The Death of Achilles
Achilles Stop 3 of 3
In brief
- Achilles was proof against wounds everywhere his mother's hand had covered when she dipped him in the Styx: everywhere except the heel she held him by.
- Paris, the least warlike of Priam's sons, shot the arrow that found it, with Apollo guiding the aim.
- Ajax carried the body out while Odysseus held off the Trojans, and the two of them later fell out badly over who should inherit the armour.
He had always known roughly how it would end. His mother had told him plainly, when he was young enough to choose: stay home and live a long and unremembered life, or go to Troy and be spoken about forever, briefly. He had chosen, and after Patroclus there was nothing left to reconsider.
He went on winning. He killed Penthesilea the Amazon queen and Memnon the Ethiopian prince, and he pushed the Trojans back to the Scaean Gate again and would have gone through it. But Apollo had not forgotten the priest's daughter at the start of the war, or the arrows the god had sent into the Greek camp because of her, and he was on the wall.
The shot came from Paris: the same Paris who had started all of it by taking Helen, who was a better archer than he was a soldier and never pretended otherwise. Apollo turned the arrow to the one place on Achilles' body where his mother's grip had kept the water of the Styx from touching him. It went into his heel, and that was enough.
The fighting over the corpse lasted the rest of the day. Ajax lifted him onto his shoulders and carried him out while Odysseus fought a retreating action behind them. Afterwards the Greeks awarded the armour of Achilles to Odysseus rather than Ajax, and Ajax, who had carried the body, did not survive the insult.
