I have many half-thoughts on this book and it’s popularity—how strange that a book that is lauded as romance is really about violence against women, how passive Patroclus only found himself in the last hundred or so pages, how this is only of those inexplicable online favourites when it seems so wrought to me. 

Fundamentally, I think, the most important relationship in this was between Patroclus and Briseis. Perhaps the only time we saw our narrator be himself, not to be who he thought the titular character wanted him to be. How unusual, then, that I have never seen anyone echo that. 

I don’t know. Beautifully written but confused in its motivations. Something just not quite right. So it always goes.