Characters
- Ajax — appears in dream; demands burial and shared ossuary
- Menoetius — father who brought young Patroclus to Peleus (recalled)
- Myrmidons — hear Achilles’ dawn report
- Peleus — foster-house of their shared childhood (recalled)
Places
- Gates of Hades — barred to the unburied shade
- Molossia — childhood recalled by the ghost
- Shore by the ships — Achilles’ sleeping-place
Themes
Narrative
The night after the Achaeans bring Patroclus’s body fully into camp mourning, Achilles lies on the shore and sleeps. The shade (*psyche*) of unhappy Patroclus comes and stands over his head, like the living man in stature, voice, and eyes, wearing the same clothes. It rebukes Achilles for neglect: bury me quickly, so I may pass the gates of Hades; the other shades keep me off, and I wander unhouselled. Give me your hand—once the pyre has eaten me I will not return from Hades. And let our bones lie in one jar, as we grew up together in Peleus’s house after Menoetius brought me as a child.
Achilles answers that he will fulfill all, and reaches to embrace the dear head; the shade goes underground like smoke, gibbering faintly. Achilles starts up in wonder and tells the Myrmidons that a spirit and phantom from Hades exists, though there is no *phrenes* (mind) in it. At dawn he orders the pyre. Catalogue this as the Patroclus-ghost atom: burial plea, shared-bones request, and Homeric psychology of the shade—distinct from the games that follow.