Achilles
Channel: 宇宙のすべての知識 プリンシピア
Date: 2018-12-21

Achilles, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=305 / CC BY SA 3.0

Achilles

In Greek mythology, Achilles or Achilleus ( ; , "Achilleus" ) was a Greek hero of the Trojan War and the central character and greatest warrior of Homer's "Iliad". His mother was the immortal Nereid Thetis, and his father, the mortal Peleus, was the king of the Myrmidons.

Achilles' most notable feat during the Trojan War was the slaying of the Trojan hero Hector outside the gates of Troy. Although the death of Achilles is not presented in the "Iliad", other sources concur that he was killed near the end of the Trojan War by Paris, who shot him in the heel with an arrow. Later legends (beginning with a poem by Statius in the 1st century AD) state that Achilles was invulnerable in all of his body except for his heel because, when his mother Thetis dipped him in the river Styx as an infant, she held him by one of his heels. Alluding to these legends, the term "Achilles' heel" has come to mean a point of weakness, especially in someone or something with an otherwise strong constitution.

Linear B tablets attest to the personal name "Achilleus" in the forms "a-ki-re-u" and "a-ki-re-we", the latter being the dative of the former. The name grew more popular, even becoming common soon after the seventh century BC and was also turned into the female form Ἀχιλλεία ("Achilleía"), attested in Attica in the fourth century BC (IG II² 1617) and, in the form "Achillia", on a stele in Halicarnassus as the name of a female gladiator fighting an "Amazon".

Achilles' name can be analyzed as a combination of (') "distress, pain, sorrow, grief" and (') "people, soldiers, nation", resulting in a proto-form "*Akhí-lāu̯os" "he who has the people distressed" or "he whose people have distress". The grief or distress of the people is a theme raised numerous times in the "Iliad" (and frequently by Achilles himself). Achilles' role as the hero of grief or distress forms an ironic juxtaposition with the conventional view of him as the hero of "" ("glory", usually in war). Furthermore, "laós" has been construed by Gregory Nagy, following Leonard Palmer, to mean "a corps of soldiers", a muster. With this derivation, the name obtains a double meaning in the poem: when the hero is functioning rightly, his men bring distress to the enemy, but when wrongly, his men get the grief of war. The poem is in part about the misdirection of anger on the part of leadership.

Another etymology relates the name to a Proto-Indo-European compound "*h₂eḱ-pṓds" "sharp foot" which first gave an Illyrian "*āk̂pediós", evolving through time into "*ākhpdeós" and then "*akhiddeús". The shift from "-dd-" to "-ll-" is then ascribed to the passing of the name into Greek via a Pre-Greek source. The first root part "*h₂eḱ-" "sharp, pointed" also gave Greek ἀκή ("akḗ" "point, silence, healing"), ἀκμή ("akmḗ" "point, edge, zenith") and ὀξύς ("oxús" "sharp, pointed, keen, quick, clever"), whereas ἄχος stems from the root "*h₂egʰ-" "to be upset, afraid". The whole expression would be comparable to the Latin "acupedius" "swift of foot". Compare also the Latin word family of "aciēs" "sharp edge or point, battle line, battle, engagement", "acus" "needle, pin, bodkin", and "acuō" "to make pointed, sharpen, whet; to exercise; to arouse" (whence "acute"). Some topical epitheta of Achilles in the "Iliad" point to this "swift-footedness", namely ποδάρκης δῖος Ἀχιλλεὺς ("podárkēs dĩos Achilleús" "swift-footed divine Achill...