Achilles

The Best of the Achaeans

Achilles is the central figure of Homer's Iliad, called simply "the best of the Achaeans" for his unmatched skill and speed in battle. He led the Myrmidons of Phthia to Troy, but the epic's plot turns on his anger, not his fighting: when Agamemnon seizes his war-prize Briseis, Achilles withdraws from the war entirely, and the Greeks suffer for it.

The Wrath and the Loss

Achilles refuses to fight even as the Trojans push the Greeks back to their ships. He relents only far enough to let his close companion Patroclus wear his armor and lead the Myrmidons into battle. When Hector kills Patroclus, Achilles' grief overtakes his anger at Agamemnon, and he returns to the field to kill Hector in single combat, dragging his body behind his chariot in a rage that the poem treats as excessive even by heroic standards.

Choice and Mortality

The Iliad frames Achilles around a foretold choice: a long, obscure life at home, or a short life crowned with undying fame at Troy. He chooses glory, and the poem's tragedy is that he knows the cost in advance. The Iliad itself ends before his death; later tradition (outside Homer) has him killed by Paris, with the god Apollo's aid, and later still gives him a single vulnerable spot at the heel.