Circe vs The Song of Achilles: Which First?
Both retell Greek myth and both will break your heart, but they do it differently. A close comparison of Madeline Miller's Circe and The Song of Achilles — and where to start.
Madeline Miller has written only two novels, and readers argue about them constantly — not because either is weak, but because they are so close in quality and so different in feeling. Both retell Greek myth from the inside; both are beautifully written; both will, in their own ways, devastate you. The question is almost never whether to read them. It is which to read first, and what you are signing up for.
The Song of Achilles (2011) retells the Iliad through the love between Achilles and Patroclus. Circe (2018) gives a full life to the witch of the Odyssey, a minor figure Homer dismissed in a few lines. One is a tragedy you can see coming and cannot stop. The other is a slow act of self-creation. Here is how they actually differ.
The Song of Achilles: a love story built to break you
Narrated by Patroclus, The Song of Achilles is the more romantic and the more relentless of the two. It is, for most of its length, a tender coming-of-age love story — two boys, then two young men, against the backdrop of a world sliding toward war. Miller earns every bit of intimacy, which is exactly what makes the back half unbearable, because the reader knows the prophecy. Achilles will go to Troy. Achilles will die. And Patroclus, our narrator, is bound to that fate.
It is tighter, faster, and more emotionally direct than Circe. If you have heard that a book “destroyed” someone, there is a good chance this is the one they meant.
Circe: a woman claiming her own power
Circe is the larger, stranger, more interior novel. Spanning centuries, it follows a nymph who is mocked by gods, exiled to an island, and who slowly discovers that her overlooked gift for witchcraft is a genuine power — one she shapes into independence on her own terms. Odysseus passes through, but this is emphatically not his story. It is a study of transformation, motherhood, mortality, and what it means to choose a smaller, mortal life over an empty immortal one.
Where The Song of Achilles sprints toward grief, Circe unfolds. It asks for more patience and rewards it with more depth. It is the more feminist book and, many would argue, the more original one.
Which should you read first?
Start with The Song of Achilles if you want to be swept up and gutted, you love a doomed romance, or you want the more accessible entry point. It is the easier book to fall into and the harder one to recover from.
Start with Circe if you are drawn to character studies over love stories, you want a woman at the centre claiming her own life, or you simply prefer your mythology slow, rich, and triumphant rather than tragic.
If you have time for only one, read The Song of Achilles — its emotional force is the purest distillation of why people love Miller. If you have time for both, read it first anyway, and let Circe be the deeper, quieter book you grow into.
The prose, and the patience each asks
Stylistically the two books pull in different directions. The Song of Achilles is warm, propulsive, and intimate — Patroclus’s voice is plain and tender, and the pages turn almost by themselves. Circe is cooler and more lyrical, written in a register that matches its narrator’s long, solitary existence; Miller lets scenes breathe across years and centuries, and the rewards accumulate slowly rather than arriving in a rush.
That difference matters for choosing. The Song of Achilles is the better book to read in a weekend, the one that grabs you by the collar. Circe is the better book to read slowly, the one that deepens the more time you give it. Neither is harder in any forbidding sense — both are completely accessible to readers new to Greek myth — but they reward different kinds of attention.
Read next
If both have left you craving more myth told from the margins, Ariadne by Jennifer Saint and A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes are the natural next steps, while Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls gives the women of the Iliad a fiercer, darker voice. For more in this vein, see our guide to books like The Song of Achilles.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Should I read The Song of Achilles or Circe first?
Most readers should start with The Song of Achilles. It came first (2011), it is shorter and more immediately gripping, and its central love story pulls you through quickly to one of the most devastating endings in recent fiction. Circe is the richer, more mature novel, but it is slower and more interior — better appreciated once you already trust Miller as a storyteller. The two are completely standalone, so you cannot read them 'out of order' in any way that matters.
Which is sadder, Circe or The Song of Achilles?
The Song of Achilles, and it is not especially close. It builds an entire novel toward a grief that readers know is coming from the first page, and Miller does not spare you. Circe contains loss and pain, but it is fundamentally a story of survival, growth, and hard-won peace — its emotional arc bends toward strength rather than heartbreak. If you want to be wrecked, read The Song of Achilles.
Are Circe and The Song of Achilles connected?
Loosely. They share the same mythological universe and a few overlapping figures — Odysseus appears in both, and the Trojan War shadows each — but they tell entirely separate stories and can be read independently in either order. Reading both deepens your sense of Miller's world, but neither depends on the other.
Which is better, Circe or The Song of Achilles?
Critically, Circe is usually considered the more accomplished novel — broader in scope, more thematically ambitious, and more original in voice. Emotionally, The Song of Achilles tends to be the more beloved, because the intensity of its love story and the force of its ending leave a deeper mark. It is genuinely a case where the 'better' book and the 'favourite' book are often different ones.
