Characters
- Amphitrite — sister-attendants in the shore lament
- Artemis — destination of Thetis’s errand for new panoply
- Hecuba — killer who holds the old armor; target of Achilles’ resolve
- Lyssa — cited as having granted Achilles’ earlier prayer
- Pallas — rises with Nereids; consoles; forbids unarmed return; seeks Hephaestus
- Patroclus — dead friend whose loss drives the lament (offstage)
- Trojan assembly — prostrate in grief; chooses Hector’s death and his own
Places
- Achaean shore — scene of the lament
- Sea-depths — whence Thetis and her sisters rise
- Underworld — Thetis’s path to Hephaestus after the mourning
Themes
Narrative
Antilochus brings word that Patroclus is dead, the body contested, Hector in Achilles’ armor. Achilles casts himself in the dust, fouls his head and face, and lies huge in grief. Thetis hears his cry from the sea-depths. She leads her sister Nereids up from the cave—Homer names a long train (Glauce, Thaleia, Cymodoce, Nesaea, Speio, Thoe, Halie, Cymothoe, Actaea, Limnoreia, Melite, Iaira, Amphithoe, Agaue, Doto, Proto, Pherousa, Dynamene, Dexamene, Amphinome, Callianeira, Doris, Panope, Galateia, Nemertes, and others)—and they beat their breasts about Achilles on the shore.
Thetis clasps her son’s head and asks why he weeps when Zeus has already fulfilled his prayer that the Achaeans be penned by their ships. Achilles answers that Patroclus is slain, the armor taken, and that he will not live unless he kill Hector—knowing Hector’s death seals his own. Thetis does not deny the fate; she only forbids him to enter battle unarmed and promises armor from Hephaestus by dawn. Leaving the Nereids to return beneath the wave, she goes to Olympus. The lament scene fixes Patroclus’s death as the hinge of Achilles’ return: maternal grief and sea-kin attend the choice that leads to Hector and to Achilles’ own end.