Everyone knows the story: Achilles, invulnerable everywhere but one spot, brought down at last by an arrow to the heel. It's one of the most famous images in Western culture — and, like the wooden horse, it is not in the Iliad. Homer's Achilles has no magic skin and no secret weakness. He is simply a man who has chosen to die.
No — Achilles' heel is not in the Iliad. In Homer, Achilles is the greatest of warriors but an ordinary mortal: he can be killed like anyone, and Homer never hints at invulnerability or a single weak point. The story of the invulnerable body and the fatal heel comes from much later tradition — most fully from the Roman poet Statius, some eight centuries after Homer.
The whole emotional weight of the Iliad depends on Achilles being able to die. He is the son of a goddess and the best fighter alive, but he is not immortal, and the poem never lets us forget it. His mother Thetis tells him plainly that his death waits close behind Hector's; his own immortal horse, given a voice for a moment, warns him that he is fated to fall; the dying Hector foretells the arrow that will kill him. Achilles knows all of this and goes forward anyway. That is the tragedy: not that he has one hidden flaw, but that he freely chooses a short, glorious life over a long, forgotten one. An invulnerable hero with a single secret weakness would be a smaller, safer figure than the one Homer actually gives us.
The famous version — Thetis dipping the infant Achilles in the River Styx, holding him by the heel so that the water makes him invulnerable everywhere except the spot her fingers covered — is post-Homeric myth. Its fullest telling is in the Achilleid, an unfinished epic by the Roman poet Statius written in the first century AD, nearly eight hundred years after the Iliad. The idea that the arrow that kills him strikes precisely that heel is later still, hardened into "fact" by centuries of retelling. Homer himself knew a tradition that Achilles would die at Troy, shot by Paris with the help of the god Apollo — that much the Iliad foretells — but the invulnerable body and the vulnerable heel are the additions of later poets, not Homer's.
It's easy to see why the heel took hold. A single fatal weakness is a wonderfully clean idea — it turns a hero into a riddle and a warning at once — and the phrase "Achilles' heel" has become the standard English name for the one vulnerable point in anything otherwise strong. But the poem underneath is stranger and better. Homer's Achilles is not undone by a fluke of the ankle; he is undone by love and grief, and he walks toward his death with his eyes open. Knowing the heel is a later embroidery lets you meet the real Achilles — mortal, doomed, and choosing — instead of the invincible action-figure the legend made of him. For the story the Iliad actually tells, start with How to Read the Iliad.
Is Achilles' heel in the Iliad?
No. In Homer's Iliad, Achilles is the greatest of warriors but an ordinary mortal — he can be killed like any man. Homer never says he is invulnerable, and there is no vulnerable heel in the poem.
Where does the myth of Achilles' heel come from?
From post-Homeric myth. The story that Thetis dipped the infant Achilles in the River Styx, holding him by the heel, is told most fully by the Roman poet Statius in his unfinished Achilleid (1st century AD). The detail of a fatal wound to the heel specifically is later still.
How does Achilles die?
His death is foretold in the Iliad but happens after it ends: he is killed at Troy by an arrow from Paris, guided by Apollo, before the city falls. The version in which the arrow strikes his one vulnerable heel comes from later tradition, not from Homer.