There is a heartbreaking passage at the beginning of the last book of the Iliad in which Achilles tosses and turns all night in anguish for his dead friend and lover, Patroclus, before walking alone on the beach at dawn. Characteristically taking his material from both life and literature, John Westbrook references it in this poem about sleeplessness as another example of the, now largely vanished, hold of Greek and Latin poetry over writers’ imaginations up to the twentieth century.
See the illustrated blog post, a vase painting of Achilles from about 450 BCE, here.
