Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

After Thetis’s failed attempt to immortalize him, Achilles was reared for a time by Chiron on Pelion. The centaur taught him hunting, medicine, music, and the arts of war; Pindar images the boy taking lions and boars and bringing their bodies still gasping to the centaur. Phoenix and other tutors appear in Homeric digressions, but Chiron remains the mythic schoolmaster of the Aeacid. Thetis, knowing from prophecy that if Achilles went to Troy he would die young and glorious, sought to hide him. She dressed him as a girl (or entrusted him in female disguise) and placed him among the daughters of Lycomedes on the island of Scyros. There Achilles—called Pyrrha or another maiden-name in some tellings—lived in the women’s quarters and lay with Deidamia, Lycomedes’ daughter. She bore him a son, Pyrrhus, later called Neoptolemus (“new war”), who would fetch to Troy after Achilles’ death. This entry covers the childhood arc through the secret union and the birth of the heir; the unmasking by Odysseus and the departure for war are catalogued separately (126). Together they bridge Peleus’s wedding to the muster at Aulis: the best of the Achaeans is first the mountain-trained boy, then the hidden youth whose son already waits to inherit his wrath and his arms.