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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Achilles Biography ACHILLES, (Gk. Achilleus). The hero of Homer's Iliad, and the type of glorious youth. In the Homeric poems his story is simple. The son of King Peleus and the sea-goddess Thetis, he was brought up at his father's court in Phthia, in Thessaly, Greece, until he was induced to take part in the Trojan War; when he learned that he could have either a long but inglorious life or a short and famous career, he preferred an early death with fame. This fate gives Achilles a tinge of melancholy characteristic of the Greek mind. While the Greeks were in camp before Troy, Achilles plundered the surrounding country and secured as his booty the beautiful maiden Briseïs. The Iliad narrates the wrath of Achilles because Agamemnon deprived him of Briseïs, whom he had come to love, to replace Chryseïs, whom Agamemnon had been forced to restore to her father Chryses, priest of Apollo, to avert the wrath of Apollo from the Greeks. In the absence of Achilles, who in his rage refuses to fight longer for the Greeks, the Trojans drive the Greeks to their ships; the complete destruction of the Greeks is averted only when Achilles allows his friend Patroclus to lead his Myrmidons to the rescue. Pursuing the Trojans to their walls, Patroclus is slain by Hector, and Achilles, overwhelmed with grief, becomes reconciled with Agamemnon, that he may hasten to obtain revenge. He returns to the fight, and after driving the Trojans within the city, slays Hector and drags his body to the ships. After celebrating the funeral of Patroclus with great pomp, he yields to the command of Zeus and allows Priam to ransom the body of his son Hector. In the Odyssey we have allusions to the death of Achilles, his splendid burial, and the renown of his son Neoptolemus. Later epic poems and other compositions add many details. According to some, his mother renders him invulnerable by dipping him in the river Styx; but his heel, by which she held him, was not immersed, and here he received his death wound from an arrow. He was educated by the centaur Chiron, and was afterward hidden, robed as a girl, by his mother at Scyros, among the daughters of Lycomedes, that he might escape the temptation to join the expedition against Troy. He was needed, however, in the expedition, and was detected by the craft of Odysseus, who, disguised as a peddler, offered a sword, as well as trinkets, for sale to the maidens. When a trumpet suddenly sounded a call to arms, Achilles at once seized the sword and, being recognized, was then easily induced to join the Greeks (Ovid, Metamorphoses, vol. xiii, 162 ff.; Statius, Achillcis, vol. i, 207 ff.). His combats with Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, and with Memnon (q.v.), who came, to aid Priam after the death of Hector, were favorite subjects with Greek artists. He met his death at the hands of Apollo and Paris before the Scæan gate, or in the temple of Apollo, whither he had gone to meet Polyxena, daughter of Priam, whom he was to wed. To appease his spirit she was slaughtered on his grave after the capture of Troy. After his death he was transported to the Islands of the Blessed, where he was united with Medea. Achilles was worshiped in Laconia and other parts of Greece, and it is probable that, like other Greek heroes, he was originally a god, honored especially by the Achæans of Phthiotis. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. I (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 87. |