Achilles

Achilles is the central hero of Homer's Iliad, the greatest warrior on the Greek side in the Trojan War. He was the son of the mortal king Peleus and the sea nymph Thetis. His anger at the Greek commander Agamemnon, and his withdrawal from the fighting, drive the plot of the poem.

After his friend Patroclus is killed wearing Achilles' armor, Thetis goes to Olympus to ask Hephaestus for a new set. Book 18 describes what she finds in the smith god's house: twenty tripods on golden wheels that roll to the gods' assembly by themselves and back again, and golden maidens with mind, voice and strength who help the lame god move. Hephaestus then forges the famous shield of Achilles.

Later stories, not in Homer, say Thetis dipped him in the river Styx to make him invulnerable except at the heel by which she held him, where he was killed by an arrow from Paris. Achilles is a figure of myth and epic.