ARETE ANCIENT GREEK HISTORY

Achilles was the son of Peleus and Thetis: Peleus was a king in Greece, and Thetis was a nymph.When Achilles was still a little baby, his mother tried to protect him from harm by dipping him into a river that had special magic water. And it worked; he could not be harmed, except for one heel that his mother held him by as she dipped him in the water. Now when someone is very strong but has one weak spot, we call that their “Achilles’ heel.” When he grew up, Achilles heard a prophecy. It was this: he could make a choice to live quietly and without fame or honor, and live a long time and die in bed, or he could choose to be famous in his lifetime and remembered always, but to die young. What would you choose?

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Achilles chose to be famous and die young, and you can read about how that happened in Homer’s Illiad

Sing, Goddess, of the anger of Achilles…”

The story of Homer’s Iliad begins in the middle of the Trojan War, just at the end of the Bronze in Greece.  We don’t know if there ever really was a Trojan War, but even if there was, this is a story about it, not a real memory of it.
The Greeks believed that the Trojan War lasted for ten years, and this story happens in the tenth year of the war, when both sides were really sick of being at war, and the Greeks were sick of being away from home.

The Iliad begins with a fight between the leader of the Greeks, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, and the Greeks’ best fighter, Achilles (uh-KILL-eez). The Greeks lived in a lot of little independent city-states called a polis. In the Bronze Age each one had its own king, but Agamemnon was leading them all during the war. The Greeks had won a battle and were splitting up the treasures  they had captured. Everybody had a pile of stuff. Achilles had gotten a woman among his stuff, to be his slave, whose name was Briseis (brih-SAY-iss). But Agamemnon decided that HE wanted the pretty Briseis, and he just took her from Achilles, saying that he was the head of the army so he would do what he liked.

Well, Achilles was so angry that Agamemnon took Briseis from him that he refused to fight for the Greeks anymore and just sat in his tent and sulked. Without their best fighter, the Greeks started losing battles.

Finally Achilles’ best friend Patroclos thought of an idea. He put on Achilles’ famous armor and went out to fight. Both the Greeks and the Trojans thought Achilles had come back to the battle and the Greeks won a big victory, but Patroclos was killed in the fighting: he might dress like Achilles but he could not fight like him.

When Achilles heard that Patroclos was dead, he was ashamed of how he had been sulking. He agreed to fight again. Now the Greeks really started to win. So the best Trojan fighter, Prince Hector, came out from Troy to fight Achilles. They fought for a long time, but finally Achilles killed Hector.
Hector’s father, King Priam, came to Achilles at night to ask for his son’s body back, and Achilles gave it to him.
The Iliad ends here, but this is not the end of the story.