MythoDex

Achilles

Best of the Achaeans

uh-KILL-eez

Offered a long quiet life or a short famous one, he took the short one, and the Iliad is about the week he regretted it.

Achilles
Domains
WarRageGloryMortality
Symbols
Ash SpearDivine ArmourHeelMyrmidon Shield

The Story

Son of the sea-nymph Thetis, dipped as an infant in the Styx and left vulnerable only where she held him. The prophecy his mother carried was Themis's: any son of hers would surpass his father, which is why the gods married her to a mortal.

The Iliad opens on his rage, not at Troy but at Agamemnon, over a prize of honour, and he withdraws while the Greeks are slaughtered. What brings him back is Patroclus's death, and what follows is the most brutal stretch in the poem. The poem ends not with his death but with him giving Hector's body back to an old man who came to beg for it.

Did You Know?

  • The Achilles tendon was named after him in the 1690s. The anatomy came second, the heel was already the byword.
  • Homer never mentions the heel or the dipping in the Styx. In the Iliad he can be wounded anywhere; the invulnerability arrives with Roman poets a thousand years later.
  • The first word of the Iliad is his rage. The poem announces its subject as an emotion rather than a war.