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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter VIII: The Trojan War & the Odyssey

Achilles: Birth, Wrath, Death and Cult of the Greek Hero

Achilles, greatest hero of the Trojan War: his birth to Thetis, his wrath in the Iliad, Patroclus and Hector, the heel, his death and his ancient hero cult.

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Achilles was the greatest Greek warrior of the Trojan War, son of the mortal king Peleus and the sea goddess Thetis. His anger at Agamemnon, and the grief and fury that followed the death of his friend Patroclus, are the subject of Homer's Iliad; after killing the Trojan champion Hector he was himself killed by an arrow of Paris guided by Apollo. Outside poetry Achilles was worshipped as a hero, with tombs and sanctuaries from the Troad to the northern Black Sea.

The Birth of Achilles: Peleus, Thetis and the Prophecy§

Thetis, chief of the Nereids, was courted by Zeus and Poseidon until a prophecy, ascribed to Themis in Pindar and to Prometheus in other versions, revealed that she would bear a son mightier than his father. The gods therefore married her to a mortal: Peleus, king of Phthia in Thessaly and former Argonaut (see Jason and the Argonauts). She resisted him by changing into fire, water, a lion and a serpent, but he held on until she yielded. All the gods came to the wedding on Mount Pelion, and it was there, in the later tradition, that Eris threw the apple of discord that led to the Trojan War.

Thetis wished to make her son immortal. In the version of Apollonius of Rhodes and Apollodorus, she laid the infant in the fire at night to burn away his mortal part and anointed him with ambrosia by day; Peleus saw the child in the flames and cried out, and the offended goddess left the house and returned to the sea. The better-known version, in which she dipped him in the river Styx while holding him by the heel, appears first in Statius' unfinished Achilleid (c. 95 CE). Homer knows nothing of either: his Achilles is wounded in battle and knows that he will die.

Chiron, Skyros and the Choice of a Short Life§

Peleus gave the boy to the centaur Chiron on Mount Pelion, who fed him, in Apollodorus' account, on the entrails of lions and the marrow of bears, and taught him hunting, music and healing; Homer adds the old warrior Phoenix as tutor. Thetis knew her son's fate. In the Iliad Achilles says that his mother told him he carried two destinies: if he stayed to fight at Troy he would not return home but would win undying glory; if he went home his glory would perish but his life would be long.

To keep him from the war, Thetis hid him, dressed as a girl, among the daughters of King Lycomedes on the island of Skyros. There he fathered a son, Neoptolemus, with Deidamia. Odysseus found him out by bringing gifts that included weapons and then sounding a war trumpet, at which Achilles seized a spear. The episode is not in Homer; it was treated in a lost play by Euripides and survives in Statius and Apollodorus. At Troy Achilles led the Myrmidons of Phthia and, before the Iliad begins, had sacked many cities of the Troad, among them Lyrnessus, where he took Briseis as his prize.

The Wrath of Achilles in the Iliad§

The Iliad opens with the word mēnin, "wrath". In Samuel Butler's translation (1898):

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.

When Apollo sent a plague on the Greek camp because Agamemnon had refused to return the daughter of his priest Chryses, Agamemnon gave her up but took Briseis from Achilles in compensation. Achilles withdrew from the fighting and asked Thetis to persuade Zeus to give the Trojans victory until the Greeks recognised his worth. In book 9 Agamemnon, now desperate, sent Odysseus, Ajax and Phoenix with offers of rich gifts; Achilles refused, in a speech that questions the whole value of heroic honour. This refusal is the poem's moral crux, and readers since antiquity have argued whether his pride is admirable, excessive or tragic.

Patroclus, Hector and Priam§

As the Trojans reached the ships, Achilles allowed his closest companion Patroclus to fight in his armour. Patroclus drove the Trojans back but was struck by Apollo, wounded by Euphorbus and killed by Hector, who stripped him of the armour. Achilles' grief is the turning point of the poem. Thetis obtained new armour from Hephaestus, including the great shield whose scenes of cities, fields, dancing and war are described in book 18. Reconciled with Agamemnon, Achilles returned to battle, filled the river Scamander with corpses until the river god rose against him, and finally killed Hector before the walls of Troy, then dragged his body behind his chariot.

The Iliad ends not with victory but with mercy. In book 24 the old king Priam, guided by Hermes, comes secretly to Achilles' hut to ransom his son's body. The two men weep together, Priam for Hector and Achilles for his father and for Patroclus, and Achilles grants a truce for the funeral. Homer calls Patroclus Achilles' dearest companion; later Greeks often understood them as lovers. Aeschylus' lost Myrmidons presented them so, and in Plato's Symposium one speaker objects that Aeschylus had the roles the wrong way round, since Achilles was the younger.

The Death of Achilles and the Achilles Heel§

The Iliad foretells but does not narrate Achilles' death; dying, Hector warns him that Paris and Apollo will kill him at the Scaean Gate. The lost epic Aethiopis, known from a later summary, told how Achilles killed the Amazon queen Penthesilea and the Ethiopian king Memnon, son of the Dawn, and was then shot by Paris with Apollo's help as he pursued the Trojans to the city. Ajax carried the body from the field while Odysseus held off the enemy, and the contest for his armour led to Ajax's suicide.

The wound in the ankle or heel is shown in Greek vase painting and stated by Apollodorus, and Roman writers connected it with the Styx story; from them comes the modern phrase "Achilles' heel" and the anatomical "Achilles tendon", a name popularised by the Flemish anatomist Philip Verheyen in 1693. In the last book of the Odyssey the shade of Agamemnon describes the funeral: Thetis rose from the sea with the Nereids, the nine Muses sang the lament, and after seventeen days of mourning the body was burned and the bones laid with those of Patroclus in a golden urn beneath a mound on the shore of the Hellespont. His son Neoptolemus came to Troy to complete his father's work, and the Trojan princess Polyxena was sacrificed at his tomb.

In the Odyssey's journey to the dead, Achilles' shade tells Odysseus that he would rather be a hired labourer for a poor man on earth than king over all the dead, a striking reversal of the choice he made in life, discussed in Hades and the Greek Underworld.

The Cult of Achilles: Tombs, Leuke and the Black Sea§

A different afterlife existed alongside Homer's gloomy picture. According to the summary of the Aethiopis, Thetis snatched her son from the pyre and carried him to the White Island, Leuke, usually identified with Snake Island in the north-western Black Sea. There, later sources say, he lived on, sometimes married to Helen or Medea, and sailors told of his voice and of white birds tending his temple. Inscriptions from Olbia and other Greek cities on the northern Black Sea coast honour Achilles as Pontarches, "lord of the sea", and a long sandspit there was called the Racecourse of Achilles.

In the Troad a tumulus near Sigeion was shown as his tomb. Alexander the Great, who claimed descent from Achilles through his mother Olympias, honoured it in 334 BCE before his campaign in Asia, and the emperor Caracalla later imitated him. At Elis, Pausanias reports, women mourned Achilles at an empty tomb at sunset. The third-century CE Heroicus of Philostratus, a dialogue about the spirits of the heroes of Troy, gives a long account of his cult and apparitions. Such worship of the mighty dead is part of the wider pattern of hero cult described in Greek Burial, the Dead and Hero Cults and Greek Religion and the Mysteries.

Achilles has remained a touchstone ever since: in Exekias' vase of Achilles and Ajax playing a board game, in Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, in Jonathan Shay's study of combat trauma Achilles in Vietnam (1994), and in modern novels retelling his life, such as Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles (2011). His story also prepares that of his rival in cunning, Odysseus.

Frequently asked questions§

Was Achilles invulnerable?§

Not in Homer, where he is wounded in battle and knows he must die young. The idea that Thetis dipped him in the Styx, leaving only the heel she held unprotected, is first attested in the Roman poet Statius around 95 CE.

Who killed Achilles?§

Paris, the Trojan prince, shot him with an arrow guided or aided by the god Apollo near the Scaean Gate of Troy. The Iliad foretells this through the dying words of Hector, and the lost Aethiopis narrated it.

Were Achilles and Patroclus lovers?§

Homer describes them as inseparable companions and does not say they were lovers. From the fifth century BCE many Greeks, including Aeschylus and speakers in Plato, understood the relationship as erotic, and the question has been debated ever since.

Sources and further reading§