Achilles' role as the hero of grief or distress forms an ironic juxtaposition with the conventional view of him as the hero of κλέος kléos ("glory", usually in war).
The grief or distress of the people is a theme raised numerous times in the Iliad (and frequently by Achilles himself). The name grew more popular, becoming common soon after the seventh century BC and was also turned into the female form Ἀχιλλεία ( Achilleía), attested in Attica in the fourth century BC ( IG II² 1617) and, in the form Achillia, on a stele in Halicarnassus as the name of a female gladiator fighting an "Amazon".Īchilles' name can be analyzed as a combination of ἄχος ( áchos) "distress, pain, sorrow, grief" and λαός ( laós) "people, soldiers, nation", resulting in a proto-form *Akhí-lāu̯os "he who has the people distressed" or "he whose people have distress". Linear B tablets attest to the personal name Achilleus in the forms a-ki-re-u and a-ki-re-we, the latter being the dative of the former. The Achilles tendon is also named after him due to these legends. Alluding to these legends, the term " Achilles' heel" has come to mean a point of weakness, especially in someone or something with an otherwise strong constitution. Later legends (beginning with Statius' unfinished epic Achilleid, written in the 1st century AD) state that Achilles was invulnerable in all of his body except for one heel, because when his mother Thetis dipped him in the river Styx as an infant, she held him by one of his heels. Although the death of Achilles is not presented in the Iliad, other sources concur that he was killed near the end of the Trojan War by Paris, who shot him with an arrow. He was the son of the Nereid Thetis and Peleus, king of Phthia.Īchilles' most notable feat during the Trojan War was the slaying of the Trojan prince Hector outside the gates of Troy.
In Greek mythology, Achilles ( / ə ˈ k ɪ l iː z/ ə- KIL-eez) or Achilleus ( Greek: Ἀχιλλεύς) was a hero of the Trojan War, the greatest of all the Greek warriors, and the central character of Homer's Iliad.
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