Achilles: The Greatest Hero of the Trojan War

Achilles stands as the greatest warrior in all of Greek mythology — a figure of blazing martial brilliance and consuming passion whose life burned short and brilliant like the flame he was compared to. The central figure of Homer's Iliad, Achilles embodied the Greek ideal of the hero: supremely gifted, fiercely proud, driven by an insatiable hunger for glory (kleos), and fully aware that greatness would come at the cost of a long life.

Son of the mortal king Peleus and the immortal sea-nymph Thetis, Achilles was almost divine — near-invulnerable in body and unmatched in speed and strength. Yet it was his human passions — his wrath, his grief, his pride — that drove the Iliad's entire narrative and sealed his fate before the walls of Troy.

For ancient Greeks, Achilles was not merely a story: he was the archetype of the warrior-hero, a cultural touchstone for courage, excellence (arete), and the glory that outlasts death. His name has echoed through three thousand years of Western literature, philosophy, and art.

Achilles was born in Phthia, a kingdom in Thessaly, to Peleus, its mortal king, and Thetis, one of the fifty Nereids (sea-nymphs) and a goddess of great power. The union between a mortal and a divine being was itself extraordinary: Zeus and Poseidon had both desired Thetis, but a prophecy warned that her son would surpass his father in greatness. Fearing this, the gods arranged her marriage to the mortal Peleus instead — ensuring any offspring would be mortal-born.

At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis — one of the most celebrated gatherings in mythological tradition — the goddess Eris (Strife) threw the Apple of Discord inscribed "For the Fairest" among the guests. The dispute it sparked between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite set in motion the chain of events that would culminate in the Trojan War, the stage on which Achilles would achieve eternal glory.

Thetis, knowing her son's fate, took extraordinary steps to protect him. In the most famous account, she dipped the infant Achilles into the River Styx, the boundary between the living world and the underworld, granting him invulnerability wherever the water touched. Holding him by his heel, she left that single spot unprotected — the origin of the legendary "Achilles' heel." Earlier traditions recorded by Apollodorus describe a different method: Thetis anointed the child with ambrosia and held him over a fire each night to burn away his mortality, until Peleus discovered the ritual and interrupted it.

Achilles spent his early childhood under the tutelage of Chiron the centaur, the wisest and most learned of his kind, who educated many of Greece's greatest heroes on the slopes of Mount Pelion. Chiron trained the young Achilles in the arts of warfare, horsemanship, hunting, music, and medicine — cultivating both the warrior and the man. Achilles learned to play the lyre and sing of heroes' deeds, a detail Homer uses to humanize him in the Iliad.

A vital relationship of this period was his bond with Patroclus, the son of Menoetius. Patroclus came to live in Peleus's household as a ward after accidentally killing a companion in a quarrel, and the two boys grew inseparable. Ancient sources describe their friendship as the most profound bond either would know — Homer presents Patroclus as Achilles's closest companion, his other self, and the grief of losing him would become the emotional fulcrum of the entire Iliad.

When the call for warriors to join the expedition against Troy went out, Thetis — foreknowing that Achilles would die if he went to Troy — disguised her son as a girl and hid him among the daughters of King Lycomedes on the island of Skyros. During this time, Achilles fathered a son, Neoptolemus (also called Pyrrhus), with Lycomedes's daughter Deidamia. The Greek commanders, informed by a prophecy that Troy could not be taken without Achilles, sent the cunning Odysseus to find him. Odysseus laid out gifts including weapons among the finery — Achilles alone reached for the sword and spear, revealing himself instantly. He chose glory over long life and sailed for Troy.

The First Landing and Telephus: On the Greek fleet's initial misdirected landing in Mysia, Achilles wounded King Telephus, who had ambushed the Greeks while they ravaged his kingdom. The wound refused to heal, and an oracle declared that only the one who inflicted it could cure it. Achilles later treated Telephus using rust scraped from his spear, earning safe passage and guidance toward Troy.

The Sack of Lyrnessus and Capture of Briseis: During the nine-year siege, Achilles led devastating raids on cities surrounding Troy. In the sack of Lyrnessus, he slew King Mynes and his brothers and captured the princess Briseis, who became his war prize and, by the time of the Iliad, someone he held in deep regard. In raids on other cities, he killed Troilus — a son of Priam — fulfilling a prophecy that Troy could not fall if Troilus reached the age of twenty.

The Wrath of Achilles — Withdrawal from Battle: When Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and commander of the Greek coalition, was forced to surrender his own war prize Chryseis to her father (the priest of Apollo, whose plague was ravaging the Greek camp), he demanded Briseis from Achilles as compensation. Achilles, enraged at the dishonor, withdrew himself and his Myrmidons entirely from the fighting. The Greeks suffered devastating defeats in his absence. Achilles petitioned his mother Thetis, who in turn persuaded Zeus to tip the balance of battle in Troy's favor until the Greeks begged Achilles to return — a plot that forms the backbone of the Iliad.

The Death of Patroclus and Achilles's Return: As the Trojans pushed to the Greek ships, Patroclus begged Achilles to let him lead the Myrmidons into battle wearing Achilles's own divine armor. Achilles relented, warning Patroclus to drive the Trojans back but not pursue them to the walls of Troy. Patroclus fought brilliantly, killing many Trojans including Sarpedon, Zeus's own son. But Apollo intervened, stripping Patroclus of his armor and leaving him vulnerable. Hector delivered the killing blow.

The Slaying of Hector: Consumed by grief and rage, Achilles reconciled with Agamemnon and returned to the battlefield with new god-forged armor — a masterwork crafted by Hephaestus at Thetis's request, featuring the famous Shield of Achilles depicting scenes of mortal life. He drove the Trojans back in a furious rampage, filling the River Scamander with bodies until the river-god rose against him. Finally, Achilles cornered the Trojan champion Hector outside the walls of Troy. Athena tricked Hector into standing his ground, and Achilles killed him with a spear through the throat. In his grief and fury, Achilles dragged Hector's body behind his chariot around the walls of Troy for days — an act of desecration that even the gods found excessive. Only when the aged King Priam came secretly to Achilles's tent and begged for his son's body did Achilles relent, moved by Priam's grief and his own thoughts of his father Peleus. He returned Hector's body and granted twelve days of truce for funeral rites.

Key Allies:

Patroclus was Achilles's closest companion, bound to him by bonds that ancient writers described as deeper than brotherhood. His death was the pivotal moment of Achilles's life, transforming personal grief into the engine of destruction that ultimately doomed Troy.

Thetis was a constant and devoted mother, intervening with Zeus and commissioning new armor from Hephaestus. Her divine influence shaped several key turning points of the Trojan War on her son's behalf.

Phoenix served as Achilles's tutor and surrogate grandfather-figure, one of the embassy sent to convince Achilles to return to battle in Book IX of the Iliad. His appeal to their shared history shows the depth of parental love Achilles inspired even in mortals.

Odysseus had a complex relationship with Achilles — he exposed Achilles at Skyros, and later led the embassy to plead for his return. Though fundamentally different in temperament (Achilles the man of action and honor, Odysseus the man of cunning and strategy), they served as the two poles of Greek heroic virtue.

Ajax the Great was Achilles's closest peer in raw physical power among the Greeks, and the two competed for the title of greatest warrior. After Achilles's death, they fought over his divine armor — a contest Ajax would ultimately lose to Odysseus, driving Ajax to madness and suicide.

Key Enemies:

Hector, crown prince and greatest warrior of Troy, was Achilles's defining rival and the man who killed Patroclus. Homer portrays Hector with equal dignity and humanity to Achilles, making their confrontation the emotional and moral heart of the Iliad.

Agamemnon's arrogance and seizure of Briseis triggered the wrath that nearly lost the Greeks the entire war, making him indirectly responsible for Patroclus's death and the cascade of consequences that followed.

Apollo consistently opposed Achilles throughout the war, intervening to protect Troy and its champions. He guided Paris's fatal arrow to Achilles's heel, ultimately causing the hero's death.

Penthesilea, the Amazon queen who came to Troy's aid, was killed by Achilles — though some traditions hold that Achilles was moved to grief and love upon seeing her face after the killing.

Memnon, the Ethiopian king and son of the dawn goddess Eos, was another great champion who came to Troy's defense. Their single combat was itself decided by Zeus weighing their fates in his golden scales. Achilles slew Memnon, though Eos secured her son a form of immortality.

Achilles died as he had always known he would — young, before the walls of Troy, in the full blaze of his glory. The prophecy had been clear since his infancy: he faced a choice between a long, unremarkable life and a short life of supreme glory that would echo through eternity. He had chosen the latter without hesitation.

After slaying Hector, Achilles continued his rampage through Troy's defenders. He killed the Amazon queen Penthesilea and the Ethiopian king Memnon, each a formidable champion in their own right. But even as his legend grew, the walls of Troy remained unbroken and his own fate drew near.

His death came not in open combat but from an arrow — a weapon considered less honorable in Greek martial culture than the spear or sword. Paris, guided by the god Apollo (who harbored deep enmity toward Achilles for killing his beloved Trojans and for desecrating Hector's body), loosed an arrow that struck Achilles in his one vulnerable point: his heel. Some accounts specify the arrow struck when Achilles was at the Scaean Gate, drawn there by his love for the Trojan princess Polyxena. Others place the shot during general battle. In all accounts, Ajax the Great and Odysseus fought over his body, Ajax carrying the corpse back to the Greek ships while Odysseus held the Trojans at bay.

Thetis, her Nereid sisters, and the Muses came to mourn Achilles. He was cremated and his ashes mingled with those of Patroclus in a golden urn crafted by Hephaestus — the two companions joined even in death, as they had been in life. His divine armor became the prize contested by Ajax and Odysseus, the judgment of which drove Ajax to suicide.

Achilles had died at an extraordinarily young age — tradition places him at around twenty or twenty-two at his death — but he had accomplished more than most heroes achieved in full lifetimes, and his name was already eternal.

In death, Achilles achieved an afterlife befitting a figure poised between mortal and divine. Most traditions place him on Leuce (the White Island) in the Black Sea, an Elysian paradise reserved for the most exalted heroes, where he lived in eternal bliss — sometimes in the company of Patroclus and other great heroes. Later traditions spoke of him ruling in Elysium or the Islands of the Blessed alongside Patroclus, Medea, and even Helen of Troy.

Achilles was worshipped as a hero-god (heros theos) across the Greek world with unusual intensity. Colonies on the Black Sea shores, including the city of Olbia, maintained active cults to Achilles of the White Island, where sailors reported hearing ghostly battle-cries across the water. Sparta, Athens, and Thessaly all had sanctuaries to Achilles. Pausanias records that at Elis, Achilles received sacrifices before the Olympic Games. In the Troad (the region around Troy), both Greeks and Trojans-descended peoples maintained his cult — acknowledging that his greatness transcended the war that killed him.

Alexander the Great famously visited Troy at the outset of his Persian campaign, offering sacrifices at Achilles's tomb and lamenting that the hero had been fortunate in having Homer to trumpet his glory. This gesture encapsulated Achilles's cultural legacy: he was the prototype of the warrior-king seeking undying fame, and generations of rulers and conquerors consciously modeled themselves on his image.

The philosophical tradition also engaged deeply with Achilles. Plato in the Apology has Socrates cite Achilles as a model for choosing honor and duty over survival. Aristotle analyzed his pride and wrath as case studies in virtue and excess. The Stoics debated whether his passionate nature represented heroic greatness or catastrophic lack of self-control — a tension that made Achilles philosophically inexhaustible.

No figure from Greek mythology, save perhaps Odysseus, has generated as vast a creative legacy as Achilles. Homer's Iliad — composed in the 8th century BCE and considered one of the foundational texts of Western literature — centers entirely on "the wrath of Achilles" and its consequences. The poem's psychological depth in portraying Achilles's grief, rage, and ultimate humanity set the template for literary heroism for three millennia.

In ancient visual art, Achilles appears on hundreds of surviving vases, friezes, and statues. Archaic and Classical pottery depicts him arming for battle, playing dice with Ajax, tending Patroclus's wounds, killing Penthesilea, and dragging Hector's body. The François Vase (570 BCE) shows his funeral games. The Achilles Painter, named for his signature work depicting the hero, was one of the finest vase painters of the Classical period.

Ancient tragedy engaged with Achilles extensively. Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus all wrote plays about him, most now fragmentary. Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis portrays Achilles as reluctantly entangled in Agamemnon's deception of Iphigenia — a rare depiction of the hero in a morally ambiguous domestic situation.

Later antiquity produced the Achilleid of the Roman poet Statius (1st century CE), an unfinished epic focused on Achilles's childhood and discovery on Skyros, and the Posthomerica of Quintus of Smyrna, which fills in the events of the Trojan War between the Iliad and Odyssey including Achilles's death.

Medieval and Renaissance traditions transformed Achilles into a knight-errant and a symbol of chivalric virtue. Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida offers a deliberately deflating portrait — Achilles as prideful and petulant, his greatness shadowed by vanity and the killing of an unarmed Hector. In contrast, Racine's Iphigénie presents him as a noble romantic hero.

Modern literature and film have returned repeatedly to the figure: Derek Walcott's Nobel-winning epic Omeros transposes Achillean themes to the Caribbean; Madeline Miller's novel The Song of Achilles (2011) retells the story from Patroclus's perspective and became a global bestseller; and Wolfgang Petersen's film Troy (2004), with Brad Pitt as Achilles, introduced the myth to a new generation of audiences worldwide.