His words set them all weeping about the poor dumb dead until rosy-fingered morning appeared. Agamemnon sent men and mules from all parts of the camp for wood, and Meriones, companion of kind Idomeneus, was their leader. They felled high oaks with long-edged bronze, and the trees crashed down.
The Achaeans split the wood and bound it on the mules, which cut up the ground with their feet struggling toward the plain through thick brush. All the woodcutters carried logs as well, for so Meriones ordered. When they threw the great logs down over the ground, Achilles told the Myrmidons to arm and yoke their horses.
They rose and put on armor; the charioteers mounted, foot-soldiers in their thousands behind. In the middle the Myrmidons bore Patroclus. They cut their hair and covered the body with it. Behind them Achilles held the head, grieving, for he was sending a peerless companion down to Hades.
At the place Achilles had named they laid the body down and built the wood. Standing apart from the fire he cut the golden lock he had grown long for the river Spercheius. He said Peleus had vowed that lock with a holy hecatomb if Achilles came home — but since he would not return, he gave the lock to Patroclus to take with him.
He set the hair in his friend's hands and stirred fresh longing to weep. The sun would have set on their tears if Achilles had not spoken quickly to Agamemnon: the people might mourn enough, but they should scatter from the pyre and prepare supper. The chiefs who were closest to the dead should remain.
Agamemnon dismissed the people to their ships. Those about the dead stayed and heaped the wood. They made a pyre a hundred feet each way and with grieving hearts laid the body on the summit. They flayed and dressed many fat sheep and cattle before the pyre; Achilles took fat from all and covered the body from head to foot, heaping the flayed carcasses around it.