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2026-05-25 · Bonus｜The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller — A Review (English) · The Long View

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  Welcome to The Long View. This is a special English language bonus episode. Today, one book,
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  Madeline Miller's first novel, The Song of Achilles, published in 2011. A retelling of
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  the Iliad from the point of view of Patroclus, Achilles' closest companion and lover.
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  I want to spend this episode doing three things. Placing. The book. Walking through what's
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  poetically interesting about how it's written. And then sitting with five or six of its most
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  significant moments. Roughly fifteen minutes. Let's begin. First. The book itself. Madeline
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  Miller is a classicist by training. A master's degree in classics. Years teaching Latin and
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  Greek to high school students. The Song of Achilles took her about ten years to write.
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  She threw out an entire first draft, several years of work, when she realized the prose wasn't doing
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  what she needed it to do. The novel was published by Bloomsbury in 2011, and the following year it
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  won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the prize that has since become the Women's Prize for Fiction.
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  For about a decade after that, it had a respectable but quiet literary life. And then, somewhere
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  around 2020 and 2021, it became one of the defining novels of what we now call book talk,
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  the literary corner of TikTok. A book originally published in 2011 spent week after week on the
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  New York Times bestseller list nearly a decade later, mostly because young readers were filming
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  themselves. Crying at the ending. That second life is part of the book's identity now. Before we go
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  further, one thing to clear up. The idea that Patroclus and Achilles were lovers is not Miller's
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  invention. That reading goes all the way back to antiquity itself. The playwright Aeschylus wrote a
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  now-lost tragedy called Myrmidons, in which the two are explicitly portrayed as lovers.
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  In Plato's Symposium, Phaedrus argues at length about whether Patroclus or Achilles was the elder,
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  taking their romantic relationship as a given. So Miller is not introducing something foreign
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  to the tradition. She is restoring a reading that the tradition itself has held in tension
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  with the heroic one for two and a half thousand years. Let me give you the shape of the story,
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  very briefly. Patroclus is a small, awkward, unloved prince, exiled from his father's court
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  at the age of nine after accidentally killing another nobleman's son. He is sent to Phythia,
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  the kingdom of King Peleus, where he meets Peleus's son Achilles, already, at nine years old,
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  the best of his generation, the son of the sea goddess Thetis. The two boys become inseparable.
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  They are sent together to Mount Pelion to be taught by the centaur Chiron, medicine, music,
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  hunting, the art of healing. They become lovers in the rose quartz cave on the mountainside.
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  Then the war comes, Helen is taken to Troy, Achilles is bound by oath, and bound by a
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  prophecy that promises him the greatest glory of any Greek if he goes, and an early death if he
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  does. He goes, Patroclus follows. After nine years of siege, Achilles quarrels with Agamemnon,
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  withdraws from battle, and the Greek army begins to lose badly. Patroclus, unable to watch any
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  longer, puts on Achilles' armor and goes out to rally the Myrmidons. He is killed by Hector.
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  Achilles, undone by grief, kills Hector, drags his body around the walls of Troy, and is himself
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  killed soon after by an arrow from Paris guided by the god Apollo. The novel ends not at Achilles'
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  death, but past it, with the question of whether Patroclus' name will be inscribed on the shared
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  tomb, or whether he will be forgotten. Now, the poetic craft, which is what I most want to talk
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  about, because The Song of Achilles is, first and last, a book about how a sentence sounds.
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  Miller's prose has a particular texture, and it is worth describing. It is sensory in a way that
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  very few contemporary novels are. The book is full of figs, of honey, of olive oil warmed in
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  the sun, of bronze and salt, and the smell of horses. The vocabulary is deliberately restricted.
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  She uses ordinary words, not the kind of decorative language people think Homeric
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  prose should look like. The effect is not archaic. The effect is closer to a clear stream,
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  small words, slow current, occasional flashes of something gold on the bottom.
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  Speaking of gold, Achilles is gold. Throughout the novel, every time Achilles enters a scene,
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  Miller reaches for the word gold, or for the word light, or for the color of honey,
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  or the color of the sun on water. It is one of the most consistent imagistic decisions in the book.
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  Patroclus, by contrast, is described very rarely. When he is, the words are smaller, darker,
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  more interior. The asymmetry is the point. We see Achilles the way Patroclus sees him.
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  We see Patroclus the way Patroclus barely sees himself.
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  About Homer. Miller is a classicist, and she resists the most obvious temptations.
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  She does not litter her prose with the famous Homeric epithets. There is very little swift-footed
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  Achilles, very little rosy-fingered Don. What she does instead is more interesting. She borrows
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  Homer's rhythm. She borrows the way Homer's sentences pause for a beat before delivering
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  an emotional weight. She compresses the epic line into something that feels modern,
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  but carries an old gravity. You feel the Iliad behind the prose without ever being told you are
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  reading the Iliad. There is one structural device that I think is the book's quietest,
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  most beautiful decision. The narrator, Patroclus, is dead. We do not know this at first. We learn
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  it as the book continues. Sentences begin to drift into a tense that is neither past nor present.
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  A description of events as if they are happening now, to a speaker who already knows the end.
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  By the final third of the book, it is clear that Patroclus is narrating from somewhere beyond his
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  own death, somewhere in the long pause between dying and being remembered. That structural
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  choice does two things. It gives every scene a tenderness, a sense that the speaker is recovering
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  a moment he has already lost. And it sets up the final pages, which are about whether the dead are
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  remembered. The narrator who has been speaking to us the whole time turns out to be a voice asking,
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  Can you hear me? The liar, one more recurring object worth noticing. Chiron teaches both boys
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  music in the cave on Peleon. Achilles plays the liar, and his playing is described over and over
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  again as the one form of grace he has that is not violence. Music is what Achilles offers Patroclus
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  that no other Greek hero has to give. In the final third of the book, when Patroclus picks
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  up the liar after a long absence, the gesture carries the weight of everything they have lost.
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  Now, significant moments. The first is the first sight. Patroclus, newly exiled, nine years old,
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  brought into Peleus's throne room. He sees a small boy juggling figs, throwing them higher and higher
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  into the air without dropping one. The boy is gold. Patroclus does not yet know the boy is Achilles.
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  The scene is a few sentences long. It is the entire novel in miniature. Light, suit, a body
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  that does the impossible easily, and a watcher whose life will be defined by what he is watching.
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  The second is the cave on Mount Peleon. Chiron's home, half cave, half garden. The boys spend years
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  there learning. The cave is where Patroclus discovers he is in love. Miller writes the
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  first kiss with extraordinary restraint. It is a single, short paragraph. The sentences before are
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  dense. The sentences during are airy. The sentences after expand into a kind of held breath.
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  The whole pivot of the novel is in three lines. The third is Skyros. Achilles has been hidden by
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  his mother on the island of Skyros, disguised as a girl among the daughters of King Lycomedes,
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  a desperate attempt by Thetis to keep her son out of the war and away from the prophecy of his death.
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  While there, Achilles sleeps with one of the princesses, Didamia, and fathers a son,
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  Pyrrhus, whom we will meet again as a much darker figure later in the myth cycle.
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  Odysseus finds Achilles by tricking him into reaching for a sword hidden among women's goods.
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  Achilles must choose, to come to Troy and be the greatest of the Greeks and die young,
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  or to stay home and live a long obscure life. He chooses Troy. Patroclus chooses Achilles.
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  The choice is made in two pages, and it shadows everything that follows.
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  The fourth is the breach with Agamemnon over the captive woman Briseis. Agamemnon takes Briseis
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  from Achilles to punish him. Achilles withdraws from the war. This is the central event of the
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  Iliad. Miller's version of it does something the original does not. It places Patroclus's moral
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  conscience at the center. Patroclus is the only character in the book who treats the captured
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  women as people. He learns their names. He protects Briseis. The moral weight of the novel
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  rests on his refusal to look away. This is one of Miller's most consequential interventions in
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  the source material, to ask the Iliad, very gently, about the women. The fifth is the moment
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  Patroclus puts on Achilles' armor. It is calculated. He knows the Trojans will believe
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  him to be Achilles. He knows the sight of that armor will rally the Greeks. He has been a healer
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  his whole life. A man who has spent the war tending wounded soldiers in a tent behind the
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  lines. Now he picks up the weapons of a man he loves and walks out to die in his name. The irony
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  is total. The healer becomes the warrior. The lover impersonates the beloved. The man who has
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  spent the novel watching now becomes the one who is watched and killed. The sixth is the funeral.
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  Achilles, having killed Hector and dragged his body around the walls of Troy in the most famous
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  scene in the Iliad, asks for one thing before his own death. That when he dies, his bones be
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  mixed with Patroclus's. No separation. The same urn. And in the final pages of the book, Thetis,
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  the sea goddess, the mother who has despised Patroclus from the moment she first saw him,
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  who has tried for the whole novel to keep her son from loving him, Thetis is the one who finally
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  inscribes Patroclus's name on the tomb beside Acheres. The book closes on the granting of
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  memory. The dead narrator, who has been waiting the whole novel, is finally named. I want to
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  close with one larger thought. The Iliad is a poem about glory. Klaos, the Greek word for the
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  imperishable fame a warrior earns by dying well. In Homer, Klaos is the highest good. The whole
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  machinery of the epic is built to celebrate it. What Miller does in the Song of Achilles is to
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  take that machinery and tilt it very slightly so that the light falls in a different direction.
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  Glory is still there. The battles are still there. The gods are still there. But the novel argues
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  sentence by sentence that love and memory are the things that actually survive. The Iliad is
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  the Song of Achilles. The Song of Achilles is the song of the man who loved Achilles,
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  which turns out in Miller's hands to be the same song heard from the other side.
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  That is why, I think, this book broke through to a generation of readers, most of whom have
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  never read Homer. Reading it, you feel like you have been told a secret. That beneath every grand
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  story of war and honor, there is a private story of two boys on a hillside, learning music from a
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  centaur, eating figs in the sun. Miller's gift is that she makes you believe both stories are
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  equally true. The grand and the private, the kleos and the kiss. That's the episode. Thank
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  you for listening to this special English bonus of The Long View. We'll be back on Mandarin next
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  time, with the news.