The Iliad (a song about Ilium, or Troy) along with its companion epic the Odyssey form the foundation of ancient Greek culture and address the extremes of human experience through war and peace. Both epics are primary, or oral, epics that draw on an enormous wealth of cultural stories in unified structures that we attribute to the poet Homer, in eighth century B.C.E. The epics are written in an unsentimental style: the Iliad depicts the ambivalence of war in meticulously accurate details. Both the nightmare of war and its excitement find expression in the Iliad, just as the Odyssey’s pages quest for a home, or a peace that seems hard-won after the devastation of war.

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Book 16 of the Iliad epitomizes the height of the chaotic struggle between the Achaeans and the Trojans as each try desperately to gain the upper hand. Lost in the rage of battle and spurred on by Zeus, Patroclus gains the upper hand after killing Sarpedon, the adopted son of Troy, yet only to be taken down by Apollo, then killed by Hector. In this battle, there is a contention between desire and fate, the gods’ and man’s struggle for they want placed beside that of inexorable fate. Here, Patroclus is the warrior fighting beyond his fate, not great enough to level the walls of Troy, but just a soldier who, like many young men, is fated to die outside the walls of Ilium.

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The opening of Gilgamesh states that it is an old story “About a man who loved and lost a friend to death.” This statement also holds true for the Iliad; friendship and its loss represent both a motivating force and an important source for a happy life in both epics. Both Achilles and Gilgamesh lose their respective friends, Patroclus and Enkidu, through actions that they themselves precipitated. And once the heroes lose their soul mates they are victims of despair which cannot be alleviated by other distractions, even women.

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