Achilles, A Compendium of the Ancient Gods

Achilles was the greatest of the Greek heroes at Troy, son of the mortal Peleus king of Phthia in Thessaly and the sea-goddess Thetis. The marriage of Peleus and Thetis had been arranged because the gods had a prophecy that any son of Thetis would be greater than his father; the gods accordingly preferred to give her to a mortal, that the prophesied son would not threaten Olympus. The wedding was attended by all the gods (and was the occasion of the Judgment of Paris, when Eris's golden apple inscribed "to the fairest" set Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite quarreling, with Trojan-War consequences). Thetis, hoping to make her son immortal, dipped the infant Achilles in the waters of the Styx, holding him by the heel — and so he was invulnerable everywhere except where her grip had been (the famous "Achilles' heel" of the post-Homeric tradition; in Homer himself the detail is absent, and Achilles is mortal but not specifically invulnerable). She also tried, in some traditions, to burn away his mortal portions in fire, which Peleus interrupted; she also entrusted him to the centaur Chiron for education in heroic arts.

Achilles was given by oracle a choice between two destinies: to live a long, peaceful, obscure life at home, or to go to Troy and win immortal fame and die young. He chose the latter, but his mother attempted to delay the choice by hiding him on the island of Scyros disguised as a girl among the daughters of King Lycomedes; Odysseus, sent to find him, brought a peddler's pack of fine cloths and weapons to the palace, and the disguised Achilles betrayed himself by reaching for the weapons. He went to Troy with his Myrmidons and his beloved companion Patroclus, and at Troy he distinguished himself above all the Greek warriors.

The matter of the Iliad is a brief episode late in the Trojan War, in which Achilles, dishonored by Agamemnon (who had taken Achilles's prize-girl Briseis to replace one he had had to return), withdrew from the fighting in wounded honor; without him the Greeks were driven back to their ships; Patroclus, in Achilles's armor, led the Myrmidons out to relieve the pressure and was killed by Hector; Achilles, in inconsolable grief, returned to the fighting, killed Hector in single combat, dragged his body around the walls of Troy three times, and refused to let it be ransomed; at length the aged King Priam came alone in the night to Achilles's tent, kissed the hands that had killed his son, and begged for the body's return; Achilles wept, gave him the body, and the poem ends with the funeral of Hector. Achilles's own death is not in the Iliad — it is, as it were, just after the poem's close. He was killed by Paris, with an arrow guided by Apollo, that struck him in his vulnerable heel (in the post-Homeric tradition); his armor was disputed between Ajax and Odysseus, with grim consequences (Ajax's madness and suicide, the matter of Sophocles's Ajax).

Curator’s note

What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay

The Iliad is the principal source for the central episode (the Wrath of Achilles) and provides characterization that no later writer surpassed. The pre-Iliadic and post-Iliadic biographies are in the so-called Cyclic poems (the Cypria for the early life and the Trojan-War prelude, the Aethiopis for events after the Iliad, surviving only in summaries by Proclus); Apollodorus, Epitome 3–5, gives a connected prose summary. Statius's Latin Achilleid (first century CE, unfinished) treats the early life. The Achilles' heel as a specific point of vulnerability is post-Homeric; the dipping in the Styx is in Statius. The choice of fates is in Iliad 9.410–416, Achilles's own statement in his speech to the embassy.

Kin in the sources

Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.

Companion ofChironshe also entrusted him to the centaur Chiron for education in heroic arts
Companion ofOdysseusOdysseus, sent to find him, brought a peddler's pack of fine cloths and weapons to the palace
SlewHectorreturned to the fighting, killed Hector in single combat, dragged his body around the walls of Troy three times
Slain byParisHe was killed by Paris, with an arrow guided by Apollo, that struck him in his vulnerable heel
Consort ofMedeabecame immortal in the Elysian fields, married to Achilles

When the sources speak

Dated witnesses for The Heroic Cycle and the Tragic Houses. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline

c. 1600–1100 BCE: Mycenaean palace tablets in Linear B record offerings and divine names, but little continuous myth.
c. 1100–800 BCE: Post-palatial oral traditions and changing cult landscapes precede the surviving alphabetic epics.
late 8th–7th centuries BCE: The Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days give influential but non-exclusive divine orders.
7th–6th centuries BCE: Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry, colonization, and local sanctuary traditions multiply regional narratives.
6th–5th centuries BCE: Orphic, Pythagorean, and mystery materials develop alternative cosmogonies and afterlife doctrines.
5th century BCE: Athenian tragedy and comedy recast heroic houses and divine justice for civic audiences.
4th century BCE: Philosophers, antiquarians, and local historians interpret or criticize inherited myth.
323–31 BCE: Hellenistic poets and scholars systematize variants across an enlarged Greek world.