Achilles- Greek DemigodDemigod"Best of the Achaeans"

The Birth of a Hero

Achilles was the son of Peleus, king of the Myrmidons in Phthia, and the sea nymph Thetis, a Nereid of surpassing beauty. His very conception was shaped by prophecy: Zeus and Poseidon had both desired Thetis, but Prometheus (or, in Pindar's telling, Themis) revealed that her son was fated to be greater than his father. To avoid a divine usurper, the gods married Thetis to a mortal, ensuring her mighty son would be mortal too, though just barely.

The wedding of Peleus and Thetis on Mount Pelion was attended by all the Olympians except Eris, goddess of strife, whose golden apple would set the Trojan War in motion. When Achilles was born, Thetis sought to burn away his mortality by anointing him with ambrosia and holding him in divine fire. Peleus interrupted her, and she fled back to the sea in rage. In Statius's telling, she dipped him in the River Styx, making every part of him invulnerable except the heel by which she held him.

The Education of Achilles

Peleus entrusted his son to Chiron, the wise centaur of Mount Pelion, who fed the boy on the entrails of lions and wild boars to build his courage and taught him war, medicine, music, and the hunt. Achilles could outrun deer on foot. Phoenix, an old warrior from Peleus's court, also raised him, teaching him to be "both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds." The Pelian ash spear that only Achilles could wield, cut by Chiron from the peak of Mount Pelion and given to Peleus on his wedding day, became the weapon that defined his fighting.

The Choice of Achilles

Thetis knew that fate offered her son two paths. He could remain in Phthia, marry, raise children, and die old and forgotten. Or he could sail to Troy, win eternal glory (kleos), and die young. When the Greeks began gathering their forces to retrieve Helen, Thetis tried to hide Achilles on the island of Skyros, disguising him as a girl among the daughters of King Lycomedes. During this concealment, Achilles fathered Neoptolemus on Lycomedes's daughter Deidamia.

But the Greeks could not sail without Achilles, for prophecy declared that Troy would not fall without him. Odysseus, ever cunning, traveled to Skyros disguised as a merchant. Among the jewelry and fabrics he displayed, he placed weapons and armor. When he sounded a war trumpet, the other girls fled, but Achilles reached for the arms. He chose glory over length of days, and was still young when he boarded the ships for Troy.

The Wrath of Achilles

The Iliad opens with one word: "wrath," menis. This is the wrath of Achilles, and it drives the entire epic. In the war's tenth year, Agamemnon, commander of the Greek forces, was forced to return a captive girl, Chryseis, to her father to end a plague sent by Apollo. To compensate his wounded pride, Agamemnon seized Briseis, Achilles's own prize, from his tent.

Achilles withdrew from battle, taking his Myrmidons with him. He prayed to his mother Thetis, who begged Zeus to give the Trojans victory until the Greeks recognized what they had lost. Zeus agreed. Without Achilles, the Greeks were driven back to their ships. Hector and the Trojans nearly burned the fleet. Thousands died because neither king could master his pride.

The Death of Patroclus

Patroclus was Achilles's closest companion, raised together from childhood after Patroclus accidentally killed a boy in Opus and was exiled to Peleus's court. They were inseparable.

As the Greeks faced destruction, Patroclus begged Achilles to relent. When Achilles refused, Patroclus asked to wear his armor and lead the Myrmidons himself, hoping the Trojans would mistake him for Achilles and flee. Achilles agreed but warned Patroclus not to pursue the Trojans too far: drive them from the ships and return.

Patroclus drove the Trojans back from the ships and killed Sarpedon, son of Zeus. Caught up in battle-fury, he chased the Trojans to the walls of Troy itself, ignoring Achilles's warning. There Apollo struck him from behind, stunning him and stripping his armor. Euphorbus wounded him. Hector delivered the killing blow.

New Armor, New Grief

The news of Patroclus's death reached Achilles like a spear to the heart. He collapsed, tearing his hair, smearing his face with ash. His grief was so terrible that Thetis heard it beneath the sea. She rose to comfort him, knowing that fate decreed Achilles would die soon after Hector.

Achilles did not care. He would kill Hector or die trying. But he had no armor; Hector wore it now. Thetis flew to Olympus and begged Hephaestus to forge new arms for her son. The smith god worked through the night. The shield alone was a cosmos in miniature: the earth and sky, cities at war and at peace. Everything Achilles was about to leave behind.

The Killing of Hector

Clad in divine armor, Achilles returned to battle like a force of nature. He killed Trojans by the score, filling the river Scamander with so many corpses that the river god rose against him in rage. Achilles fought the river itself until Hephaestus drove it back with fire.

He found Hector before the Scaean Gate. Three times they ran around Troy's walls before Athena, disguised as Hector's brother Deiphobus, tricked the Trojan champion into standing his ground. They fought, and Achilles's spear found the gap in Hector's borrowed armor, at the throat, where Achilles knew his own armor was weakest.

But killing Hector was not enough. Achilles pierced the tendons of Hector's ankles, threaded leather straps through them, and dragged the body behind his chariot around the walls of Troy, around the tomb of Patroclus, for twelve days. The gods preserved Hector's corpse from decay.

The Ransoming of Hector

Old King Priam, guided by Hermes through the Greek camp under cover of night, came alone to Achilles's tent to ransom his son's body. He knelt and kissed the hands that had killed so many of his children.

Achilles looked at Priam and saw his own father, Peleus, who would never see his son return. Both men wept. Achilles's wrath finally broke. He returned Hector's body and granted the Trojans eleven days of truce for the funeral. The Iliad ends there, at a funeral pyre in Troy.

The Death and Afterlife of Achilles

After killing the Amazon queen Penthesilea and the Ethiopian king Memnon, son of Eos, Achilles pursued the Trojans to the Scaean Gate. There Paris, guided by Apollo, shot an arrow that struck the hero's vulnerable heel. Achilles fell to the weakest of the Trojan princes, killed not by strength but by a god's aim.

Ajax and Odysseus recovered his body from the battlefield amid fierce fighting. His divine armor became the prize that drove Ajax to madness and suicide when it was awarded to Odysseus. Achilles's bones were mingled with those of Patroclus in a single golden urn on the headland at Sigeum, united in death as in life.

In the Odyssey, when Odysseus encounters Achilles's shade in the underworld and praises his lordship over the dead, Achilles answers: "I would rather serve as a hired laborer to another man, a man without land or livelihood, than be king over all the perished dead." Pindar placed him on the White Island, Leuke, in the Black Sea, where he dwelt with Patroclus, Ajax, and Antilochus among the blessed dead. Sailors passing the island reported hearing the clash of arms and the voices of heroes feasting, and a cult persisted there into the Roman period.