The Song of Achilles is a love story, following the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus from childhood to adulthood. While their bond is an example of romantic love, various forms of platonic love also become important as the story progresses. But The Song of Achilles is also a war story, tracking the experiences of the Greek army fighting in the Trojan War. As a result, love and war intermix—in fact, the novel at first seems to imply that love causes and justifies violence, and that violence is more powerful than love. However, characters’ fates eventually depend on their ability or inability to love, and those who are capable of love are much better off. In this way, the book suggests that real love is a redemptive force; while it sometimes justifies violence, it also provides an alternative.
On the surface, it seems that love sanctions violence—or, at the very least, that it isn’t strong enough to overcome violence. Notably, the Trojan War itself is founded on a love story: the Trojan prince Paris runs away with Helen, Menelaus’s wife. Menelaus and his brother, Agamemnon, then assemble an army to retrieve her. At the start of the novel, Helen’s suitors—including Patroclus—all take a blood oath to defend her and her husband, and Patroclus notes that the scene feels like a fictional story. Later, Patroclus understands that the Greeks would have invaded Troy regardless of Helen; the abduction merely provided a convenient reason to do so, and the oath ensured an army. In this way, love justified an inevitable war: the reason why taking the oath felt like fiction to Patroclus is because, in a way, it actually was. Then, after Menelaus announces that he’ll sail to Troy, the gods give Achilles a choice: either he can participate in the war, become famous, and die in Troy, or he can stay in Greece and live in obscurity. In other words, he can choose between a short, violent life or a long life with Patroclus. Achilles knows that he’s Greece’s best fighter (someone eventually refers to him as a human “weapon”). Patroclus tells him that they would remain together if he stayed—but he knows that for Achilles, “it was not enough,” and Achilles decides to fight in the Trojan War. This choice implies that perhaps love isn’t a strong enough force to overcome violence and war.
However, characters who are unable to love wind up doomed in one way or another. Before the Greek army sails to Troy, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, the priestess Iphigenia, against her will to appease the goddess Artemis. Achilles is horrified by the ritual, which leads him to distrust Agamemnon to the point that he eventually refuses to fight for Agamemnon, dooming thousands of Greeks. Achilles’s decision ruins his own reputation, but also Agamemnon’s: Agamemnon prizes control, but he’s left without any. His willingness to sacrifice his daughter rather than spare her out of love leads to his own humiliation as well as his army’s plight. Achilles’s son, Pyrrhus, is similarly unable to love or act on love: he was taken from his mother, Deidameia, as a child and raised by Thetis, Achilles’s goddess mother. Achilles’s final conversation with his mother sets up an explicit contrast between father and son: both of them are strong and divinely predestined to be warriors, but Thetis wishes that she hadn’t allowed Achilles to be raised by humans, because it softened him. But the emotional hardness and cruelty that Thetis prizes in Pyrrhus proves fatal: Agamemnon’s son eventually kills him because he stole his wife and assaulted her. Thus, Pyrrhus’s inability to show others love or mercy ensures his early death.
In contrast, other characters’ capacities for love redeem them. Achilles’s ability to love proves to be his only redeemable quality after endless violence. When Patroclus dies, Achilles goes on a rampage, killing Patroclus’s murderer, Hector; he takes Hector’s body, planning to keep it away from Hector’s family (if he does so, Hector’s soul will never find peace). Hector’s father, Priam, begs him to reconsider, connecting with him via their shared grief—and Achilles decides to return Hector’s body, a rare act of mercy. His ability to love sets him apart from a character like Pyrrhus, who wouldn’t understand Priam’s love for Hector. Achilles dies soon after, meaning that his kindness was one of his final acts—it’s what readers are meant to remember him by. Patroclus’s ability to love, meanwhile, indirectly saves the Greek army. When Achilles refuses to fight, Patroclus wears Achilles’s armor into battle, planning to save his lover’s reputation and galvanize the army at the same time. He does so in part because he loves Achilles and wants him to be remembered kindly; he also cares about his kinsmen and doesn’t want anyone else to die. Patroclus’s plan leads to his own death, but it works—his love, both romantic and fraternal, briefly spares the army.
Eventually, the love between Achilles and Patroclus saves their souls. Both men are dead at the end of the novel, ashes intermingled. But because Pyrrhus ensures that their grave only references Achilles, Achilles’s soul rests in the underworld, while Patroclus’s is adrift. Thetis eventually visits their burial ground, and Patroclus’s spirit begins telling her about Achilles’s good deeds. Thetis always hated Patroclus, believing him unworthy of her son—but as with Achilles and Priam, their shared grief connects them. Thetis ends up marking Patroclus’s grave herself, proving both that she truly loved Achilles, and that the love between Patroclus and Achilles (exemplified by the anecdote of Achilles’s kindness to Priam) was strong enough to move her. Patroclus and Achilles are spared a lonely afterlife; their love saved each other and redeemed Thetis, who observed it. The novel ends with the implication that Achilles and Patroclus find each other after death. Their story, then, is fundamentally a love story, though violence underlies it—love brings them peace, which violence stole away. It is, in the end, a redemptive force.
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Love, Violence, and Redemption 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.
His movements were so precise I could almost see the men he fought, ten, twenty of them, advancing on all sides. He leapt, scything his spear, even as his other hand snatched the sword from its sheath. He swung out with them both, moving like liquid, like a fish through the waves.
He stopped, suddenly. I could hear his breaths, only a little louder than usual, in the still afternoon air.
"Who trained you?" I asked. I did not know what else to say.
"My father, a little."
A little. I felt almost frightened. "No one else?"
"No."
I stepped forward. "Fight me."
He made a sound almost like a laugh. “No. Of course not."
"Fight me." I felt in a trance. He had been trained, a little, by his father. The rest was—what? Divine? This was more of the gods than I had ever seen in my life.
"Men will hear of your skill, and they will wish for you to fight their wars." He paused. "What will you answer?"
"I do not know," Achilles said.
"That is an answer for now. It will not be good enough later," Chiron said.
[…]
"What about me?" I asked.
Chiron's dark eyes moved to rest on mine. "You will never gain fame from your fighting. Is this surprising to you?"
His tone was matter-of-fact, and somehow that eased the sting of it.
"No," I said truthfully.
"Yet it is not beyond you to be a competent soldier. Do you wish to learn this?"
I thought of the boy's dulled eyes, how quickly his blood had soaked the ground. I thought of Achilles, the greatest warrior of his generation. I thought of Thetis who would take him from me, if she could.
"No," I said.
His eyes opened. "Name one hero who was happy."
I considered. Heracles went mad and killed his family; Theseus lost his bride and father; Jason's children and new wife were murdered by his old; Bellerophon killed the Chimera but was crippled by the fall from Pegasus' back.
"You can't." He was sitting up now, leaning forward.
"I can't."
"I know. They never let you be famous and happy." He lifted an eyebrow. "I'll tell you a secret."
"Tell me." I loved it when he was like this.
"I'm going to be the first." He took my palm and held it to his. "Swear it."
"Why me?"
"Because you're the reason. Swear it."
"I swear it," I said, lost in the high color of his cheeks, the flame in his eyes.
"I swear it," he echoed.
We sat like that a moment, hands touching. He grinned. "I feel like I could eat the world raw."
"I do not think I could bear it," he said, at last. His eyes were closed, as if against horrors. I knew he spoke not of his death, but of the nightmare Odysseus had spun, the loss of his brilliance, the withering of his grace. I had seen the joy he took in his own skill, the roaring vitality that was always just beneath the surface. Who was he if not miraculous and radiant? Who was he if not destined for fame?
"I would not care," I said. The words scrabbled from my mouth. "Whatever you became. It would not matter to me. We would be together."
"I know," he said quietly, but did not look at me.
He knew, but it was not enough.
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.
He leaned forward in his chair. “May I give you some advice? If you are truly his friend, you will help him leave this soft heart behind. He's going to Troy to kill men, not rescue them.” His dark eyes held me like swift-running current. “He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.”
The words drove breath from me, left me stuttering. “He is not—”
“But he is. The best the gods have ever made. And it is time he knew it, and you did too. If you hear nothing else I say, hear that. I do not say it in malice.”
I listened to every word, imagining it was a story only. As if it were dark figures on an urn he spoke of instead of men […] I learned to sleep through the day so that I would not be tired when he returned; he always needed to talk then, to tell me down to the last detail about the faces and the wounds and the movements of men. And I wanted to be able to listen, to digest the bloody images, to paint them flat and unremarkable onto the vase of posterity. To release him from it and make him Achilles again.
“Her safety for my honor. Are you happy with your trade?”
“There is no honor in betraying your friends.”
“It is strange,” he says, “that you would speak against betrayal.”
There is more pain in those words, almost, than I can bear. I force myself to think of Briseis. “It was the only way.”
“You chose her,” he says. “Over me.”
"Over your pride."
[…]
“My life is my reputation,” he says. His breath sounds ragged. “It is all I have. I will not live much longer. Memory is all I can hope for.” He swallows, thickly. “You know this. And would you let Agamemnon destroy it? Would you help him take it from me?”
“I would not,” I say. “But I would have the memory be worthy of the man. I would have you be yourself, not some tyrant remembered for his cruelty.”
It is strange how well she fits there. How easily I touch my lips to her hair, soft and smelling of lavender. She sighs a little, nestles closer. Almost, I can imagine that this is my life, held in the sweet circle of her arms. I would marry her, and we would have a child.
Perhaps if I had never known Achilles.
[…]
She draws down the blanket, releasing me into the air. She cups my face in her hands. “Be careful tomorrow,” she says. “Best of men. Best of the Myrmidons.”
The thought of Troy's fall pierces me with vicious pleasure. They deserve to lose their city. It is their fault, all of it. We have lost ten years, and so many men, and Achilles will die, because of them. No more.
[…]
I will crack their uncrackable city, and capture Helen, the precious gold yolk within. I imagine dragging her out under my arm, dumping her before Menelaus. Done. No more men will have to die for her vanity.
[… ]
I am delirious, fevered with my dream of Helen captive in my arms. The stones are like dark waters that flow ceaselessly over something I have dropped, that I want back. I forget about the god, why I have fallen, why my feet stick in the same crevices I have already climbed. Perhaps this is all I do, I think, demented—climb walls and fall from them.
He lifts his ashen spear.
No, I beg him. It is his own death he holds, his own blood that he will spill.
[…]
Hector's eyes are wide, but he will run no longer. He says, “Grant me this. Give my body to my family, when you have killed me.”
Achilles makes a sound like choking. “There are no bargains between lions and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.”
Her skin is whiter than I have ever seen it. “Do not be a fool. It is only my power that—”
“What does it matter?” He cuts her off, snarling. "He is dead. Can your power bring him back?”
“No," she says. "Nothing can.”
He stands. “Do you think I cannot see your rejoicing? I know how you hated him. You have always hated him! If you had not gone to Zeus, he would be alive!”
“He is a mortal,” she says. “And mortals die.”
“I am a mortal!” he screams. “What good is godhead, if it cannot do this? What good are you?”
“I know you are mortal,” she says. She places each cold word as a tile in a mosaic. “I know it better than anyone. I left you too long on Pelion. It has ruined you.”
“I am sorry for your loss,” Priam says. “And sorry that it was my son who took him from you. Yet I beg you to have mercy. In grief, men must help each other, though they are enemies.”
[…]
Priam's voice is gentle. “It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after.”
“No,” Achilles whispers.
Nothing moves in the tent; time does not seem to pass. Then Achilles stands. “It is close to dawn, and I do not want you to be in danger as you travel home. I will have my servants prepare your son's body.”
“Is it right that my father's fame should be diminished? Tainted by a commoner?”
“Patroclus was no commoner. He was born a prince and exiled. He served bravely in our army, and many men admired him. He killed Sarpedon, second only to Hector.”
“In my father's armor. With my father's fame. He has none of his own.”
Odysseus inclines his head. “True. But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another.” He spread his broad hands. “We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?” He smiles. “Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.”
[…]
Odysseus looks at the young man's implacable face. “I have done my best,” he says. “Let it be remembered I tried.”
I remember.
Others stand at the base to look at the scenes of his life carved on the stone. They are a little hastily done, but clear enough. Achilles killing Memnon, killing Hector, killing Penthesilea. Nothing but death. This is how Pyrrhus’ tomb might look. Is this how he will be remembered?
[…]
You said that Chiron ruined him. You are a goddess, and cold, and know nothing. You are the one who ruined him. Look at how he will be remembered now. Killing Hector, killing Troilus. For things he did cruelly in his grief.
Her face is like stone itself. It does not move. The days rise and fall.
Perhaps such things pass for virtue among the gods. But how is there glory in taking a life? We die so easily. Would you make him another Pyrrhus? Let the stories of him be something more.
"What more?" she says.
For once I am not afraid. What else can she do to me?
Returning Hector's body to Priam, I say. That should be remembered.
