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The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis
How Jupiter’s Fear Brought About the Birth of Achilles
Everyone has heard of Achilles, the demi-god son of Peleus and Thetis and hero of the Trojan War. Whether you know him because his death is where we derive the phrase “Achilles’ heel” to refer to someone’s weakness, or because you’ve read The Song of Achilles or watched Brad Pitt in Troy, you probably know that he was a Greek (well, Achaean — Greece did not exist then!) warrior.
Children of the gods in mythology are common, but the majority of them are the children of gods and mortal women. Achilles is one of the few sons of a goddess, boasting a mortal father (one of the other notable demigods with divinity on their mother’s side is Aeneas, whose mother Venus (Aphrodite) was tricked into lying with a mortal).
Despite not being the son of Jupiter (Zeus), Achilles would still not have been born if not for Jupiter. We learn this in Book XI of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so let’s dive in.
The Prophecy (XI. 221–228)
The narrative begins as so many epic stories begin: with a prophecy.
Proteus, sometimes referred to as the old man of the sea and the god of the oceans before Neptune (Poseidon) makes a prophecy featuring Thetis, a goddess of the waves. He prophesises…
