Achilles

• 1. Introduction

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  Achilles, the central figure of Homer's Iliad, carried a name that meant something like 'he who has the people distressed' - a striking label for a warrior celebrated above all others for his glory in battle. His name combines the Greek words for grief and for the people, a double meaning that the scholar Gregory Nagy, following Leonard Palmer, has traced to the idea of a corps of soldiers brought to ruin. That tension between grief and glory is exactly what the Iliad explores. When Achilles functions rightly, his Myrmidons bring distress to the enemy. When he turns inward with rage, it is his own side that suffers. What drove Achilles to withdraw from the greatest war the Greeks had ever fought? What was the nature of the bond that pulled him back? And why did ancient peoples from Athens to the shores of the Black Sea still venerate him centuries after the poem was composed? These are the questions that will carry us through his story.

• 2. A Hero Before the War

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  Peleus, king of the Myrmidons in Phthia, fathered Achilles with a sea-nymph named Thetis, and the circumstances of that marriage were anything but ordinary. Zeus and Poseidon had both wanted Thetis for themselves until the fore-thinker Prometheus warned Zeus of a prophecy, first spoken by Themis, goddess of divine law: Thetis would bear a son greater than his father. Both gods withdrew from the pursuit immediately and arranged for Thetis to marry a mortal king instead. In another version of the story, Thetis had already rebuffed Zeus out of loyalty to Hera, who had raised her, and Zeus in his fury decreed she would never marry an immortal.

  Thetis, knowing the dangers her son would face, tried from the start to protect him from mortality itself. The first-century CE epic Achilleid by Statius describes her dipping the infant Achilles in the river Styx to make him invulnerable, holding him by his left heel and leaving that single spot untouched. In an older variant, she anointed the child with ambrosia and placed him on a fire to burn away his mortal parts; Peleus interrupted her and she abandoned both father and son in fury. Homer himself does not mention any general invulnerability: in Book 21 of the Iliad, the Paeonian fighter Asteropaios draws blood from Achilles's elbow with a thrown spear. The invincible heel is a later embellishment, not a Homeric fact.

  Peleus gave the boy to Chiron, the most righteous of the centaurs, who lived on Mount Pelion. In some accounts, Achilles's original name was Ligyron and Chiron renamed him. One account recorded by Photius adds a stranger detail: after Thetis burned previous children she had by Peleus, Peleus snatched the infant from the fire with only a burnt foot; Chiron later exhumed the body of Damysus, the fastest of the giants, removed an ankle, and incorporated it into the child's damaged foot. Growing up in Phthia, Achilles befriended Patroclus, and taught him everything Chiron had taught him - including the medical arts. Thetis warned her son that he faced a choice: a short life full of glory, or a long life in obscurity. Achilles chose the former.

• 3. Hidden on Skyros

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  Before Achilles ever reached Troy, Thetis made one last attempt to keep him from the war. She concealed the young man at the court of Lycomedes, king of Skyros, disguising him as a girl - possibly under the name Pyrrha, meaning 'the red-haired girl', or Cercysera or Aissa. There, living among Lycomedes's daughters, Achilles began a relationship with Deidamia, the king's daughter, and fathered two sons: Neoptolemus (also called Pyrrhus, echoing his father's alias) and Oneiros.

  The prophet Calchas had told Odysseus that Troy could not fall without Achilles. Odysseus traveled to Skyros in the guise of a peddler selling women's clothes and jewellery, but he had placed a shield and spear among his wares. When Achilles immediately reached for the spear, Odysseus saw through the disguise and convinced him to join the Greek campaign. An alternative version of the unmasking has Odysseus arranging for a trumpet alarm to sound; while Lycomedes's women fled in panic, Achilles prepared to fight, giving himself away. Either way, his warrior instinct proved impossible to suppress.

• 4. Rage and Withdrawal

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  Homer's Iliad opens with a declaration of its true subject: the rage - menis - of Achilles, "the accursed rage that brought great suffering to the Achaeans." The poem covers only a few weeks of the decade-long war, and everything pivots on the moment Agamemnon, commander of the Achaean forces, seized Briseis, the daughter of Briseus, who was Achilles's slave and, as Achilles himself says later, someone he loved. Agamemnon had been forced to give up his own slave, Chryseis, after her father - the priest Chryses - begged for her return and Apollo sent a plague among the Greeks. Transferring Briseis to himself was Agamemnon's compensation, and for Achilles it was an unacceptable humiliation.

  Achilles withdrew from battle entirely. He prayed to Thetis to ask Zeus to help the Trojans gain ground so that Agamemnon would feel his absence. Zeus obliged, and the Trojan army, led by Hector, pushed the Greeks back toward their ships. Agamemnon sent Odysseus, Ajax, and Phoenix with an offer: Briseis returned, along with other gifts. Achilles refused everything and urged the Greeks to sail home. He planned to do the same.

  The situation grew desperate. Patroclus persuaded Achilles to let him lead the Myrmidons into battle wearing Achilles's own armour, hoping the sight would push the Trojans back from the ships. It worked at first. Patroclus pushed the Trojans away from the beaches, but Hector killed him before he could press on toward Troy. Hector took the armour. Achilles received the news from Antilochus, son of Nestor, and his grief was total. Thetis came to comfort him, then went to Hephaestus to commission new armour - including the elaborately described Shield of Achilles. The rage that had paralyzed him now aimed itself entirely at Hector.

• 5. The Killing of Hector

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  Returned to the battlefield, Achilles cut through the Trojan forces with such violence that the river god Scamander, angered that Achilles was choking his waters with the dead, rose against him. Hera and Hephaestus stopped the river god. Zeus himself sent the other gods to restrain Achilles, concerned that his uncontrolled fury might sack Troy before the time assigned for its fall - a detail Homer uses to suggest that Achilles's rage had reached a force capable of defying fate.

  Achilles chased Hector around the wall of Troy three times. Athena, disguised as Hector's brother Deiphobus, persuaded Hector to stop running and face his pursuer. When Hector realized the trick and understood he was alone, he charged at Achilles with his sword but missed. He asked Achilles only that his body be returned for proper burial after his death. Achilles refused him even that, saying his rage was so great he could eat Hector raw. He killed him and dragged the body by the heels behind his chariot.

  After Patroclus's shade visited Achilles in a dream and asked that his bones be placed with Achilles's own in the golden vase Thetis had given as a gift, Achilles held elaborate funeral games in his companion's honour. Then Priam himself, guided to Achilles's tent by the god Hermes, begged for the return of his son's body. Achilles relented and granted a nine-day truce, with burial on the tenth day, following the tradition of Niobe's offspring. The Iliad ends with Hector's funeral. The doom of Troy, and of Achilles himself, was still to come.

• 6. The Many Deaths of Achilles

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  Achilles died near the end of the war, but the precise story of how depends entirely on which source one consults. Hector, with his last breath in the Iliad, prophesied that Paris and Apollo would slay him at the Scaean Gates; Statius added the detail that the fatal arrow struck his heel. The earliest fragments of the Epic Cycle - the Cypria, the Little Iliad by Lesches of Pyrrha, the Aethiopis and Iliupersis by Arctinus of Miletus - mention no heel vulnerability at all. Later vase paintings often show the arrow or arrows striking his torso.

  Another tradition gives the death a different motivation entirely. In this version, Achilles fell in love with the Trojan princess Polyxena and asked Priam for her hand in marriage. Priam agreed, since the union would end the war. Paris, who would have had to give up Helen if Achilles married into the family, hid and shot him with a divine arrow during the private ceremony.

  After the death, Odysseus and Ajax the Great competed for Achilles's armour, each arguing before their Trojan prisoners that he was the braver warrior. The prisoners judged Odysseus the more deserving. Ajax, furious, cursed Odysseus; Athena punished Ajax by driving him temporarily mad so that he slaughtered a flock of sheep believing them to be his comrades. When he regained his senses and understood what he had done, he killed himself in shame. The armour eventually passed to Neoptolemus, Achilles's son. In the Odyssey, Odysseus encounters Ajax's shade in the underworld, and Ajax still refuses to speak to him.

  The Achilleid, the work of Statius, presents a further posthumous tradition: Achilles, in the underworld as described in the Odyssey, tells Odysseus that he would rather be a slave to the worst of masters than rule as king over all the dead.

• 7. The Cult on Leuce

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  Long after the Iliad was composed, the veneration of Achilles spread across the ancient world with a reach that bordered on the religious. His tomb in the Troad was visited by Thessalians, by Persian expeditionary forces, and by Alexander the Great. In 216 CE, the Roman emperor Caracalla held games around Achilles's burial mound while traveling to war against Parthia, consciously imitating Alexander. Sanctuaries existed in Sparta, Elis, and in the Magna Graecia cities of Tarentum, Locri, and Croton.

  The most remarkable center of the cult was an island in the Black Sea now identified with Snake Island, off the coast of modern Ukraine near Kiliia. Already in the fifth century BCE, Pindar mentioned a cult of Achilles on a bright island of the Black Sea. The Aethiopis, the lost epic composed after the Iliad, said that Thetis had snatched Achilles from his funeral pyre and carried him to a place called Leuce, or White Island. The Periplus of the Euxine Sea, written around 130 CE, described the island as uninhabited except for grazing goats and countless sea birds that performed a daily ritual: flying to sea, wetting their wings, returning, and sprinkling the temple with water before cleaning the hearth with their feathers.

  Visitors brought animals for sacrifice and consulted Achilles's oracle. A fifth-century BCE black-glazed lekythos found on the island in 1840 bore the inscription: "Glaukos, son of Poseidon, dedicated me to Achilles, lord of Leuce." By the third century CE, dedicatory stelae from the nearby city of Olbia called him Achilles Pontarches, roughly 'lord of the sea', and venerated him alongside the Olympian gods. Ruins of a square temple measuring thirty meters to a side were found on Snake Island by a visiting captain in 1823, though a lighthouse construction seventeen years later destroyed all surviving traces.

• 8. Achilles in the World

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  The name Achilles has been given to at least nine Royal Navy warships since 1744. A 60-gun vessel of that name fought at the Battle of Belleisle in 1761; a 74-gun ship served at Trafalgar. The New Zealand warship HMNZS Achilles became famous for her role in the Battle of the River Plate, and also served at Guadalcanal in 1942-1943 and at Okinawa in 1945. When she was eventually scrapped after being sold to the Indian Navy in 1948, parts of the ship were preserved in New Zealand.

  In 1890, Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress of Austria, had a summer palace built in Corfu and named it the Achilleion. In 1822, the Wellington Monument was erected in London as a statue representing Achilles, honoring Arthur Wellesley, the first duke of Wellington. A lizard species, Anolis achilles, is named for him because of its widened heel plates.

  In literature, the tradition runs from Dante's Inferno, where Achilles appears in the second circle among the lustful, through Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida of 1602, where he is portrayed as lazy and morally corrupt. Madeline Miller's 2011 novel The Song of Achilles, which explores the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus from boyhood forward, won the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction. Zeno of Elea, meanwhile, used Achilles in one of antiquity's most enduring philosophical puzzles: the argument that Achilles, however swift, could logically never overtake a tortoise given a head start, because the space between them could always be divided again. The Pelian Spear, which the centaur Chiron gave Achilles before the war and which allegedly no other man could wield, was reportedly preserved for centuries at the temple of Athena on the acropolis of Phaselis in Lycia, where Alexander the Great visited the city in 333 BCE.