It’s called The Song of Achilles because the Iliad, the most famous text about Achilles, opens with the infamous line
“Sing, O Muse, of the rage of Achilles”
and that’s how it’s all presented, the rage of Achilles. It’s not his song, it’s a song about his actions and their context within the war and the larger struggle between mankind and fate. There is no song about Achilles himself, no infamous narrative that explores the identity and the humanity of the so-called Best of the Greeks. It’s really dehumanizing, and that’s quite possibly by design, it’s part of the story’s message.
So Miller reframes the story, rephrases the song so that it really is about Achilles. It’s a humanization of one of the most infamous fictional characters ever, it breathes life and soul into Achilles, himself a symbol of the tragedy of a soul broken by insitituonal and personal forces, and makes him more than a symbol, it makes him a person.
But nothing can be about Achilles without also being about Patroclus, because even in the Iliad it is clear that only he can see and reach Achilles’s softer, human side. So Patroclus tells the story, sings us the song of Achilles, of the story of the soul of the man, not simply the man who butchered Troy.
One of Patroclus’s biggest conflicts in the story is the dehumanization of Achilles itself, that history won’t remember him as the boy who loved to play the lyre and eat figs, but as Aristos Achaeon. It breaks Patroclus’s heart and it breaks the reader’s heart, and much of the story is based around Patroclus trying to prevent that from happening.
The song of Achilles is supposed to be Patroclus’s vanguard against the dehumanization of history. On a broader scale, it’s a testament to the necessity of love, compassion, and empathy when looking at any “historical” event, and that the human soul is a precious thing in and of itself and deserves to be protected and cherished, and the world is left a better place when it is. (I could also go into the emphasis on the importance of rejecting repressive cultural, social, and institutional pressures and living life for oneself and not just one’s place in the world, but I’m emotional enough as it is.) That’s why I think it’s such an important text related to the Iliad and it deserves the same respect as the thousands of its other retellings.
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