In Greek mythology, Patroclus was a Greek hero of the Trojan War and the close companion of the hero Achilles. Born in Opus as the son of the Argonaut Menoetius, he was exiled as a child after an accidental killing and adopted into the household of Peleus, king of Phthia, where he was raised alongside Achilles. Patroclus features prominently in Homer's Iliad: during a critical phase of the war he donned Achilles's armour and led the Myrmidons against the Trojans, only to be killed by the Trojan prince Hector — a death whose grief drove Achilles back into battle and turned the war in the Greeks' favour. Although Homer never explicitly describes the two as lovers, later ancient authors frequently interpreted their bond as a romantic one.
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I.Name
The Latinized name Patroclus derives from the Ancient Greek Pátroklos (Πάτροκλος), meaning "glory of his father," combining patḗr ("father") and kléos ("glory").
Three English pronunciations exist. Latin prose stress patterns point toward one form, but Alexander Pope's translation of Homer established the pronunciation with stress on the "o," which became standard. A misanalysis of the weight of the penultimate syllable produced a further variant among English speakers.
II.Description and family
Philostratus described Patroclus as having "an olive complexion, black eyes, and sufficiently fine eyebrows," with moderately long hair and a straight nose.
Patroclus was the son of Menoetius; his mother is variously identified as Philomela, Polymele, Sthenele, or Periopis. His only sibling was Myrto, who is said to have borne Eucleia by Heracles. Menoetius was himself a son of Actor, king of Opus in Locris, through Actor's union with Aegina, the daughter of the river god Asopus.
III.Mythology — Early days
During his childhood, Patroclus accidentally killed his playmate Clysonymus during a game of dice. As a consequence he was exiled from Opus, and his father Menoetius sent him to Peleus, king of Phthia and the father of Achilles. Peleus made Patroclus Achilles's squire, and the two grew up together as close friends; Patroclus, who was the elder, served as a kind of role model — gentler and wiser in counsel than Achilles.
Patroclus's early life, including his flight to the household of Peleus, is recounted later in the Iliad when his ghost addresses Achilles. According to Photius, Ptolemy Hephaestion wrote that Poseidon loved Patroclus and taught him horsemanship.
A local Laconian tradition held that Achilles had killed Las while seeking the hand of Helen, but the geographer Pausanias disagreed, arguing that it was Patroclus who killed Las and that he too had been a suitor of Helen.
IV.Mythology — Trojan War
When the Trojan War turned against the Greeks and the Trojans threatened to burn their ships, Patroclus persuaded Achilles — who had withdrawn from the fighting — to let him lead the Myrmidons. Achilles consented and lent Patroclus his own armour so that he might be mistaken for Achilles, instructing him to drive the Trojans back from the ships and then return.
Patroclus disobeyed and pressed his pursuit all the way to the gates of Troy. He killed many Trojans and Trojan allies, among them Sarpedon, a son of Zeus. Then Apollo struck him and removed his wits; the spear of Euphorbus wounded him, and Hector finished him off, stabbing him in the stomach with a spear.
Achilles recovered the stripped body, which was defended by Menelaus and Ajax. The ghost of Patroclus appeared to Achilles and demanded burial so that it might pass into Hades. Patroclus was cremated on a pyre over which his companions laid their cut hair — a sign of grief and of the separation of the living from the dead — and his ashes were eventually buried together with those of Achilles in a golden urn beside the Hellespont.
V.Relationship with Achilles
Homer's Iliad contains no explicit sexual relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, but later Greek authors read implicit romantic dimensions into their bond, and writers such as Aeschylus and the speaker Phaedrus debated their respective roles within such a relationship.
According to Ledbetter (1993), Patroclus may embody Achilles's compassionate side, in contrast to his renowned rage; Ledbetter compares the way Thetis comforts the weeping Achilles in Book 1 with the way Achilles comforts the weeping Patroclus in Book 16. Because Patroclus is explicitly the elder, however, this need not reflect their relative social standing.
James Hooker argues that Patroclus's character was narratively essential: without his death, Achilles's return to the fighting would upset the balance of the Iliad. Hooker sees Patroclus as Achilles's counterpart rather than his surrogate, stressing that the greater the love between them, the greater the resulting tragedy.
Since Homer never explicitly states that the two were lovers, the question has been disputed since antiquity. Aeschines maintained that such a relationship need not be stated outright, being "manifest to such of his hearers as are educated men." Plato's Symposium presents their relationship as a model of romantic love, while Xenophon's Symposium countered that to call it romantic was inaccurate. Their bond was said to have inspired that of Alexander the Great and Hephaestion.
In the Iliad Achilles is the younger of the two, a detail that some, following Dowden, connect with the erastes–eromenos dynamic of initiation practice; Statius's Achilleid, by contrast, claims that they were the same age or behaved as if they were. In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida the idle Achilles is besotted with Patroclus, and other characters complain that the pair are too occupied with each other to fight.
VI.Achilles and Patroclus in classical literature
The pair recur across the classical canon. Among the principal works that treat them are Homer's Iliad (c. 700 BC), Pindar's Olympian Odes IX (476 BC), Aeschylus's Myrmidons (495 BC), Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis (405 BC), Plato's Symposium (388–367 BC), and Statius's Achilleid (96 AD).