Achilles

Achilles, the hero of Homer's Iliad, was the son of the nereid Thetis and Pæleus, who was son of Æacus, and king of the Myrmidons at Phthia in Thessaly. He was taught eloquence and the arts of war by Phoenix, and the healing art by the centaur Chiron. He led his Myrmidons in fifty ships to Troy, although he knew that he would not return. In the war he was the bulwark of the Greeks, being at once the swiftest and bravest hero in the army. He destroyed many towns in the Troad before his quarrel with Agamemnon, with which the Iliad opens. A pestilence in the Greek camp being ascribed to the anger of Apollo, whose priest had been robbed of his daughter Chryseis by Agamemnon, that chief was compelled by the army to send the girl back to her father. On this he carried away Briseis, the fair captive of Achilles. The latter now retired to his tent, and neither the splendid offers made by Agamemnon nor the disasters of the Greeks could afterwards move him to take any part in the contest, until his dear friend Patroclus was slain by Hector. The hero then buckled on his armour, which had been made for him by Hephaestus, and of which the shield is described at great length by Homer. The fortunes of the field were now suddenly changed in favour of the Greeks; and the vengeance of Achilles was not satiated until he had slain a great number of the Trojan heroes, and lastly Hector himself, whose body he fastened to his chariot and dragged into the Grecian camp. He then buried his friend Patroclus with great funeral honours. King Priam, the father of Hector, came by night to the conqueror's tent, and prayed that the body of his son might be given to him. Achilles consented; and with the burial of Hector the Iliad closes. The hero himself fell in battle at the Scaean gate before the city was taken. His death is not expressly mentioned in the Iliad, but in the Odyssey his remains are buried, together with those of Patroclus, in a golden urn on the coast of Hellespont, where a mound was raised over them. Such is the Homeric account of Achilles, the swift-footed, fair-haired hero of the Iliad. He is at once the handsomest and bravest of the Greeks, terrible to his foes, tender and gentle with his friends, magnanimous and proud, defiant to the unjust prince, but reverent and obedient to the gods. He loves music, is the most devoted of friends, has a passionate hunger for glory, and dies in the full splendour of his youth. There are many later traditions which fill up the bare outlines of his history. His mother dipped him when an infant into the Styx, and hence he became invulnerable except in the heel by which she held him. To escape the fatal expedition to Troy, she hid him in the disguise of a girl at the court of Lycomedes at Scyros, but here his sex soon made itself known, for one of the king's daughters became by him the mother of a son, Pyrrhus or Neoptolemus. Ulysses discovered him by an artful stratagem. Disguised as a pedlar, he came to offer his wares for sale: the girls at once showed a natural interest in the articles of dress and ornaments, but the eager interest which he could not hide in the weapons of war at once revealed the youthful hero. Among his achievements at Troy are his conquest of the Amazon Penthesilea and of Memnon. Nor does he fall by human hands alone. Some say that he was killed by Apollo himself; others, that the god merely guided the weapon of Paris. Another story tells how the hero fell in love with Polyxena, daughter of Priam, and how he came unarmed to meet her in a temple of Apollo, where he was shot in the vulnerable heel by the treacherous Paris. His body was rescued by Ulysses and the Telamonian Ajax, and these heroes had a fierce contest for his famous armour. The hero was carried to the islands of the blessed, where he was united to Medea or Iphigenia.