Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Phoenix tells Achilles how he came to Phthia. His father Amyntor loved a concubine and slighted Phoenix’s mother; at the mother’s urging Phoenix lay with the concubine to make the old man hateful to her. Amyntor cursed him with childlessness—the Erinyes heard—and Phoenix planned to kill his father but was checked. Kinsmen held him under guard; he fled through locked doors and wandered until Peleus received him, loved him as a father loves an only son, and set him as tutor and companion over the child Achilles in Phthia among the Dolopes. The episode supplies Phoenix’s moral authority in the Embassy: he knows household ruin, exile, and surrogate sonship. Catalogue Amyntor’s curse and Phoenix’s flight apart from Ate–Litai and apart from Meleager.