Achilles was the greatest warrior of the Greeks at Troy, the central figure of Homer’s Iliad, and the archetypal tragic hero. He was the son of the sea-nymph Thetis and the mortal king Peleus, and his destiny was foretold by prophecy: he would either live a long, obscure life, or a short, glorious one. His mother chose glory for him. He became the greatest of all Greek warriors, and his quarrel with Agamemnon, his friendship with Patroclus, and his wrathful rage at the death of his companion drive the action of the Iliad.
Achilles is the central figure of the Iliad and one of the central figures of the entire Greek mythological cycle. The standard scholarly reading is that he is the first literary character of the Western tradition: the Iliad opens with his quarrel with Agamemnon and ends with the ransoming of Hector’s body, and the poem’s 24 books are the Iliad’s account of his wrath, his withdrawal, his friend’s death, his return to battle, and his reconciliation. The standard biographical sources for Achilles outside the Iliad are the Aethiopis (the lost third poem of the Epic Cycle, summarised by Proclus), the Cypria (the first), and Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca 3.13.5–8.
The Birth of Achilles
Achilles was the son of Peleus, king of Phthia in Thessaly, and the sea-nymph Thetis, a Nereid, daughter of the old man of the sea, Nereus. The wedding of Peleus and Thetis was a major event in Greek myth: all the gods were invited except Eris, the goddess of strife. Eris, in her anger, threw a golden apple inscribed “to the fairest” into the midst of the guests, leading to the Judgment of Paris and, eventually, the Trojan War.
According to prophecy, Thetis would give birth to a son greater than his father. This alarmed Zeus and Poseidon, both of whom had courted Thetis. To prevent the prophecy, Thetis was married to the mortal Peleus, and she resisted her divine suitors.
Thetis gave birth to Achilles, and she tried to make him immortal. According to one tradition, she anointed him with ambrosia and held him in the fire to burn away his mortality. According to another, she dipped him in the river Styx, the river that separated the world of the living from the world of the dead, and the waters made him invulnerable except at the heel where she held him. The phrase “Achilles’ heel” has come to mean any critical weakness.
The Early Life of Achilles
When Achilles was nine years old, the seer Calchas prophesied that Troy would not fall without him. Thetis, knowing that her son was destined to die young at Troy, disguised him as a girl and hid him among the daughters of King Lycomedes on the island of Scyros. There, Achilles lived as a maiden, and he fathered a son, Pyrrhus (also called Neoptolemus), on Deidamia, the king’s daughter.
The trick was discovered by Odysseus, who came to Scyros disguised as a merchant. He laid out women’s jewelry and weapons for sale, and Achilles, despite his disguise, immediately reached for the weapons. His identity was revealed, and he was sent to join the Greek expedition against Troy.
Achilles in the Iliad
Homer’s Iliad is the central text for understanding Achilles. The poem does not cover the entire ten-year Trojan War. It covers a few weeks in the tenth and final year, during the period of Achilles’s withdrawal from battle. The poem opens with the word menin, “wrath” or “rage,” and the central theme is the wrath of Achilles.
The Quarrel with Agamemnon
The Iliad opens with a quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the Greek forces. Agamemnon has taken a captive woman, Chryseis, the daughter of a priest of Apollo. When the priest comes to ransom his daughter, Agamemnon refuses, and Apollo sends a plague on the Greek camp. The seer Calchas reveals the cause, and Achilles demands that Agamemnon return Chryseis to her father. In a rage, Agamemnon agrees but takes Achilles’s own captive, Briseis, as compensation.
Humiliated, Achilles withdraws from the fighting. He prays to his mother Thetis to ask Zeus to favor the Trojans, so that the Greeks will learn to honor him. Zeus agrees, and the war turns against the Greeks.
The Embassy to Achilles
As the Greeks suffer defeat after defeat, Agamemnon sends an embassy to Achilles, offering him great gifts if he will return to the fighting. The embassy includes the great warrior Odysseus, the old wise man Phoenix, and the great Ajax. Achilles refuses, saying that he will sail home to Phthia the next morning. He is unmoved by the gifts.
The Death of Patroclus
As the situation grows desperate, the Greeks are pushed back to their ships, and Hector, the greatest of the Trojan warriors, sets fire to a Greek ship. Patroclus, the beloved companion of Achilles, cannot bear to watch. He goes to Achilles and begs to be allowed to lead the Myrmidons into battle wearing Achilles’s own divine armor. Achilles, weeping for his friend, agrees.
Patroclus drives the Trojans back from the ships and almost takes the city, but he is killed by Hector, with the help of Apollo. The armor is stripped from his body, and the news of his death reaches Achilles, who is overcome with grief and rage.
The Return of Achilles
Achilles, consumed with grief, is visited by his mother Thetis, who brings him new armor forged by Hephaestus. The armor is described in detail in the Iliad’s most famous passage, the “Shield of Achilles,” a long description of the elaborate scenes on the shield.
Achilles returns to battle in a frenzy. He drives the Trojans before him and kills countless warriors. He finally meets Hector, the greatest of the Trojan heroes, outside the walls of Troy. They fight, and Achilles kills Hector. He then ties Hector’s body to his chariot and drags it back to the Greek camp, where he leaves it unburied.
The Ransoming of Hector
The Iliad ends with the ransoming of Hector’s body. King Priam of Troy, the aged father of Hector, comes secretly into the Greek camp, embracing the knees of Achilles and begging for the return of his son’s body. Achilles, moved by the old man’s grief, agrees, and the two men share a meal in the tent. The Iliad ends with the funeral of Hector.
The Death of Achilles
Achilles did not die in the Iliad. According to the lost epic cycle, he continued to fight at Troy after Hector’s death. He killed Penthesilea, the queen of the Amazons, and was momentarily struck by her beauty. He killed Memnon, the king of the Ethiopians, who had been sent by his mother Eos to help the Trojans.
Finally, Achilles was killed at the Scaean Gate of Troy. According to the most common tradition, the Trojan prince Paris shot an arrow, guided by Apollo, into Achilles’s heel, the one part of his body not protected by the divine armor and the only part not made invulnerable by the river Styx. The arrow struck him, and he died. There are other versions of the story, including one in which Achilles was killed by Apollo himself in the form of Paris, and another in which he was killed at the wedding of his son Neoptolemus.
After his death, Achilles was given a magnificent funeral, with funeral games to honor him. He was buried on the Trojan plain, and his ghost appeared to Odysseus in the underworld, complaining that he would rather be a slave in the world of the living than a king in the world of the dead.
The phrase “Achilles’ heel” has come to mean any critical weakness, derived from the one vulnerable spot on his body.
The Cult of Achilles
Achilles was worshipped as a hero in the ancient world, with major cult centers on the White Island near the mouth of the Danube, where he was said to have been buried. His cult was so strong that it persisted for centuries, and Alexander the Great visited it before his Persian campaign. Sacrifices were offered to Achilles as a divine hero, and he was said to have the power to help sailors in distress.
The Legacy of Achilles
Achilles is one of the central figures of the Iliad, the subject of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011, Orange Prize for Fiction 2012), and the central character of the Brad Pitt film Troy (2004). He appears in the Percy Jackson series and the God of War franchise, and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is built around the Iliad. For the broader modern reception, see our guide to Greek mythology in modern culture.
A Note on Reading This Profile
A note on reading this profile. The Achilles of the Iliad and the Achilles of the later poets (the Aethiopis, the Cypria, the lost tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles) are not the same figure, and the reader who wants only the Iliad should treat the Aethiopis material (Achilles’ killing of Penthesilea, his love for her as she dies, his killing of Memnon, his death by Apollo’s arrow) as a later addition. The Iliad itself does not contain the Penthesilea story; that is from the Aethiopis (lost, summarised in Proclus). The page above is written in the Iliad register, with the Aethiopis material in the right place.