Achilles

Achilles

In Greek legend, the son of Peleus and the Nereid Thetis, and king of the Myrmidons, a Thessalian tribe. He is the hero of Homer's Iliad and became the prototype of the Greeks' conception of manly valor and beauty.

He took part in the Trojan War on the side of the Greeks as their most illustrious warrior, and slew the Trojan hero Hector. Achilles had been dipped in the Styx by his mother, which rendered him invulnerable except in the heel by which she held him and where he was fatally wounded by an arrow shot by Paris, Hector's younger brother, or, according to another version of the story, by the god Apollo who had assumed Paris' shape. heel of Achilles. The vulnerable or weak point in a man's character or in a nation.