How did Achilles die?

Foretold, never told

The Iliad ends with Hector’s funeral while Achilles is still alive, yet the poem keeps announcing his death:

1. Thetis, when he swears to avenge Patroclus: “your own death awaits you full soon after that of Hector” (Iliad 18.96).
2. His horse Xanthus, given a voice for a moment: “it is your doom to fall by the hand of a man and of a god” (19.416–417).
3. Achilles himself, nearly drowned by a river god, recalls that his mother said he would fall under the walls of Troy to Apollo’s arrows (21.277–278).
4. Dying Hector, who names the killers and the place.

the day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo, valiant though you be, shall slay you at the Scaean gates.

The last battles

The rest was told in the Aethiopis, an epic of the Trojan cycle lost except for a prose summary by Proclus. First Penthesilea, an Amazon and daughter of Ares, comes to help Troy and falls to Achilles. When the soldier Thersites jeers that Achilles loved her, Achilles kills him too and has to be purified of the killing on Lesbos. Then Memnon arrives, son of the Dawn, wearing armor made by Hephaestus, and kills Nestor’s son Antilochus. Achilles kills Memnon, and the Dawn wins immortality for her son from Zeus.

The arrow at the gate

Achilles routs the Trojans and, in the summary, rushes into the city with them and “is killed by Paris and Apollo.” Apollodorus places it at the Scaean gate and adds one detail: the arrow hit him in the ankle (Epitome 5.3). The pairing is the point. Paris, the archer of the Trojan royal house, takes the shot, and a god guides it, just as Hector foretold. Why so many people believe he could be wounded only in the heel is a separate story: what does “Achilles’ heel” mean?

The body and the funeral

A great fight broke out over the body. Ajax carried it back to the ships while Odysseus held off the Trojans; years later, clinging to a wrecked raft, Odysseus wishes he had died that day “about the dead body of Achilles” (Odyssey 5.310). In Odyssey 24, the ghost of Agamemnon describes the funeral to the ghost of Achilles himself: Thetis rising from the sea with her nymphs, the nine Muses singing the lament, seventeen days and nights of weeping, the pyre on the eighteenth day, and the bones laid with those of Patroclus in a golden vase under a mound on a headland over the Hellespont. In the Aethiopis, Thetis snatches her son from the pyre and carries him to the White Island.

What came after

His armor, made by a god, became the prize for the bravest Greek. Ajax and Odysseus both claimed it; in the Odyssey the judges were Trojan prisoners and Athena, and Odysseus won. Ajax, shamed, later took his own life. The Greeks then fetched Philoctetes and the bow of Heracles, and an arrow from it killed Paris. Odysseus meets the ghosts of both Achilles and Ajax in the underworld, a scene told in who did Odysseus meet in the underworld?