Patrocleia. Book XVI of Homer’s Iliad, adapted by Christopher Logue

Book design and typography by Germano Facetti

Scorpion Press, London 1962

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.

(King Lear I,V:I:37–38)

Arguably, few people in history have been as widely and as long revered as the poet Homer. And yet we know nothing certain of him, save that he was credited with the composition, if indeed composition is the right term (perhaps the singing is more accurate) of Western Europe’s two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Or was it really he? There are many unresolved questions about the poet - above all, whether ‘Omiros’ was a single individual or a succession of many individuals, each adding to and editing the epic over the vast span of time which passed before it was finally transcribed, most probably in Athens sometime during the 6th century BC.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to attributing both compositions to a single author is the inescapable fact that the two are so radically different. The Iliad is single-mindedly, enthusiastically, unrelentingly about killing. The Odyssey, an infinitely more subtle and complex weaving, is about nostos ^[1] and about return. The Iliad’s note is a sustained high-pitched scream; the Odyssey’s is seabirds calling from afar. The Iliad is fiercely masculine, its women depicted as the playthings of men and fate; the Odyssey’s women have agency and character, while it is the hero, Odysseus, who becomes the plaything of fate and the angry gods. Indeed, in 1714 the English scholar Richard Bentley decided that the Iliad was written for men, and the Odyssey “for the other Sex”. ^[2] Centuries later, the poet Robert Graves went a step further, theorizing that the author of the Odyssey must have been a woman, and felt so strongly about it that he wrote an entire novel on the subject, Homer’s Daughter (1955).

All this preamble is to explain why for much of my life I had regarded the Iliad with indifference: I considered it repetitive, tedious and almost wholly lacking in subtlety, whilst the only human emotions it touched upon, and those at tiresome length, were pride, arrogance and anger.

The Iliad and its ethos were a core part of the education of boys in Britain’s 19th and early 20th centuries public schools. When the poet Patrick Shaw-Stewart, a graduate of Eton College, found himself fighting in the murderous Gallipoli campaign of 1916-17, he remembered his Homer; after all, ancient Troy was a mere 90 or so kilometers south of the slaughter. His poem “Stand in the trench, Achilles” concludes with an appeal to the long-dead hero:

Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knewest, and I know not—
So much the happier I.

I will go back this morning
From Imbros over the sea;
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.

I could be touched by Shaw-Stewart’s poem, but not by Homer’s account of Greek and Trojan butchery - or so it was until I came across the first of Christopher Logue’s ‘adaptions’ of the Iliad. Patrocleia is the name traditionally given to Book XVI of the Iliad, which deals with the death of the Greek hero Patroclus, young lover of the ur-hero, Achilles. Achilles has been sulking in his tent following a squalid dispute with the expedition leader, King Agamemnon, over a division of spoils; while he sulks, the Greeks are getting slaughtered by the Trojans. Eventually, he gives in to the pleas of none other than Odysseus. With a view to heartening the troops, he agrees to send his lover into battle wearing the famous and instantly recognizable armor of Achilles. Much death ensues.

Logue (1926-2011) was a middle-ranking British poet and appropriately, it seems to me, a lifelong pacifist briefly imprisoned in 1961 for his part in the London anti-war movement. ^[3] The literary work by which he will above all be remembered is his rendering of the Iliad, book by book from 1963 until his death; originally published by a variety of small presses, the books were eventually brought together in one volume under the title War Music. ^[4] The Times Literary Supplement was to opine that “Logue’s Homer is likely to endure as one of the great long poems of the twentieth century”, and I’m inclined to agree with that judgement.

Great texts are invariably translated anew for each generation, almost inevitably consigning earlier versions to slow oblivion. But Logue’s version of the Iliad will survive, precisely because it is not a translation, but a radical reimagining which nevertheless hues very close to the original in plot, content and above all in spirit. He takes enormous liberties; he invents new names for minor protagonists, and the heroes no longer orate (or rarely), but talk almost like modern officers. Here is Achilles delivering a fateful warning to Patroclus as he sets off for battle:

And one more thing before you go.
          Don’t overreach yourself, Patroclus.
Without me you are something, but not much.
Let Hector be. He’s mine – God willing -
In any case he’d make a meal of you.
And I don’t want you killed, you hear?
But neither do I want to see you shining
At my expense. So, here’s my order.
No matter how, how much, how often or how easily you win,
Once you have forced the Trojans back, you stop. That’s clear?

Logue also breaks up the action with short, apparently irrelevant interpolations reflecting other times and situations, but which end up of amplifying and illuminating the subsequent action. This comes as Patroclus prepares to move out with his men:

Imagine wolves: an hour ago the pack
Smelt out a stag and tore it into shreds.
Now they have snuffled through its corpse
They want a drink to wash the curry down; so,
they sniff out a pool and loll their long
Thin, sharp-pointed tongues in it; and as they lap
Little crimson billows drift off their chops,
Spreading through the water like red smoke.

     Likewise the Myrmidons as they stood for Patroclus,
While Achilles moved along their ranks; here,
Tightening a shoulder strap; there dressing a sword.

Patroclus succeeds in defeating the Trojan attack on the Greek ships, but succumbs to the hubris Achilles warned him of.

          Nothing was left of Hector’s raid except
Loose smoke-swathes drifting over the Aegean like dark hair,
And the ditch stained perfect crimson where
Some outraged god, five miles tall, had stamped on glass.

     Movement in the air. Gulls lift.
Sideslip. Land again. No more.
Mindless of everything Achilles said
          Patroclus went for Troy.

And then, before Patroclus meets his fate, Homer sings of the death of Sarpedon, Prince of Lydia, first and most faithful of Troy’s allies, in this most extended of his battle scenes.

Under the white sun, back and forth
Across a disk of yellow earth, midway
Between the ditch and the closed stone capital,
The heroes fought like Pharaoh’s bare-necked hens
Wrangling over carrion in mid air.

         Likewise the human champions,
Until Patroclus’ spear nosed past Sarpedon’s busy heart
And the ground sense in his body seeped away.

He fell as a tree falls – oak, say or pine -
Slowly at first and then, with the bright
Commercial axes at its heart,
The tall hurt trunk lies down
Among its leaves, resentfully.

Seeing Hector approach to pillage the corpse, Glaucus, Sarpedon’s second-in-command, appeals to Apollo for help:

Lord, put my pain to sleep,
And grant me strength enough to keep
Swords flickering across
Sarpedon’s ruined body
Until you lead the Sun away.

          And Apollo, Mousegod, Lord of the Morning, He
Whose face is brighter than a thousand suns,
Mollified his wound with precious ointment,
And let delight like flame rise through his loins,
And he did more, for, as Glaucus ran to Hector,
Aeneas, the rest, Apollo called:
          “Sun, stand thou still over Ilium,
And guard Sarpedon’s body till their blades
Move over it like grasses over stone.”

          Air into azure steel.
The daylight stiffens to translucent horn.
          And through it,
Falling,
          One sun’s cord
That opened out into
A radiant cone around Sarpedon’s body
And him inside it lying
Like a waxen god asleep on his outstretched hand.

The sequence of events in Logue’s rendition has followed the Homeric original closely, but he interpolates two entirely original texts: the fallen tree simile, and the wonderful details of Apollo’s Joshua-like halting of the sun: “Sun, stand thou still over Ilium”. In addition, his is the inspired image of blades moving across Sarpedon’s body “like grasses over stone.”

And still the battle rages:

Inside the yellow spiral
The enemies jammed cheek to cheek,
And both, because they could do nothing else,
Looked up and thought they saw the moon -
Was it so long? – and wondered to themselves,
“Who will be left to praise us if we win?
And if we lose, who will there be to bury us?”
Yet it was not the moon they saw through dust,
But the sun
Turning its back upon a day longer than autumn.

Eventually, after hours of grim fighting and many deaths, the Greeks overcome Glaucus’ Lydians and the body of Sarpedon is stripped of its gear, a trophy to be displayed upon Patroclus’ ship. And the singer, who is Omiros, and is also Logue, comments:

It is true men are clever.
But the least of gods is cleverer than their best.
          And it was here, before God’s hands
(Moons poised either side of the world’s agate)
You overreached yourself, Patroclus.
Not only God was out that day but Lord Apollo.
“You know he loves the Trojans. So,
No matter how, how much, how often, or how easily you win,
Once you have forced them back, you stop.”
Remember it, Patroclus? Or was it years ago
Achilles cautioned you outside his tent?
Remembering or not you stripped Sarpedon’s gear,
That glittered like the sea’s far edge at dawn,
Ordered your borrowed Myrmidons to drag him off
And went for Troy alone.

It is now too late for the hero, as the hammer blows of Achilles’ admonitory warnings echo again like an ominous Wagnerian theme:

         Three times Patroclus climbed Troy’s wall.
Three times his fingers scraped the parapet.
Three times and every time he tried it on
The smiling Mousegod flicked him back.
But when he came a fourth, last time,
The smile was gone.
          Instead, from parapet to plain to beach-head, on,
Across the rucked, sunlit Aegean, the Mousegod’s voice -
Loud as ten thousand crying together -
          Cried
“Greek,
   Get back where you belong!”
          So loud
Even the Yellow Judges passing sentence
Half of the world away, paused -

“Get back where you belong!
   Troy will fall in God’s good time,
   But not to you!”
          Banner behind slatted banner,
Blue overwhelming gold, gold over blue,
It was Patroclus’ turn to run
Wide-armed, staring into the fight, and desperate
To hide (to blind that voice) to hide
Behind the moving blades.

Till at the end, in a hysterical frenzy to escape Apollo’s anger, head ringing with his roar, reduced to pure killing machine, Patroclus senses the presence of the god at his back...

           Patroclus broke among the Trojans.
A set of jealous bones covered with flesh
Finished with bronze, dipped in blood,
And the whole being inspired by ferocity.

- Kill them!
My sweet Patroclus

- Kill them!

As many as you can
          For
Coming behind you in the dusk you felt
-- What was it? – felt the darkness part and then

Apollo!

Who had been patient with you,
Struck.

But that inexorable “struck” is not quite the end, for the very last word is bleaker still, spoken by a doomed Hector as he finishes off the dying Greek:

“Big mouth,
Remember it took three of you to kill me.
A god, a boy, and last of all, a hero!
          I can hear Death
Calling my name and yet,
Somehow it sounds like ‘Hector’
          And when I close my eyes
I see Achilles’ face with Death’s voice coming out of it.”

         Saying these things Patroclus died.
And as his soul went through the sand like water,
Hector withdrew his spear and said
          “Perhaps.”