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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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