Achilles
The son of Peleus, king of Phthiotis, in Thessaly, and the Nereid Thetis. On account of a prophecy of Calchas that Troy could never be taken without Achilles' assistance he was sent by his mother at an early age to the court of Lycomedes, where he lived some time disguised in female attire. Ulysses, however, visited Lycomedes in the garb of a traveling merchant and offered for sale various articles of female attire, mingling among them some pieces of armor. Achilles disclosed his sex by eagerly seizing the arms, and then accompanied Ulysses to the Trojan war. In the last year of the war, Achilles, who was the greatest hero on the side of the Greeks, being deprived by Agamemnon of his favorite Briseis, retired enraged to his tent and refused any longer to assist the Greeks.
Zeus, at the request of Thetis, granted that the Greeks should suffer defeat at the hands of the Trojans until the insult offered to Achilles had been atoned for. Patroclus, his dearest friend, who wore Achilles' own armor, was killed, and the armor was taken by Hector. Then Achilles, in his grief for the loss of his friend, forgot his anger, and, clad in a new suit of armor made for him by Vulcan at the request of Thetis, went forth once more to battle with the Greeks and defeated the Trojans and killed Hector, whose corpse he fastened to his chariot and dragged around the walls of Troy under the eyes of Priam and all the Trojans. Achilles was afterward killed in the battle at the Schaean Gate; though a later tradition maintains that he was killed by Paris with a poisoned arrow which wounded him in the heel, the only part of him which remained vulnerable after his mother Thetis had dipped him in the river Styx.