Of all the Greeks who sailed to Troy, Achilles was the swiftest, the strongest, and the most terrible. He is the central figure of Homer’s Iliad, the oldest surviving work of European literature, and the poem’s first word — mēnin, “wrath” — belongs to him. Yet Achilles is not a simple warrior. He is the hero who knows his fate in advance, who is offered the choice between a long, quiet life and a brief, glorious one, and who chooses glory with open eyes. His story is less about victory than about the price of it.
Achilles stands at the centre of the Greek idea of heroism. Later generations of Greeks — from Alexander the Great, who slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow and ran naked around the tomb of Achilles at Troy, to the philosophers who argued over whether his anger was noble or monstrous — measured themselves against him. To understand Achilles is to understand what the ancient Greeks most admired and most feared in a man.
Birth: The Son of a Goddess
Achilles was the son of Peleus, king of the Myrmidons in Phthia in Thessaly, and the sea-nymph Thetis, one of the fifty daughters of the old sea-god Nereus. The marriage was not a love match. Both Zeus and Poseidon had desired Thetis, until the Titan Prometheus (or, in some versions, the goddess Themis) revealed a prophecy: Thetis was destined to bear a son greater than his father. No god wanted to father his own overthrower, so the Olympians married her off to a mortal.
The wedding of Peleus and Thetis was the grandest in Greek myth. All the gods attended — all except Eris, goddess of strife, who had not been invited. In revenge she threw a golden apple among the guests, inscribed “For the fairest.” Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each claimed it, and the dispute that followed — settled by the Trojan prince Paris — led directly to the Trojan War. Achilles, in other words, was born out of the same feast that doomed him.
Thetis and the Attempt at Immortality
Thetis, a goddess, could not bear that her son would die. The most famous version of her attempt to make him immortal — dipping the infant in the waters of the River Styx while holding him by the heel — is surprisingly late. It is found clearly only in the Roman poet Statius, writing in the first century CE. Older Greek sources describe a different rite: Thetis anointed the baby with ambrosia by day and laid him in the fire by night to burn away his mortal parts. Peleus, waking to see his son in the flames, cried out in horror; Thetis, interrupted and insulted, abandoned her husband and returned to the sea.
The story of the vulnerable heel, explored in our article on the Achilles heel, is therefore a later addition. Homer’s Achilles is not invulnerable at all; he is simply the best fighter alive.
Education by Chiron
Peleus entrusted the boy to the wise centaur Chiron, who lived in a cave on Mount Pelion. Chiron was unlike the other, wild centaurs: he was a healer, a musician, and a teacher of heroes, and among his pupils were Jason, Asclepius, and (in some accounts) Heracles. From Chiron, Achilles learned to hunt, to ride, to play the lyre, and to heal wounds. Later sources add that the centaur fed him on the entrails of lions and the marrow of bears to give him their courage.
Achilles also grew up alongside Patroclus, a slightly older boy who had fled to Peleus’s court after accidentally killing a playmate. The bond between Achilles and Patroclus — whether understood as brotherhood, comradeship, or love, and the ancient Greeks themselves disagreed — would become the emotional centre of the Iliad.
Hidden Among the Girls of Skyros
Thetis knew a prophecy: if Achilles went to Troy, he would win undying glory but die young; if he stayed at home, he would live long and be forgotten. When the Greek kings began gathering an army to recover Helen, she disguised her son as a girl and hid him among the daughters of King Lycomedes on the island of Skyros. There Achilles fathered a son, Neoptolemus, with the princess Deidamia.
The Greeks, told by the seer Calchas that Troy could not fall without Achilles, sent the cunning Odysseus to find him. Odysseus arrived disguised as a merchant and laid out gifts for the princesses: jewellery, fabrics — and a spear and shield. Then he had a trumpet sounded as though the palace were under attack. The girls fled; one of them seized the weapons. Achilles was unmasked, and he sailed willingly for Troy.
Achilles at Troy
For nine years before the events of the Iliad, Achilles raided the cities around Troy. He sacked twelve cities by sea and eleven by land, by his own count, and killed or captured many of Troy’s allies. It was in one of these raids that he took the young woman Briseis as his prize of honour, and the priest’s daughter Chryseis was taken by the commander-in-chief, Agamemnon.
The events of the Iliad cover just a few weeks in the tenth year of the war, and they turn entirely on Achilles’s anger. When Agamemnon is forced to give up Chryseis, he takes Briseis from Achilles instead. Humiliated, Achilles withdraws from the fighting and asks his mother to persuade Zeus to let the Trojans win until the Greeks realize what they have lost. The full arc of that quarrel and its consequences is told in The Wrath of Achilles.
Patroclus, Hector, and the Armour of Hephaestus
With Achilles sulking in his tent, the Trojans under Hector drive the Greeks back to their ships. Patroclus, unable to watch his comrades die, borrows Achilles’s armour and leads the Myrmidons into battle. He drives the Trojans back to their walls — and is killed by Hector, with help from the god Apollo.
Achilles’s grief is volcanic. He pours ashes on his head, tears his hair, and howls so terribly that the Trojans flee at the sound of his voice alone. Thetis brings him new armour forged overnight by Hephaestus, including the famous shield described in Book 18 of the Iliad, which depicts the whole world in miniature: cities at peace and at war, weddings and lawsuits, ploughing and harvest, dancing and the encircling Ocean.
Achilles returns to battle and slaughters the Trojans in such numbers that the river-god Scamander rises against him, choked with corpses. At last he meets Hector before the walls of Troy, chases him three times around the city, and kills him. Then, in an act that shocked even the gods, he drags Hector’s body behind his chariot and refuses to return it for burial.
Priam’s Ransom
The Iliad does not end with triumph but with pity. Priam, the old king of Troy, guided by the god Hermes, crosses the battlefield by night and enters Achilles’s hut. He kneels, kisses the hands that killed his sons, and begs for Hector’s body. Achilles, thinking of his own old father Peleus whom he will never see again, weeps with his enemy. He returns the body and grants a truce for the funeral. The poem closes with the burial of “Hector, tamer of horses.”
It is this scene — the recognition of shared mortality between two enemies — that has made the Iliad one of the great works of world literature, and Achilles more than a killing machine.
The Death of Achilles
Homer does not narrate Achilles’s death, though he foreshadows it repeatedly. Later poems of the Epic Cycle, now lost but summarized by ancient scholars, and later writers such as Ovid, filled the gap. After killing Hector, Achilles fought and killed the Amazon queen Penthesilea and the Ethiopian prince Memnon, son of the Dawn. Then, before the Scaean Gate of Troy, he was shot by Paris, whose arrow was guided by Apollo. In the later tradition, the arrow struck his heel.
The Greeks fought fiercely over his body; Ajax carried it from the field while Odysseus held off the Trojans. Thetis and the Nereids came up from the sea to mourn him, and the Muses sang his dirge. His ashes were mingled with those of Patroclus in a golden urn.
His armour was awarded to Odysseus rather than Ajax — a decision that drove Ajax to madness and suicide, and became the subject of Sophocles’s tragedy Ajax.
Achilles in the Underworld
In the Odyssey, Odysseus meets the shade of Achilles in the land of the dead and praises him as a lord among the dead. Achilles’s reply is one of the most famous lines in Greek poetry. He would rather, he says, be a hired labourer on a poor man’s farm, alive, than king over all the dead. The hero who chose glory over life seems, in death, to regret the bargain — or at least to understand what it cost.
Other traditions gave Achilles a happier afterlife. Some said Thetis carried him to the White Island (Leuke) in the Black Sea, where he lived on with Helen or Medea, and where sailors reported hearing the clash of arms and the singing of heroes. A real cult of Achilles flourished there and around the Black Sea coast for centuries.
Achilles and Patroclus
The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus has been debated since antiquity. Homer never describes it as sexual, but Aeschylus, in his lost play Myrmidons, portrayed them as lovers, and Plato’s Symposium discusses which of the two was the elder partner. Other ancient writers insisted they were comrades only. Modern retellings, most notably Madeline Miller’s novel The Song of Achilles (2011), have drawn heavily on the romantic reading.
What is certain is that Patroclus’s death is the turning point of the Iliad. Achilles’s anger shifts from Agamemnon to Hector, and the hero who withdrew from the war for the sake of his honour returns to it for the sake of grief.
Symbolism and Legacy
Achilles embodies the central tension of Greek heroic culture: the pursuit of kleos, the undying fame that comes from great deeds, against the certainty of death. He is the hero who will not compromise, who would rather die than be shamed, and whose anger destroys friend and foe alike. The Iliad neither simply praises nor condemns him; it shows the terrible cost of greatness.
His name survives in the Achilles tendon and the phrase “Achilles heel,” meaning a single fatal weakness. His story has been retold by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, by Christa Wolf in Cassandra, by Pat Barker in The Silence of the Girls — which tells the war from Briseis’s perspective — and on screen in the film Troy (2004).
Last reviewed: September 2026.