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| Troops on their way to attack Troy |
MADELINE MILLER'S APPROACH TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY IN THE SONG OF ACHILLES.
My Short Review of The Song of Achilles-
The Song of Achilles |A novel by Madeline Miller
The Song of Achilles retells the story of the Greek demigod, Achilles. It is told by the much-neglected yet very significant character Patroclus. The novel portrays Achilles, who is half human & half god as a creature full of majestic glamour in keeping with his divinity from his mother Thetis. Yet Madeline depicts him as a human being full of softer human emotions, compassion, friendship & genuine comradeship with his childhood friend Patroclus, an exiled prince.
Both Patroclus & Achilles got Centaur training before joining the Trojan War. Achilles deemed the Great Trojan War not quite fascinating due to its petty cause, i.e., recovering Helen, who was abducted by Paris. As the prophecy had told Hector would be killed by Achilles & then he would be killed by someone & die in the war.
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| Centaur |
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| Centaur |
It is interesting that, throughout the novel, Achilles wonders why would he kill Hector who is a nice person; who had done him no harm. As the story moves forward a slave Trojan girl Brises is claimed by Achilles & all three share a bond of humanity while they all stay in their war camps. She quickly learned Greek & managed to groom other slave girls.
The story revealed that Patroclus had a deep concern for saving his comrades & he simulates Achilles attacking Troy when Achilles left the war due to a conflict with Agamemnon. While, both the warriors Achilles & Agamemnon, were just boosting their ego preferring over their troop's safety.
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Spardeon Son of Zeus
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Patroclus had attacked Troy & he killed Zeus's son, Sarpedon, the king of Lycia. God Apollo restrained Patroclus from further dismantling the Troy army & castle. Hector kills Patroclus.
Achilles could not live without taking revenge for his friend’s murder. In this way comes his fate too. Achilles killed Hector & many other notable enemies. Later, he is killed by Paris.
Mixing Myth with Fantasy
What makes this classical Greek myth a fascinating story for 20th-century readers is the deft handling by Madeline Miller, who has used her knowledge of Greek & Latin literature with a touch of imagination & genius, to bestow it an element of universality; expressing a story having demi-gods as leading characters she makes it relevant to contemporary readers.
Theme of War
The theme of war is handled with a surety of touch to bring out the above-human expertise & capability of Achilles yet it foregrounds the need to acknowledge the trivial nature of the cause behind such bloodshed & havoc in this particular war. The novel also implies the idea that war in any era will always retain this pettiness of trivial motivations behind killing humanity. What motivates men to participate in wars for the sake of the agendas of a few powerful people is the greed of monetary welfare, lust, or its least trivial & most dangerous cause is the human ego gone wild to kill anyone; who does not belong to them.
Theme of Parenting
The way Peleus, had brought up Achilles as a human being, made him quite expressive in music & nurtured his soft skills along with his training as a warrior. His divinity has bestowed upon him the qualities of super-human capability as a warrior. He had proved to be the best warrior among the mortals, with his precision in targeting his enemy & performing miraculously on the battlefield.
His leadership quality & compassion together with his superb public speaking further hurt Agamemnon's pride as a general when Achilles presides over the troops to resolve the issue created by the general's lust & greed.
The personality, grace & dealing of Achilles the outcome of his princely upbringing by his father Peleus’s upbringing is contrasted with his mother Thetis' manner of dealing with human beings, particularly; the way she uses Lycomedes' daughter Deidamia & gets her divorced later. The contrast becomes more lucid through the depiction of Neoptolemus, the only child of Achilles.
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Goddess Thetis
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Thetis took her grandson, Neoptolemus to the underworld with the immortals & brought him up with gods but sadly the way he treated Brises and his other decisions revealed that he had turned out to be a far lesser person than Patroclus whom she deemed impure & not in keeping with the decorum of Achilles, brought up among human beings in the mortal world.
He was not like Achilles in various fine attributes of the personality of the latter. Further, Thetis had inculcated biases in his mind and he envisioned Patroclus with the same bias as he was treated by Thetis.  |
| Sea goddess-Thetis |
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| Thetis as Queen |
| A famous Cetus (sea monster who was in
the service of Poseidon)was sent against the city of Troy. |
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A famous Cetus (sea monster who was in the
service of Poseidon)was sent against the city of Troy.
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O Magazine
“You don’t need to be familiar with Homer’s The Iliad (or Brad Pitt’s Troy, for that matter) to find Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles spellbinding. While classics scholar Miller meticulously follows Greek mythology, her explorations of ego, grief, and love’s many permutations are both familiar and new. . . Miller treats the men’s mutual sexual passion with refreshing straightforwardness and convincingly casts their love in such mythic proportions that we’re convinced when Patroclus declares, “He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”” ―O Magazine
Conclusion
The novel is a marvelous piece of literature, written with a creative touch, wisdom, and a genius mind. It is a pleasurable reading & has a lot of food for thought, it ends with a fundamental Socratic question posed by Greek myths & literature- "Know Thyself". It kindles the urge in our souls to know ourselves fully before we leave this world & it clearly shows that the best way to leave a mark in this world is to live our mortal life with compassion, and genuine bonding with others & we must strive for personal excellence also. We must retain the natural sense of bonding with humanity
References
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller(Penguin ed.)
https://greekgodsandgoddesses.net/goddesses/thetis/
https://mythologysource.com/poseidon-greek-god/
https://madelinemiller.com/the-song-of-achilles/
https://www.artstation.com/
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