During his stay in Rome, Wiertz worked on his first great work, Les Grecs et les Troyens se disputant le corps de Patrocle ("Greeks and Trojans fighting for the body of Patroclus", finished in 1836), on a subject borrowed from canto XVII of Homer's Iliad.
The main human characters are those of the original Iliad: Paris, Helen of Troy, Hector, Ajax, Achilles, Patroclus, and Odysseus.
A number of ships have been named SS Patroclus after Patroclus, the Ancient Greek hero Achilles' best friend.
Hector whirls in the air the severed head of Patroclus, which whispers "Ultor ubi Aeacides", "Where is Achilles Aeacides, my avenger?"
Through the Professor, allusions made are to Homer, Georg Autenrieth's A Homeric Dictionary, H. L. Ahrens's Griechische, Formenlehre, John Flaxman, The Trojan War, Harlequin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Artemis, John Keats, Rhesus of Thrace, Achilles, Patroclus, Aubrey Beardsley, Franz Schubert, Theseus, Centaur, Jack the Giant Killer, Golden Helen, Hector, Andromache.
She also found Patroclus "tantalizing" because he is a minor character that later had a "big impact" on the outcome of the Trojan War.
In 960, Bruno I, Archbishop of Cologne translated Patroclus' relics from Troyes and buried them in 964 in the cathedral in Soest, Germany dedicated to the saint, where he is still today venerated.