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Menelaus is the first to see that Patroclus has fallen. He stands over the body, and the fight becomes a struggle for the corpse and for Achilles’ armour, which Hector has stripped and put on.
Aias and Menelaus hold off the Trojans while the body is carried back. Antilochus runs to Achilles with the news. The book ends with Achilles’ grief beginning, and with Hector still wearing the armour that will help seal his fate.
Opening lines
And the son of Atreus, Menelaus, dear to Ares, failed not to mark that Patroclus had been slain in battle by the Trojans, but fared amid the foremost fighters, harnessed in flaming bronze, and bestrode the dead, as over a calf standeth lowing plaintively its mother, that hath brought forth [5] her first-born, ere then knowing naught of motherhood; even so over Patroclus strode fair-haired Menelaus, and before him he… — Homer, Iliad XVII.1ff., trans. A. T. Murray (Loeb; Perseus Digital Library, CC BY-SA 4.0).
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