can read their states in book 23 as matching up thematically, as Patroclus is a literal ghost and Achilles is ghostlike, watching over the games as somewhat of a shell of his usual self in his grief. Moreover, Achilles in books 23 and especially 24 is increasingly associated with the dead and in the latter case with Hades as lord of the dead.

When Patroclus’s shade speaks to Achilles, he speaks of the doom that follows the pair of warriors, saying that “[h]ateful doom, the lot that I have had since I was born, has opened wide to swallow me at last. Godlike Achilles, even you are fated to die beneath the wealthy wall of Troy.”

Now, unlike Achilles, Patroclus was not told of his doom before it came to pass. However, there is a line in the beginning of book 18 that implies that he could have known it, if someone like Thetis had made it known to him. When Antilochus runs to tell Achilles that his companion has died, Achilles sees the anguish in his face and fears the worst. He says, “[m]y mother told me something once. She said the best of all the Myrmidons would leave the sunlight, killed by Trojan hands, while I would stay alive. And surely now Patroclus… must be dead.”

Therefore, Patroclus too has a prophesied death told to Achilles by Thetis. Patroclus’s death by Hector, then, stitches these prophecies together. If Patroclus, the “best of all the Myrmidons,” is killed by Hector, then Achilles’s prophecy that he will die once he kills Hector is inseparable from Patroclus’s prophecy, and their fates are fused. Patroclus’s ghost continues in his speech, and he reinforces the idea that he and Achilles have a shared identity apart from the other warriors. He says, “[n]ever again will we sit down together alive, apart from all our dear companions, and form our plans together.”

Ultimately, he requests, “[d]o not put my bones apart from yours, Achilles, but together, as we were raised together in your house.” Future events in the poem show that Achilles will do just as Patroclus asked, and are indeed entombed in the same urn.

Conclusion

In particular, the death of Patroclus entombs him into the narrative of the Iliad as the rest of the story and the actions that move the plot forward are dedicated to his life. As the twin, stand-in, or ghost of Achilles, Patroclus’s doom becomes Achilles’s and vice versa. It is ultimately fitting for the pair and their dual identity that Patroclus dies wearing the armor of Achilles, and that when Achilles kills Hector, he is wearing that same armor looted from Patroclus, sealing his own fate. Ultimately, the identities of Patroclus and Achilles are literally intermixed, as after the death of Achilles, we know that his bones were combined with those of Patroclus. In this way, they become indistinguishable from each other in every way. Their dyad is marked by the same death; both are killed by the god Apollo working through a prince of Troy.

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