Achilles died at Troy after killing Hector and before the Greek army captured the city. In the best-known version of his death, Paris, the Trojan prince who was Hector’s brother, shot him while Apollo helped guide the attack. The killing took place near the Scaean Gate. Ancient storytellers agreed on the hero’s fate more readily than on the details: in some accounts Paris fires the arrow, in others Apollo does, and the place where Achilles is wounded also varies.
In the familiar account, Achilles’ mother Thetis, a sea goddess, immerses him in the underworld river Styx to make his body invulnerable. Because she held him by one foot, his heel remained exposed. This is a relatively late form of the story. Homer says nothing about the immersion, and the earliest accounts of the killing do not depend on one vulnerable piece of skin. Ancient depictions sometimes even show Achilles struck by several arrows.
Homer never narrates Achilles’ death: the hero is still alive when the Iliad ends. The poem closes with the funeral of Hector, whom Achilles killed after Hector defeated Patroclus. Greek audiences knew what happened to Achilles from other epic traditions. Those works now survive unevenly, through quotations, outlines and much later writers, and they sometimes disagree about the circumstances and meaning of his death.
The Lost Epic That Told of Achilles’ Death
An early epic called the Aethiopis continued the events of the Trojan War beyond those told in the Iliad. Tradition attributed it to Arctinus of Miletus, although its authorship and date are uncertain. The poem itself has been lost. Its main sequence is known from an outline transmitted under Proclus’ name. The outline preserves the sequence ascribed to the epic, but none of its scenes or wording in full, and not necessarily its original qualifications.
After Hector’s death, Penthesilea, the Amazon queen, comes to Troy’s defence. Achilles kills her and then kills Thersites, a Greek soldier who insults him over Penthesilea. He must be purified for killing a man on his own side. A further Trojan ally, Memnon, arrives with forces from the east. Memnon kills Antilochus, the son of the elderly Greek leader Nestor, and Achilles kills Memnon in revenge. Each victory brings Achilles closer to the encounter in which he will die.
According to the surviving summary of the Aethiopis, Achilles chases the Trojans towards their walls and is killed by Paris and Apollo during the assault on the city. The summary mentions neither a single arrow nor a wound in the heel. It identifies the attackers and the setting without describing the injury. Ajax carries Achilles’ body out of danger while Odysseus keeps the Trojans back. Thetis and the Muses mourn him, and the Greeks hold funeral games. The epic went on to describe the consequences of the death at much greater length than most modern retellings do.
The Aethiopis gives Achilles another fate after the funeral: Thetis removes him from the pyre and takes him to Leuke, the White Island, a place later associated with his cult. Homer’s accounts of the hero among the dead do not fit neatly with that ending. Different poets adapted traditions that remained at odds over what followed Achilles’ death. Achilles could die at Troy in several traditions without every writer agreeing about his existence afterwards.
Why Homer Never Shows Achilles Dying
Homer’s Iliad covers only a short stretch of the war’s final year. The dispute begins when Agamemnon, the Greek commander, takes Briseis, a captive woman awarded to Achilles. Achilles refuses to fight, allowing the Trojans to push the Greeks towards their ships. Patroclus, his companion, eventually borrows Achilles’ armour and enters battle. Hector kills him with Apollo’s assistance. Achilles returns to avenge Patroclus, knowing that taking up arms again will shorten his own life.
The warning comes directly from Thetis in Iliad 18.94–96. When Achilles decides to kill Hector, his mother tells him that death will follow soon afterwards. The dying Hector adds the details in Book 22: Paris and Apollo will kill Achilles near the Scaean Gate. Hector identifies the killers and the gate, but Homer does not go on to narrate the attack. Hector speaks this prophecy immediately after being defeated by the man whose end he predicts.
An earlier warning is spoken by Xanthus, Achilles’ immortal horse, after Hera briefly gives it a human voice. A god and a mortal, it says, will cause Achilles’ death. Achilles replies that he already expects to die far from home. The scene, preserved in Iliad 19.404–417, recalls the god’s intervention in Patroclus’ death. Apollo has helped destroy Achilles’ companion, and the audience knows that divine intervention will also contribute to Achilles’ fate.
Instead of following Achilles to his grave, the Iliad ends with an encounter between him and Priam. Hector’s father enters the Greek camp to ask for his son’s corpse. Achilles relents and returns it, allowing Troy to bury Hector. Achilles’ decision brings his anger into contact with another father’s grief. Achilles’ own approaching death still matters, but the poem achieves its ending without narrating it.
Where Did the Arrow Strike Achilles?
A particularly precise description survives in the Bibliotheca, also called the Library, under the name of Apollodorus. The Epitome 5.3 states that Alexander, the alternative name for Paris, and Apollo shoot Achilles in the ankle near the Scaean Gate. The word refers to the ankle region. It supplies no account of a child being held by the heel during immersion in the Styx, and it does not say that weapons could have harmed him nowhere else. The Styx and the invulnerable body belong to other versions of the story.
Quintus of Smyrna gives a related but different version in his Posthomerica, an epic from the Roman imperial period. In Book 3, Apollo shoots the hero in the ankle while remaining invisible, after Achilles ignores a warning to stop killing Trojans. Achilles pulls out the missile and attempts to continue fighting, but eventually dies. Paris has no part in firing this arrow. Quintus and Apollodorus agree about the wound’s location while telling different stories about the archer. The passage itself describes divine intervention as the cause of death, without supplying a medical account of the wound.
Vase paintings from archaic Greece provide evidence older than the Roman epics. Sixth-century BC images sometimes place an arrow in Achilles’ lower leg; others have been interpreted as showing multiple wounds. Such paintings show that artists already pictured a lower-leg injury well before Statius discussed the Styx. They cannot establish the precise wording of the lost Aethiopis or prove that the artist knew a myth of complete invulnerability elsewhere on the body. Jonathan Burgess addresses this distinction in his study of the development of Achilles’ vulnerable-heel tradition.
An arrow in the ankle or foot might have disabled a soldier, and a sufficiently serious wound could cause fatal bleeding or infection. The ancient accounts, though, give no clinical history from which Achilles’ precise injuries could be reconstructed. Their explanation is concerned with how a powerful warrior meets his death. Attempts to derive a detailed anatomical diagnosis from poetry and painted pottery go beyond the evidence.
Why Did Apollo Help Kill Achilles?
Apollo’s involvement is consistent with his established role in the Iliad. He supports Troy, sends disease into the Greek camp when Agamemnon mistreats his priest Chryses, and assists Hector in the killing of Patroclus. Apollo’s later attack on Achilles continues that hostility. He is an active participant in the war, with interests of his own, rather than a convenient addition to an otherwise purely human attack.
Ancient writers nevertheless give Apollo different parts to play. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses 12, Poseidon calls on Apollo after Achilles kills his son Cycnus. Apollo spots Paris shooting at other Greeks, tells him to aim at Achilles and guides the fatal arrow. Hyginus, in Fabulae 107, has Apollo assume Paris’ appearance and shoot the hero himself. Quintus describes an invisible Apollo acting alone. The accounts differ over who fires the arrow and exactly how Apollo intervenes.
Some authors gave Apollo a personal reason to seek revenge. In Apollodorus’s account of the earlier campaign, Achilles kills Tenes, sometimes described as Apollo’s son, despite being warned that this would bring about his death at the god’s hands. Another group of stories involves the Trojan prince Troilus and violence committed by Achilles at a sanctuary of Apollo. These episodes provide motives for Apollo’s resentment in later accounts. We cannot assume that every early poet knew or accepted them.
An incomplete fragment attributed to Pindar may have depicted Apollo disguised as Paris. Its context is too uncertain to use as decisive evidence for that version. Several separate narratives have Apollo kill Achilles or help Paris do so. Divine agency was an established feature of the Trojan War tradition: gods regularly alter the result of battles fought by human beings.
Was Achilles Invulnerable Except for His Heel?
In the later heel story, Thetis protects her infant by dipping him into the River Styx. She holds one foot above the water, leaving that place vulnerable when the rest of his body becomes immune to injury. Nothing like this is recounted in the Iliad. Homer even describes Achilles bleeding when Asteropaeus strikes his right forearm with a spear in Iliad 21.161–167. The hero has a divine mother and exceptional armour, but his body is not presented as impossible to wound.
A different attempt to remove Achilles’ mortality appears in Apollodorus, Library 3.13.6. At night Thetis places the child in fire, while by day she rubs him with ambrosia. Her husband Peleus interrupts the process. Thetis departs, and the centaur Chiron raises Achilles. The story conveys the difficulty faced by an immortal mother whose son, through his mortal father, can still die. The use of fire and ambrosia gives this version a different method and outcome from immersion in the Styx.
The earliest clear surviving literary references to Thetis strengthening Achilles through the Styx appear in Statius’ unfinished Latin Achilleid, composed near the end of the first century AD. In Book 1 Thetis regrets that she did not make him entirely safe, and Greek commanders speak of limbs made resistant to weapons. Statius seems to assume that his audience can recognize a story he does not narrate in full. The text of the Achilleid and Julene Abad Del Vecchio’s 2023 study of the Styx passage show why these passages require careful reading rather than being treated as the complete familiar legend.
Greek poets and artists had associated Achilles’ death with an injury low on the leg well before these Roman references. The chronology matters because the location of the wound is older than the claim of complete invulnerability. The more developed idea that immersion in the Styx made the rest of his body wholly invulnerable is later and harder to trace. Burgess regards the wound tradition as potentially old and the complete invulnerability story as comparatively late. Nor has anyone demonstrated a simple translation error that converted a Greek “ankle” into a Latin “heel”.
The Other Story: A Marriage Trap for Achilles
Other versions shift the killing from Troy’s walls to a place of worship. The hero visits a sanctuary of Apollo in connection with negotiations to marry Priam’s daughter Polyxena. Paris, sometimes accompanied by his brother Deiphobus, ambushes him there. The sanctuary is often identified with Thymbraean Apollo in the region around Troy. Some writers describe arrows, others a sword. The marriage proposal itself can be presented as bait to bring Achilles within reach.
Later prose works and commentary preserve this account, including material discussed in the notes to Apollodorus’s Epitome. None amounts to an eyewitness report of a historical marriage ceremony, and there is insufficient evidence to assign the whole tradition confidently to a specific lost Greek tragedy. Storytellers used the planned union to make Achilles’ desire, affection or trust expose him to attack. It gives his death a different character from a military assault, with the killing carried out treacherously at a holy site.
The sanctuary version may explain why some much later images depict Achilles by an altar as Paris attacks. Peter Paul Rubens, for example, painted the hero’s death in a temple setting. These artworks record later interpretations of the myth without establishing what an early Greek epic described. Jonathan Burgess and other scholars have asked whether parts of the temple-ambush story might be ancient, but the evidence does not establish its early development securely.
Did Achilles’ Divine Armour Protect His Whole Body?
Achilles receives new armour from Thetis after Patroclus is killed in the equipment he had borrowed. In Iliad 18, the divine craftsman Hephaestus makes a magnificent replacement, including a shield decorated with cities, warfare, farming, dancing and the wider world. It withstands a spear in Book 21. Homer never says that the armour left just one area exposed or that Achilles’ flesh had become invulnerable. A blow still draws blood from Achilles’ forearm while he wears the divine equipment.
A wound below the protection of a warrior’s armour may seem more plausible than one piercing its strongest plates. An unprotected ankle might explain a battlefield injury, but it cannot establish where the Styx story originated. No securely identifiable ancient passage or scholarly demonstration supports the proposed connection. In the surviving narrative, the armour matters because Achilles obtains it after Patroclus’ death and because it becomes the object of a bitter contest after Achilles himself is killed.
Achilles Knew What His Victory Would Cost
In Iliad 9.410–416, Achilles tells Odysseus and the other envoys urging him to rejoin the fighting what his mother has said about his fate. Two paths lie before him. Remaining at Troy means an early death and lasting renown; going home means a long life without that heroic fame. At this point Achilles has not yet ruled out leaving Troy. The prophecy should not be read as evidence that Achilles had made an irrevocable choice before the expedition even began.
The death of Patroclus changes the way Achilles weighs those futures. He resolves to kill Hector despite Thetis’ warning, because revenge has become more important to him than surviving. The Iliad develops this awareness of death alongside his anger and grief. His encounter with Priam eventually brings him face to face with another bereaved father, whose suffering reminds him of Peleus. Their shared experience of loss gives the final meeting its force, although the poem never reaches Achilles’ own death.
Xanthus’ warning and Hector’s prophecy are part of a poet’s narrative, not independent evidence from witnesses to an event. Both anticipate a death already known from other Trojan War stories. Their agreement with the Aethiopis summary indicates overlapping traditions, although exactly how Homer and the cyclic poets related to one another remains disputed. The shared elements do not establish which poet first told each part of the story.
Did Achilles Die Before the Trojan Horse?
Achilles dies before the Trojan Horse brings about Troy’s capture. Following his death, Odysseus and Ajax compete to inherit his armour. Odysseus wins, and Ajax subsequently dies. Philoctetes later kills Paris, while Achilles’ son Neoptolemus joins the Greek forces. Only after these events do the Greeks build and use the horse. Summaries of the lost Little Iliad and other works in the epic cycle preserve this general sequence of events.
Modern versions often combine episodes from the whole Trojan War under the name of the Iliad. But Homer’s Iliad ends at Hector’s burial. The horse is absent from its action, and Achilles neither enters it nor sees the Greeks sack Troy. Later narratives place Neoptolemus among the attackers during the final assault. The horse episode belongs to another stage of the story, also discussed in Spoken Past’s article on the Trojan Horse.
What Happened to Achilles’ Body?
Greek poetry devoted substantial attention to the struggle over Achilles’ body. In the Aethiopis summary, Ajax lifts the corpse and carries it towards the ships as Odysseus holds off the Trojan fighters. Sixth-century BC vase painters returned repeatedly to Ajax carrying his fallen comrade. A neck-amphora in the Metropolitan Museum of Art from about 530 BC shows that scene on one side. The pottery confirms that this image circulated early, but it cannot reconstruct the lost epic’s entire rescue scene.
Another account of the funeral survives in Odyssey 24. Agamemnon’s ghost tells Achilles of the sea nymphs and Muses mourning with Thetis, of his cremation and of the golden urn holding his bones together with those of Patroclus. The Greeks raise a burial mound beside the Hellespont, visible to passing sailors. In the Aethiopis summary, by contrast, Thetis takes him to the White Island. These are literary and religious traditions with different endings, and neither should be presented as a report about the actual remains of an identifiable historical warrior.
Achilles’ death also creates a dispute among those who fought beside him. Ajax has recovered the body, but the Greeks award the dead man’s weapons to Odysseus, with the details of the judgment varying by author. Ajax’s humiliation and death form another tragic sequence told in epic and drama. The dispute over his armour carries the consequences of Achilles’ death into the stories of Ajax and Odysseus.
Did Achilles Exist? What Archaeology Can Tell Us
At Hisarlik in northwestern Turkey, archaeologists have uncovered successive settlements at the place widely identified with ancient Troy. Occupation and destruction layers include remains from the Late Bronze Age. The settlement’s extent, political influence and connections with its neighbours remain subjects of archaeological debate. Excavation has not identified Achilles, Hector or Paris, and no object found there confirms how Achilles died. The site can help us understand the environment in which Trojan War stories took form without proving that every episode in those poems took place.
Greeks also worshipped Achilles as a hero, making offerings at places connected with his name. Ancient authors associated him with the Hellespont and Black Sea region. Pausanias 3.19.11–13 reports a sacred island near the Danube’s mouth containing a sanctuary and image of Achilles. This is evidence for worship and sacred geography in the Roman period, not physical confirmation that his remains were taken to the island. His death acquired a place in cult as well as poetry.
The earlier literature does not agree on his destination after death either. In Odyssey 11, Odysseus meets Achilles as a spirit in the underworld, where he speaks bitterly of the condition of the dead. The Aethiopis instead has Thetis take him to the White Island. The competing endings form part of the different literary and religious traditions surrounding Achilles. Ancient audiences could ask both how Achilles was killed and what kind of existence followed his death.
Why the Death of Achilles Was Retold for Centuries
The Trojan War poems portray Achilles as the Greeks’ greatest warrior, yet he is also destined to die young. In the Iliad, he can return home; his grief for Patroclus draws him back into battle. The Aethiopis follows him through more victories until Paris and Apollo cause his death. Roman poets developed accounts of divine retaliation, dangerous wounds and invulnerable flesh, while artists chose battlefields, city gates and sanctuaries as the setting for the final attack.
“Achilles’ heel” has become a phrase for a weakness that leaves an otherwise powerful person exposed. The ancient accounts are less uniform than that expression suggests. Many describe Achilles as capable of being wounded, and they disagree about the fatal attack. What they consistently preserve is a hero whose death was anticipated, whose choice to seek renown remained central to his story, and whose name continued in epic, images and religious observance long after his imagined funeral.
