The Death of Achilles: Paris' Arrow and the Fatal Heel

Achilles dies at the Scaean Gates of Troy in the tenth year of the war, shortly after killing Hector. In the most widespread version, an arrow shot by Paris and guided by Apollo strikes him in the ankle. The Iliad foretells this death again and again but never narrates it; the scene is known from a summary of a lost epic, the Aethiopis, from the Odyssey, which describes his funeral, and from later mythographers. The famous Achilles’ heel, left dry when his mother Thetis dipped him in the Styx, is a late addition, first found in the first century AD in the Roman poet Statius.

A death foretold from the start

The death of Achilles is built into his fate. In Iliad 9.410-416, he tells Agamemnon’s envoys that his mother has revealed two destinies: stay at Troy and die there with undying fame, or go home and live long without glory. He has chosen the first.

The poem keeps reminding him. When he resolves to avenge Patroclus, Thetis warns that his own death will follow soon after Hector’s (18.95-96). His horse Xanthus, given a voice by Hera, predicts that he will be brought down “by a god and a man” (19.416-417). Achilles himself recalls his mother’s warning that he would die beneath Troy’s walls by Apollo’s swift arrows (21.277-278). Finally the dying Hector names the place and the killers: “on the day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo destroy you, for all your valor, at the Scaean Gates” (22.358-360).

Yet the Iliad ends with Hector’s funeral. The death of Achilles, prepared book after book, stays outside the poem.

Penthesilea and Memnon: the last battles

The sequel was told in the Aethiopis, an epic of the Trojan Cycle attributed to Arctinus of Miletus, now known only through a summary by Proclus. After Hector’s death, two new allies come to Troy’s aid.

Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons and daughter of Ares, comes first. Achilles kills her in battle. Tradition adds that he falls for her as she dies; Thersites, the foul-mouthed soldier of the Iliad, mocks him for it, and Achilles kills him with a blow of his fist. He must sail to Lesbos to be purified of the killing.

Memnon, king of the Ethiopians and son of Eos, the Dawn, follows, wearing armor forged by Hephaestus like Achilles’ own. He kills Antilochus, Nestor’s son, Achilles’ closest friend after Patroclus. Achilles avenges him and kills Memnon. Eos wins immortality for her son from Zeus, and later poets read the morning dew as the tears she sheds for him. The echo of the Iliad is clear: a friend killed, a revenge, a goddess’ son, and a death that follows close behind.

At the Scaean Gates: Paris’ arrow

After Memnon, Achilles routs the Trojans and chases them into the city. There, at the Scaean Gates, Paris and Apollo bring him down, the mortal and the god that Hector named.

The sources split the credit differently.

• The Aethiopis, as Proclus summarizes it, says only that Achilles is killed “by Paris and Apollo”.
• Apollodorus (Epitome 5.3) specifies that Alexander (Paris) and Apollo shoot him “in the ankle” (sphuron).
• Virgil (Aeneid 6.56-58) and Ovid (Metamorphoses 12.580-619) make Apollo the guide of Paris’ arrow. In Ovid, Neptune, furious that Achilles killed his son Cycnus, asks Apollo to destroy him; Apollo, hidden in a cloud, points the archer to his target.
• Hyginus (Fabulae 107) says that Apollo, in anger, took Paris’ shape and himself struck the heel “which he is said to have had mortal”.
• Quintus of Smyrna (Posthomerica 3) has Apollo shoot alone, an arrow to the ankle; the wounded Achilles pulls it out, defies the god and kills several more Trojans before he collapses.

The irony is deliberate. The best of the Greek warriors falls not to an equal but to Paris, whom the Iliad paints as a seducer of doubtful courage, and to a god who has hated him since he killed Hector and dragged his body.

The Achilles’ heel: a late invention

The heel, now inseparable from the hero, is missing from Homer. In Iliad 21.166-167, Asteropaeus’ spear even grazes Achilles’ arm and draws blood: he is not invulnerable at all. His divine armor, forged by Hephaestus, protects him better than his skin.

Two separate traditions try to account for his toughness.

• Fire. In Apollonius of Rhodes (Argonautica 4.869-879) and Apollodorus (Library 3.13.6), Thetis lays the baby in the fire each night to burn away his mortal part and anoints him with ambrosia by day. Peleus catches her at it and cries out; she abandons the ritual and leaves the house. The immortality stays unfinished.
• The Styx. Statius’ Achilleid (1.133-134 and 268-270) is the first surviving text in which Thetis dips her son in the waters of the Styx. The heel she holds him by stays dry and becomes his one weak spot.

An arrow in the foot is older than Statius, though: Apollodorus and several archaic images show Achilles wounded there. The heel became the weak point par excellence, so much so that in 1693 the Flemish anatomist Philip Verheyen named the tendon joining the calf to the heel the Achilles tendon (chorda Achillis).

The fight over the body

With Achilles down, both armies fight for his corpse. In the Odyssey (24.36-42), the ghost of Agamemnon recalls that the battle raged all day and ended only when Zeus sent a storm. The Aethiopis divides the roles: Ajax, the giant, hoists the body onto his shoulders and carries it to the ships while Odysseus holds off the Trojans. Ajax carrying Achilles is one of the oldest scenes in Greek vase painting: it already decorates both handles of the François Vase, around 570 BC.

That day haunts the survivors. In Odyssey 5.308-310, caught in a storm at sea, Odysseus wishes he had died then, when the Trojans hurled their spears at him over Achilles’ body: he would have had a funeral and fame.

The funeral of Achilles

The Odyssey (24.43-94) describes an extraordinary funeral. Thetis rises from the sea with the Nereids, and their wailing terrifies the army. The nine Muses sing the lament in turn. For seventeen days gods and mortals mourn; on the eighteenth the body is burned. His bones are gathered in a golden urn, a gift from Dionysus made by Hephaestus, and mixed with those of Patroclus. The Greeks raise a great mound on a headland over the Hellespont, visible far out to sea, and Thetis sets out prizes for funeral games.

The armor of Achilles and the suicide of Ajax

Achilles’ death causes another. His Hephaestus-made armor is to go to the bravest of the Greeks, and Ajax and Odysseus both claim it. In the Little Iliad it is awarded to Odysseus; other versions have Trojan prisoners questioned, or Trojan girls overheard, to decide. Humiliated, Ajax goes mad, slaughters livestock he takes for the Greek leaders, then kills himself, the subject of Sophocles’ Ajax. In Odyssey 11.543-567, his ghost still refuses to say a word to Odysseus in the Underworld.

How the ancient versions differ

• Homer foretells the death and describes the funeral but never shows the killing. His Achilles is not invulnerable.
• The Aethiopis fixes the sequence of Penthesilea, Memnon, the Scaean Gates and the fight for the body, and adds an ending the Odyssey ignores: Thetis snatches her son from the pyre and carries him to the White Island (Leuke).
• Pindar (Olympian 2.79-80) places Achilles in the Isles of the Blessed, where Thetis brought him after winning over Zeus. Other poets, Ibycus and Simonides according to an ancient commentary, give him Medea as his wife in the afterlife, a detail Apollodorus repeats (Epitome 5.5).
• The late “Trojan histories” attributed to Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian rationalize the myth: Achilles, in love with Priam’s daughter Polyxena, is lured to the shrine of Thymbraean Apollo to negotiate a marriage and treacherously killed. Polyxena is later sacrificed on his tomb, an episode already found in the Sack of Ilion and in Euripides’ Hecuba.

What his death says about the hero

The Odyssey gives a striking counterpoint. In Book 11 (488-491), Odysseus visits the dead and congratulates Achilles on ruling among them. Achilles answers that he would rather be a hired laborer for a poor farmer on earth than king over all the dead. The hero who chose glory over life seems, once dead, to regret it; yet he rejoices to hear of his son Neoptolemus’ courage.

Later ages kept both sides. Alexander the Great, who saw himself as a new Achilles, crowned the hero’s tomb near Troy in 334 BC (Arrian, Anabasis 1.12.1). Achilles’ cult on the White Island, today’s Snake Island in the Black Sea, was still described by Arrian in the second century AD. And “Achilles’ heel” has come to mean, across European languages, the single weak point of someone or something otherwise thought invincible.

Further reading

The hero’s whole life is traced in the entry on Achilles, and his mother, the sea nymph who tried to make him immortal, in the one on Thetis. The archer who killed him has his own entry, Paris, as does the god who guided the shot, Apollo. For the wider context, read the Trojan War, then the Trojan Horse, which opens on the deadlock left by Achilles’ death. The contest for his armor continues in the entries on Ajax and Odysseus, and the meeting among the dead in the Odyssey. Eos’ grief for Memnon, the other goddess’ son who fell at Troy, is told in the entry on Eos.