(Agamemnon appropriates one of Achilles’ slave girls, Briseis, after being forced to return a slave girl of his own.) The affront to Achilles is more serious than it might appear to a modern audience: as Miller’s Patroclus observes, in one of the numerous asides that sound irritatingly as if they were lifted from SparkNotes, “wealth and reputation were the things our people had always killed for.” His reputation compromised, the greatest of the Greek warriors sulks in his tent while the Greeks start to lose badly - the demonstration, as he had intended, of his own great worth.

At the beginning of Homer’s exploration of “the wrath of Achilles,” the half-divine hero angrily withdraws from the Greek coalition that’s invading Troy after he is grossly insulted by the overbearing commander in chief, Agamemnon. The not uninteresting conceit of Miller’s book is that it’s narrated by a character who is both central to the action of the “Iliad” and curiously shadowy: Patroclus, Achilles’ highborn companion. “The Song of Achilles” does not, in fact, belong to Achilles at all. The result is a book that has the head of a young adult novel, the body of the “Iliad” and the hindquarters of Barbara Cartland. More recently, it has challenged ambitious writers like Mary Renault, whose 1958 novel “The King Must Die” brilliantly reimagined the Theseus legend as narrated by the hero himself, and David Malouf, whose terrific 2009 novel “Ransom” invents a moving episode toward the end of the “Iliad.” But in the case of Miller, who earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in classics at Brown, the epic reach exceeds her technical grasp.

The idea of recasting the Greek classics began with the ancients themselves Virgil’s “Aeneid” is, in many ways, both a rewriting of and a commentary on the Homeric epics. To the long catalog of odd hybrids that inhabit Greek myth - the half-human, half-equine centaurs, the birdlike Harpies with their human faces, the man-eating Scylla with her doglike nether parts - we may now add Madeline Miller’s first novel, “The Song of Achilles.” In it, Miller has taken on an (appropriately) heroic task: to fashion a modern work of literature out of very ancient stories - specifically, the tale of the Greeks at Troy, one of the oldest and most seminal of all legends in the Western tradition.

Achilles the song of achilles