Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Patroclus.
The gallery
Achilles Bandaging the Wounded Patroclus
Unknown (the Sosias Painter), c. 500 BCE
The interior tondo of this Attic red-figure kylix, now in the Antikensammlung Berlin (F 2278), shows Achilles intently binding a dressing around the wounded arm of his companion Patroclus. Patroclus, seated and helmeted, grimaces and turns his face aside in pain while Achilles kneels close in concentration. One of the masterpieces of late Archaic Athenian vase painting and signed by the potter Sosias, it is the single most famous ancient image of the tender bond between the two warriors at the heart of the Iliad.
The Funeral of Patroclus
Jacques-Louis David, 1778
Painted during David's formative years in Rome, this turbulent canvas depicts the elaborate funeral rites Achilles holds for his slain friend Patroclus in Book 23 of the Iliad. Around the towering pyre the artist crowds sacrificed horses, captive Trojans bound for slaughter, smoke, and grieving warriors, while Achilles drags Hector's body in vengeance. The crowded, theatrical composition shows the young David still working in a late-Baroque idiom before the severe Neoclassicism that would soon make his name.
Menelaus Bearing the Body of Patroclus (The Pasquino Group)
Unknown (Roman copy after a Hellenistic original), Roman period (after a 3rd-century BCE Greek bronze)
Known as the Pasquino Group, this marble depicts the warrior Menelaus straining to lift and carry the lifeless body of Patroclus from the battlefield, a desperate episode from Book 17 of the Iliad in which the Greeks fight to rescue the corpse from the Trojans. The version illustrated stands in Florence; the type, a Roman copy of a celebrated lost Hellenistic bronze, survives in numerous ancient replicas and became one of the most influential sculptural images of heroic compassion and the burden of the fallen comrade.
Warriors Lifting the Body of Patroclus (Etruscan relief)
Unknown (Etruscan), 2nd century BCE
This Etruscan relief, preserved in the National Archaeological Museum of Florence, shows Menelaus and Meriones raising the slain body of Patroclus while Odysseus and other Greeks look on, dramatizing the struggle over the hero's corpse recounted in the Iliad. The funerary subject was popular in Etruscan art, where the recovery and mourning of a fallen warrior carried strong associations with death and the journey to the afterlife, and the crowded frieze translates the Homeric battle into the compact, expressive idiom of late Etruscan sculpture.
On screen
Troy
Wolfgang Petersen
Garrett Hedlund's Patroclus is the cousin who steals Achilles' armour and dies in it — the grief that finally sends Brad Pitt's Achilles back to the field.
Troy: Fall of a City
Owen Harris
The BBC/Netflix retelling keeps Patroclus at Achilles' side — the companion whose death is still the hinge of the wrath.
In play
The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller
Miller's Orange Prize winner is Patroclus' book: the Iliad retold from the companion's eyes, from Pelion to the pyre, love and war in the same breath.
Hades
Supergiant Games
In Elysium, Patroclus waits apart from Achilles — a quiet, devastating side-story that made a generation of players learn his name again.