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Achilles
When Helen, the beautiful wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, was
kidnapped to Troy, Menelaus called upon his fellow chieftains to
help him recover his wife. One of them was the great warrior
Achilles. Achilles's mother, the immortal sea-nymph Thetis, knowing
that her son's fate was to perish at Troy if he went, dispatched him
to the court of King Lycomedes. There, at her urging, he disguised
himself as a maiden and joined the king's daughters. Odysseus,
learning that Achilles was at the palace, appeared before the women
as a merchant, offering items for sale, including weaponry. While
the daughters naturally gravitated towards the feminine objects,
Achilles, as this mosaic depicts, couldn't resist the arms. Thereby
unmasked, Achilles quickly agreed to accompany Odysseus to Troy,
where Achilles was eventually killed by a poisoned arrow that struck
him in the heel. It was his one weak spot: When he was a baby, his
mother Thetis dipped him in the River Styx, which made him
invulnerable except where she held him at the heel.
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