The relationship between Patroclus and Achilles is arguably the one in Iliad described in the most intensely emotional terms. Discuss Patroclus both as a character (consider his reputation with the other Greeks) and as the object of Achilles’s love, the source of his guilt, the reason for his grief (remember that Achilles’s name is etymologically linked to grief), and the impetus for his final decision.
The description of the shield Hephaestus makes for Achilles is perhaps the most famous example of ekphrasis — the literary description of a visual work of art — in literature, but it strikes many readers as odd. First, it interrupts the narrative. Also, the description not only seems almost impossibly detailed, but also hardly seems to be of still images. Things are happening on the shield, as if it not only contains decorated images but the actual characters and events that those images depict. Why does Homer do this? What function does this section of the work serve for the reader (or audience)?
As I have mentioned, people think of The Iliad as the story of the Trojan War, but it deals with only a few weeks of that war, which supposedly lasted ten years. The plot begins with Achilles withdrawing from the war. The dramatic climax is his decision, triggered by Patroclus’s death, to put aside his conflict with Agamemnon and rejoin the war, even though he knows it will mean his own death. Everything after that is anti-climax (though the emotional climax or catharsis is yet to come). Consider Iliad as a tragedy: a literary work that has human suffering as its subject and that gives pleasure to the audience through the depiction of that suffering in an individual character. Does Achilles qualify as a tragic character or not?