The Siege and Fall of Troy by Robert Graves

Author:Robert Graves [Robert Graves]
Language: eng
Format: epub

IX.

Achilles Avenges Patroclus

Patroclus begged Achilles to lend him his own suit of armour and the command of his warlike Myrmidons. ‘With their help,’ he pleaded, ‘I can drive away the Trojans before the fleet is burned and our surviving friends are massacred.’ Achilles consented, but made Patroclus promise that once the camp had been cleared of enemies, he would not try to win further glory by chasing them back and attacking Troy itself.

Great Ajax could no longer defend his ship, because Hector lopped off the pike-head and left him only the pole. He jumped down and rejoined his comrades, who were holding the nearest row of huts. This allowed the Trojans to set the ship on fire. As soon as Achilles saw a thin column of smoke rising into the sky, he lent Patroclus his magnificent arms and armour, paraded the Myrmidons, and sent them forward to save the fleet. Their charge was irresistible. Mistaking Patroclus for Achilles, the Trojans were again driven out, and lost heavily.

Almighty Zeus, watching from Mount Ida, could not at first decide whether Patroclus should be immediately destroyed by Hector and stripped of Achilles’s armour, or whether he should be granted fresh victories. In the end, Zeus let him go on for another half hour. Patroclus forgot his promise to Achilles as he chased the fleeing Trojans across the plain. A company of Myrmidons were already scaling the walls of Troy—the weak part built by Aeacus—when Apollo showed himself on the Citadel and shook his terrible shield at them. They retired in awe.

Hector then challenged Patroclus to a duel. No sooner had they dismounted from their chariots than Apollo stepped quietly behind Patroclus and struck him on the neck with the edge of his palm. Achilles’s helmet tumbled off, Achilles’s tough spear shattered, Achilles’s shield slipped to the ground, and Patroclus stood there unarmed, dazed and trembling. Darting up, Hector speared him low in the belly; and the Trojans rallied when they saw his fall.

A fearful tussle followed for the body. Both Greeks and Trojans treated it like a newly-flayed bull’s hide, which farm-boys tug in all directions, to stretch and supple it. At last Menelaus and Idomeneus’s lieutenant, Meriones the Cretan, succeeded in carrying the body back to camp, while Great and Little Ajax acted as rearguards.

One of Nestor’s sons brought the bad news to Achilles, tears blinding his eyes. Achilles’s two horses, Xanthus and Balius, which Patroclus had been driving, wept too—huge tears trickled down their noses. But he already knew. Hera had sent a message by Iris, and ordered him to stand on the rampart as soon as the Trojans appeared, and roar out a challenge. This would make them recoil in terror because, having watched Hector strip his well-known armour from Patroclus, they thought him dead. Achilles shouted so loud, and the Greeks halted in such confusion, that forty of them were wounded by the spears of men following behind, or run over by chariots.

Achilles wept, laid his enormous hands on

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