Why is this man so important to Achilles? Homer shows us the end of their story, and I wanted to know the beginning. We hear that Patroclus is ‘the most beloved companion’ of Achilles, but we don’t hear much more than that, even though Achilles’s reaction to his death is the crux of the entire Iliad. “I found both of these characters very mysterious in the original mythology. “I was really interested in those untold stories,” Miller says, sipping tea in the airy living room of her home just outside Philadelphia. In each book, Miller narrates a familiar tale in the voice of someone seen only from the outside in the originals: in the first, Achilles’s lover Patroclus, a minor character in the Iliad, and in her latest, Circe, the witch who turns men into pigs in the Odyssey. Madeline Miller’s new novel, Circe, to be published by Little, Brown in April, takes the same stimulating approach to ancient Greek literature as its bestselling 2012 predecessor, The Song of Achilles.
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