The lyre represents innocence, which Achilles and Patroclus must eventually cast aside. When Patroclus is exiled from his kingdom to Phthia, his father sends a lyre as payment, which the young prince Achilles takes. This particular lyre belonged to Patroclus’s mother and was part of her dowry; she was intellectually disabled and would often listen to visiting bards play the instrument, not understanding the sounds but appreciating their beauty instinctually. When Achilles, a skilled musician, first encounters the lyre, he’s similarly innocent. But Patroclus isn’t: he’s already killed a young boy, which is what led to his exile. The lyre’s change of ownership makes sense, then: Achilles’s innocence and carefree nature is what allows him to take pleasure in playing the instrument. Patroclus describes Achilles’s use of the lyre as “pure,” which might be the only pure thing about him, as he’s eventually destined to be Greece’s best warrior. But he’s still childlike when he plays the lyre, and that bloody future seems a long way off.
When Achilles leaves to train with Chiron, Patroclus secretly follows him—but he hesitates before doing so, solely because running away would mean leaving the lyre. His decision to go anyway suggests that he’s willing to abandon the instrument—and the comfort of childlike innocence that it represents—if it means staying with Achilles. Achilles, however, took the lyre when he left, and he jokes that he now knows how to make Patroclus follow him anywhere: all he has to do is hold onto the lyre. But when Achilles leaves for Scyros, he leaves the lyre in Phthia, and he later says that he wishes they had it. Before Achilles and Patroclus leave for Troy, Achilles receives an ash spear that Chiron fashioned for him. Patroclus notes that it resembles a lyre, though the two objects are, of course, vastly different. The resemblance suggests that Achilles’s innocence has transformed into something much darker—he will, after all, use the spear to kill enemy soldiers in the Trojan War. Furthermore, it confirms that Patroclus never followed him for his innocence. Patroclus understands that Achilles will change, and he accepts it—and this acceptance is, perhaps, the clearest loss of innocence for them both.
The Lyre Quotes in The Song of Achilles
It was my mother's lyre, the one my father had sent as part of my price.
Achilles plucked a string. The note rose warm and resonant, sweetly pure. My mother had always pulled her chair close to the bards when they came, so close my father would scowl and the servants would whisper. I remembered, suddenly, the dark gleam of her eyes in the firelight as she watched the bard's hands. The look on her face was like thirst.
[…]
His fingers touched the strings, and all my thoughts were displaced. The sound was pure and sweet as water, bright as lemons. It was like no music I had ever heard before. It had warmth as a fire does, a texture and weight like polished ivory. It buoyed and soothed at once.
Finally, last of all: a long spear, ash sapling peeled of bark and polished until it glowed like gray flame. From Chiron, Peleus said, handing it to his son. We bent over it, our fingers trailing its surface as if to catch the centaur's lingering presence. Such a fine gift would have taken weeks of Chiron's deft shaping; he must have begun it almost the day that we left. Did he know, or only guess at Achilles' destiny? As he lay alone in his rose-colored cave, had some glimmer of prophecy come to him? Perhaps he simply assumed: a bitterness of habit, of boy after boy trained for music and medicine, and unleashed for murder.
Yet this beautiful spear had been fashioned not in bitterness, but love. Its shape would fit no one's hand but Achilles', and its heft could suit no one's strength but his. And though the point was keen and deadly, the wood itself slipped under our fingers like the slender oiled strut of a lyre.
The Lyre Symbol Timeline in The Song of Achilles
