The Song of Achilles

I recently finished Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. It’s a beautifully written book that follows the events of Homer’s The Iliad and the Trojan War through the eyes of Achilles’s lover Patroclus. 

A tale of gods, kings, immortal fame, and the human heart, The Song of Achilles is a dazzling literary feat that brilliantly reimagines Homer’s enduring masterwork, The Iliad. An action-packed adventure, an epic love story, and a marvelously conceived and executed page-turner, Miller’s monumental debut novel has already earned resounding acclaim from some of contemporary fiction’s brightest lights—and fans of Mary Renault, Bernard Cornwell, Steven Pressfield, and Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series will delight in this unforgettable journey back to ancient Greece in the Age of Heroes.

Throughout history, there have been debates over the nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. Were they lovers? Were they the same age? All sources claim that Achilles had a great love for Patroclus; the question is: were they romantic? Plato believed they were lovers, and it appears that most ancient Greeks felt the same way.  Also, ancient sources usually agree that Patroclus was the older of the two and that the relationship was pederastic. Miller, however, writes that they are the same age. and The Song of Achilles is about the romantic relationship between the two men.

As a historian who has studied and is fascinated by Ancient Greece, I find Miller's portrayal of the story fascinating. The Iliad is far from the only source for the mythology of Achilles, and many of those sources vary greatly from one another. Miller is able to take the various stories and show how they can all be accurate from various perspectives. For instance, in the story of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, the king sacrifices his daughter for victory in Troy. (In Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon, this is one of the reasons his wife Clytemnestra murders him.) The daughter, Iphigenia, is brought to him in Aulis to be married to Achilles but secretly to be sacrificed to the goddess Artemis. Various sources say she knew she was to be sacrificed and did so willingly; others sources say she did not know. In The Song of Achilles, Miller weaves together the stories in a way to make both stories appear to be true. When the Greeks are horrified by the murder, Agamemnon claims Iphigenia knew her fate and sacrificed herself willingly. However, Achilles was close enough to see the shock on her face when she was killed. It really is an interesting way to write the story, and that is just one example.

Reviewing The Song of Achilles for The Guardian, Natalie Haynes commended the novel as "more poetic than almost any translation of Homer" and "a deeply affecting version of the Achilles story." Mary Doria Russell similarly praised the novel in her review for The Washington Post, favorably citing its "prose as clean and spare as the driving poetry of Homer." In his review for The New York Times, Daniel Mendelsohn criticized the book's structure and, in particular, its tone. He compared the book unfavorably to young adult literature, describing The Song of Achilles as "a book that has the head of a young adult novel, the body of the Iliad, and the hindquarters of Barbara Cartland." He also compared the novel's prose to SparkNotes and softcore pornography. I agree with Haynes and Russell’s assessments, but Mendelsohn couldn’t be further from the truth. There is nothing young adult about the book, and it is mostly certainly not softcore pornographic. In fact, the sex scenes are hardly explicit. The book is beautifully written, moving, and historically fascinating.

Miller's book is beautifully written and is a new retelling of the famous relationship. The book was published in 2011, so it is hardly a new book, but I just got around to reading it. I you have not read it and have an interest in Ancient Greek mythology, I highly recommend it. If you have read it, what was your opinion of the book?

The Song of Achilles is available from Amazon in Kindle, audiobook, or paperback.