Homer's Achilles Bleeds From the Elbow

The Spear at the Ford

The Iliad's Achilles bleeds. It happens in Book 21, at the ford of the river Scamander, where Achilles has filled the water with Trojan dead. A Paeonian captain named Asteropaeus rises out of the river with a spear in each hand. He is the grandson of the river Axius, and he has been at Troy for eleven days. He can throw with either hand, so he throws two spears, one from each hand.

The first spear hits Achilles' shield and stops on the layer of gold the god put there. The second does what the famous legend says no weapon can do. In Samuel Butler's translation, it "grazed the elbow of Achilles' right arm drawing dark blood."

Achilles kills him soon after. But the wound is on the page, in Homer's own lines. Read beside the legend everyone knows, it raises one question. If Homer's Achilles can be cut, where did the invulnerable body with one weak heel come from?

The Story Everyone Knows

In the familiar version, Thetis, a sea goddess married to the mortal Peleus, dips her baby son in the river Styx. Every part the water touches becomes proof against weapons. Her fingers hold him by the heel, so the heel stays mortal, and years later Paris puts an arrow into exactly that spot. Peter Paul Rubens painted the dipping around 1625, with Charon rowing the dead behind it.

The earliest surviving text that tells this story is the Achilleid of Statius, an unfinished Latin epic from the first century AD. Wikipedia's summary is blunt about it: none of the sources before Statius refer to a general invulnerability. Whether Statius drew on older lost sources is unclear. Homer, at any rate, is not one of them.

What Achilles Says About His Own Death

Homer's Achilles talks about his death more than once, and he never mentions a weak spot. Later in Book 21, the river god rises against him in a wave that knocks him off his feet. He grabs an elm, and it tears out by the roots. Running across the plain, he cries out against his mother. Thetis, he says, told him he would fall under the walls of Troy "by the flying arrows of Apollo" (Butler). He fears he will instead drown like a swineherd's boy carried off by a torrent. Poseidon and Athena, Neptune and Minerva in Butler's English, come in the shape of two men and promise he will not die in this river.

Earlier that same day he catches Lycaon, a son of Priam who has escaped slavery on Lemnos and been home only twelve days. Lycaon begs for his life. Achilles refuses, and his answer is the plainest account of his own body in the poem. He is a goddess's son, he says, yet "the hands of doom and death overshadow me all as surely" (Butler). Someday, at dawn or dusk or noon, a man will kill him with a spear or with an arrow. He names no part of himself that is safe, and none that is weak.

Armour, Not Skin

The Trojan Agenor reasons the same way. Standing outside the gates, he talks himself into fighting: Achilles' flesh, he says, can be pierced by pointed bronze, and men say he is only mortal. He throws, and the spear strikes Achilles on the leg beneath the knee. The greave of new tin rings loudly, and the point bounces off. Butler gives the reason: "the god's gift stayed it." The gift is the armour Hephaestus forged after Hector took the first set from Patroclus.

That detail matters more than it looks. A spear hits low on the leg, beneath the knee, and what saves Achilles is metal. Homer protects his hero the way he protects every other fighter in the poem.

Pierced Heels in Book 22

In Book 22, after chasing Hector three times round the walls of Troy, Achilles studies Hector's armour for a gap. He finds the throat, where the collarbones divide neck from shoulders, and drives the spear through. With his last breath Hector prophesies that Paris and Phoebus Apollo will kill Achilles at the Scaean gates. This is the most specific forecast of the death. It names two killers and a place, and no part of the body. The arrow to the heel, as Wikipedia notes, is Statius's addition.

Then the word heel does appear. Achilles, in Butler's words, "pierced the sinews at the back of both his feet from heel to ancle," threads ox-hide thongs through the slits, and drags Hector behind his chariot. In these last books of the Iliad, the only pierced heels belong to Hector. Some readers see an irony there. That is an interpretation, not evidence that Homer knew the heel story. On the heel of Achilles, the text says nothing.

The Lost Poems and the Painted Arrows

The Iliad ends before Achilles dies. The poems that told his death, the Cypria, the Little Iliad attributed to Lesches, and the Aethiopis and Iliupersis of Arctinus, survive only in fragments. In those fragments there is no trace of an invulnerable body or a famous weakness at the heel. The vase painters agree with them: on the pots that show Achilles dying, the arrow, often several arrows, hits his torso.

The sources also disagree with each other about what happens next. The Aethiopis has Thetis snatch her son from the funeral pyre and carry him to Leuke, the White Island. In Book 24 of the Odyssey, Agamemnon's ghost says the bones were burned and mixed with Patroclus's in Thetis's golden vase, which is exactly what Patroclus's ghost asked for in Iliad 23. Neither ending needs a heel.

Fire Before Water

Before the river, there was fire. Later Hellenistic stories have Thetis anoint the infant with ambrosia and lay him in the hearth fire to burn away his mortal parts. Peleus walks in, sees his son in the flames, and interrupts. The ritual stays unfinished, and Thetis leaves in a rage. One of Achilles' old names, Pyrisous, "saved from the fire," seems to belong to this tradition.

Ptolemy Hephaestion, as Photius reports him, goes further. Thetis burns each child she has by Peleus. Peleus pulls Achilles out with one burnt foot, and Chiron digs up the giant Damysus, the fastest of all giants, to graft his ankle onto the boy. Here the story fixes on his foot. The element is still fire.

Statius and the Styx

In Statius the element is water, the Styx, and his is the version that won. The water seals everything it touches except the place where Thetis holds him, his left heel. Recent research complicates even that: the sources that mention the myth point to the talus, the Greek astragalos, an ankle bone rather than the heel. Other late tellings change the scene of the death too. In one, Achilles is marrying the Trojan princess Polyxena when Paris shoots him from hiding in the bushes.

From Myth to Anatomy

The heel then moved into science and speech. In 1693 the anatomist Philip Verheyen wrote that the tendon at the back of the ankle was commonly called "the cord of Achilles." In 1810 Coleridge called Ireland "that vulnerable heel of the British Achilles." The Oxford English Dictionary dates "Achilles' heel" as a general phrase for a weak spot to 1840. As a death wound it makes little sense: tendons carry no blood supply, so an arrow there would hardly kill unless it was poisoned, and some versions do call Paris's arrow poisoned.

What the Text Actually Says

One scholarly suggestion is that the Iliad deliberately left out any invulnerability, to keep its hero plainly mortal and far from the gods. That is a reading, and it is labelled as one. The text itself is simpler. At the ford of the Scamander, a river's grandson throws two spears, one from each hand, and Achilles bleeds from the right elbow.

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