The Iliad is an epic poem attributed to Homer, believed to have been written down circa eighth-century BCE. The ancient Greek text is written in dactylic hexameter, and it is among the oldest works of Western literature. Assuming the scholarly consensus is correct—which is, in the case of the Iliad, a controversial assumption—Homer lived around 850 BCE, and the events depicted in the Iliad are believed to have taken place about 400 years before that. The poem would likely have been transmitted orally, performed as a sort of song, perhaps with musical accompaniment.
Whether the content of the Iliad has any bearing in truth is also controversial. There is archeological evidence to suggest that there was a great city on the site traditionally ascribed to Troy, though the size of the remains seems to contradict the possibility of a 10-year war on such an epic scale. A campaign by Greek-speaking peoples against this city is at least possible, though since this would have happened before written record, the accuracy of Homer’s history (if it is history) would still be questionable. During the time of Alexander the Great, Greeks recognized a structure as the burial mound of Achilles and Patroclus. To them, at least, the heroes of the Iliad were real.
The Iliad tells a similar story to The Song of Achilles, with some differences. The Iliad includes no explicit statement of Achilles’ and Patroclus’s sexual relationship, though Patroclus is referred to as “his beloved companion,” and Achilles’ grief for him is overpowering and horrible in its intensity.
Formally, Patroclus’s narrative mode in The Song of Achilles draws inspiration from lyric poetry rather than the Homeric epic tradition, so even identical scenes can give different impressions. The Iliad features multiple Homeric similes. Here is one from Richard Lattimore’s translation of book 16, lines 823 – 829:
As a lion overpowers a weariless boar in wild combat
as the two fight in their pride on the high places of a mountain
over a little spring of water, both wanting to drink there,
and the lion beats him down by force as he fights for his breath, so
Hektor, Priam’s son, with a close spear-stroke stripped the life
from the fighting son of Menoitios, who had killed so many,
and stood above him, and spoke aloud the winged words of triumph.
Long, exhaustive, complicated similes are frequently employed in the Iliad, as well as epithets like “winged words.” The poem illustrates not only scenes of battle, but scenes of violent nature, dynamic comparisons that provide twice the entertainment for the listener or reader.
The same scene of Patroclus’s death in The Song of Achilles reads as follows:
No. My hands flurry in the air like startled birds, trying to halt the spear’s relentless movement towards my belly. But I am weak as a baby against Hector’s strength, and my palms give way, unspooling in ribbons of red. The spearhead submerges in a sea of pain so great that my breath stops, a boil of agony that bursts over my whole stomach. My head drops back against the ground, and the last image I see is of Hector, leaning seriously over me, twisting his spear inside me as if he is stirring a pot. The last thing I think is: Achilles.
No long similes, but many short ones, particularly using rhetorical devices that evoke the home: a baby, ribbons, stirring a pot. Hector killing Patroclus is certainly less heroic, more intimate, and tragically painful instead of triumphant. The same content is portrayed to very different effect; a comparison of the two can provide fruitful insight into why and how such narratives are told and retold across millennia.
