Achilles father

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Achilles' parents
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Achilles: Early Life

Like most mythological heroes, Achilles had a complicated family tree. His father was Peleus, the mortal king of the Myrmidons–a people who, according to legend, were extraordinarily fearless and skilled soldiers. His mother was Thetis, a Nereid.

According to myths and stories composed long after the Iliad, Thetis was extraordinarily concerned about her baby son’s mortality. She did everything she could to make him immortal: She burned him over a fire every night, then dressed his wounds with ambrosial ointment; and she dunked him into the River Styx, whose waters were said to confer the invulnerability of the gods. However, she gripped him tightly by the foot as she dipped him into the river–so tightly that the water never touched his heel. As a result, Achilles was invulnerable everywhere but there.

When he was 9 years old, a seer predicted that Achilles would die heroically in battle against the Trojans. When she heard about this, Thetis disguised him as a girl and sent him to live on the Aegean island of Skyros. To be a great warrior was Achilles’ fa

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Achilles

（Ἀχιλλεύς). In the legends about Achilles, as about all the heroes of the Trojan war, the Homeric traditions should be carefully kept apart from the various additions and embellishments with which the gaps of the ancient story have been filled up by later poets and mythographers, not indeed by fabrications of their own, but by adopting those supplementary details, by which oral tradition in the course of centuries had variously altered and developed the original kernel of the story, or those accounts which were peculiar only to certain localities.

Homeric story.

Achilles was the son of Peleus, king of the Myrmidones in Phthiotis, in Thessaly, and of the Nereid Thetis. (Hom. Il. 20.206, &c.) From his father's name he is often called Πηλείδης, Πηληϊάδης, or Πηλείων(Hom. Il. 18.316; 1.1; 1.197; Verg. A. 2.263), and from that of his grandfather Aeacus, he derived his name Aeacides (Αἰακίδης, Il. 2.860; Verg. A. 1.99). He was educated from his tender childhood by Phoenix, who taught him eloquence and the arts of war, and accompanied him to the Trojan war,

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The story of Achilles begins even before his birth, with a prophecy that would shape his destiny.

The sea-nymph Thetis, his mother, was foretold to bear a son who would surpass his father in strength and valor.

This prophecy was so powerful that Zeus, the king of the gods, fearing that Thetis' son might overthrow him, arranged for her to marry a mortal, Peleus, the king of the Myrmidons.

Thetis and Peleus' union was celebrated with a grand wedding attended by all the gods, except for Eris, the goddess of discord.

Eris, in her anger at being excluded, threw a golden apple inscribed with the words "to the fairest" into the gathering, setting off a chain of events that would eventually lead to the Trojan War.

But that is a story for later. For now, our focus is on the child born of this union, Achilles.

Achilles' birth was marked by his mother's desperate attempt to protect him from his prophesied fate.

Thetis, in an effort to make her son immortal, held him by his heel and dipped him into the River Styx, the river of the underworld.

The Styx was said to confer invulnerabil