Achilles

Region/Culture: Southern Europe / Greece
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Demigod son of a sea-nymph and a mortal king, made all but invulnerable in infancy and trained from boyhood as the swiftest and most lethal warrior of the age.
Role in Mythos: Greatest of the Greek champions at Troy, whose wrath and grief drive the central action of Homer’s Iliad and whose death seals the city’s fate.
Relation to Humans: Achilles is a mortal hero, not a god to be worshipped, though hero-cults grew at his tomb on the Trojan shore and on the island of Leuke in the Black Sea. Mortals approach him as the measure of martial glory and as a warning about the cost of refusing to bend.

The first word of the Iliad is rage. Not Achilles’ name, not Troy, not the gods. Rage. The whole poem begins by naming the thing that drives it, and the thing it names is a young man so good at killing that the war stops when he sulks in his tent.

He was the son of Peleus, king of the Myrmidons in Phthia, and Thetis, a Nereid of the deep sea. The match was not a love story. Zeus and Poseidon had both wanted Thetis themselves until they heard the prophecy that her son would outshine his father, and they handed her off to a mortal to keep the threat away from the throne of heaven. She did not want Peleus. She turned into fire, water, a lion, a serpent, and he held on through every shape until she gave up. The wedding was famous for two reasons. The gods came. And Eris, uninvited, threw a golden apple onto the floor that would eventually start the Trojan War.

Thetis tried to make her son immortal. The earliest version of this story is not the one most people know. In the older tradition she anointed him with ambrosia by day and laid him in the hearth fire by night to burn the mortality out of him, and Peleus walked in one night, saw the baby in the flames, and screamed, and she abandoned the work and the marriage both. The river-Styx version, in which she dipped him as an infant and gripped his heel so that the dark water never reached it, comes later, recorded in full by Statius in the first century CE. Homer never mentions the heel. Homer never mentions any invulnerability at all. The hero of the Iliad bleeds when he is cut.

Peleus sent the boy up Mount Pelion to be raised by the centaur Chiron, who had taught Heracles and Jason before him. Chiron fed him the marrow of lions and the entrails of wild pigs to make him strong, taught him the lyre and medicine and the hunt, and let him run barefoot across the high pastures until he could outrun a deer. The boy learned to play and sing. He learned to set bones. He learned to kill anything that moved through the trees. When he came down from the mountain he was small and beautiful and faster than anyone else alive.

His mother knew the prophecy. He could live a long, quiet life in Phthia and be forgotten, or go to Troy and die young and be remembered forever. She tried to hide him. She sent him to the court of Lycomedes on the island of Skyros disguised in a girl’s dress, hair dyed red, calling himself Pyrrha, living among the king’s daughters. He fell in love with one of them, Deidamia, and a son was born there in secret, Neoptolemus, who would later finish what his father started. Odysseus came looking. He set out gifts for the women, jewellery and cloth, and a spear and shield laid quietly among them, and then had his men sound a trumpet outside as if the island were under attack. Every woman scattered. One reached for the spear. That was Achilles.

He went to Troy with fifty ships and the Myrmidons. He fought there for nine years before the Iliad opens, taking city after city along the coast, and during one of those raids he was given a captive woman named Briseis as his share of the spoils. When Agamemnon was forced by Apollo to give up his own captive, the king took Briseis from Achilles to compensate himself, and Achilles withdrew from the war and asked his mother to make the Greeks lose without him. They did. The Trojans pushed the Greeks back to the ships and began to burn them. Achilles’ beloved companion Patroclus put on Achilles’ armour and went out to drive the Trojans back and was killed by Hector at the wall. Then the rage that had been pointed inward turned outward and went looking for someone to spend itself on. Achilles came back to the field in armour newly forged by Hephaestus, the shield with the whole of human life beaten into its rings, and he killed everyone in his way until he found Hector outside the gates of Troy. He chased him around the walls three times. He drove a spear through his throat. He tied the body to his chariot and dragged it through the dust until old King Priam came alone at night to ransom what was left of his son.

His weapons were his speed, his spear of Pelian ash that no one else could lift, the armour from Hephaestus’ forge, and the immortal horses Xanthus and Balius gifted to Peleus at his wedding. Xanthus once spoke aloud to warn him he was running toward his own death. He answered that he already knew. He killed Penthesilea the Amazon queen and Memnon the Ethiopian king after Hector fell, and then Paris shot him from the walls. The arrow, in the later tradition, found the one place his mother had not been able to protect. He had chosen the short bright life. He got it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Achilles?

Achilles was the greatest Greek warrior of the Trojan War, the son of King Peleus of the Myrmidons and the sea-nymph Thetis. He is the central figure of Homer’s Iliad, where his rage at Agamemnon and grief at the death of Patroclus drive the plot, and he is best remembered for killing the Trojan prince Hector in single combat.

How did Achilles die?

Achilles was killed by an arrow shot by the Trojan prince Paris, in some versions guided by the god Apollo. The arrow struck him in the heel, the one part of his body his mother Thetis had failed to make invulnerable when she dipped him in the river Styx as an infant.

Was Achilles really invulnerable?

In the later tradition, yes, except for his heel. Homer’s Iliad, the oldest surviving account, never mentions any invulnerability and shows Achilles bleeding from wounds. The famous Styx story comes from the Roman poet Statius in the first century CE, much later than the original Greek tradition.

Why did Achilles refuse to fight at Troy?

Achilles withdrew from the war after King Agamemnon took his captive Briseis to replace a captive of his own. The insult to Achilles’ honour and standing in the army drove him to withdraw and ask his mother Thetis to engineer Greek defeats until Agamemnon was forced to apologize. He only returned to the field after Hector killed his beloved companion Patroclus.

Who was Patroclus to Achilles?

Patroclus was Achilles’ closest companion, foster-brother, and the central love of his life, raised alongside him in Phthia. His death at Hector’s hands is the turning point of the Iliad and the only event powerful enough to break Achilles out of his refusal to fight. Ancient and modern readers have long understood the bond as romantic as well as fraternal.