Myrmidons () — a Homeric kingdom of the Odyssey, c. 1200 BC

Myrmidons — Fleet-footed Achilles' fifty ships — the wrath that opened the war, the spear that never came home.

Phthia of the Myrmidons, house of Aiakos, sent Achilles and fifty ships to Troy — the deadliest Achaean spear. He never returned: slain by Paris and Apollo, his ashes lie under a barrow on the Hellespont, and his son Neoptolemos now carries the line.

Leader at Troy: Achilles.

Ruler in the Odyssey's present: Achilles.

Role in the Trojan War: Achaean shock-force of fifty ships led by Achilles, mightiest of the Greeks; his quarrel with Agamemnon and his wrath drive the Iliad, and his return to battle to avenge Patroklos brings down Hector before he himself falls to Paris and Apollo.

The homecoming: No return — he fell at Troy; his son Neoptolemos carries the line.

In deep-soiled Phthia — the Pelasgian Argos — dwelt the men called by three names in one breath: Myrmidons, Hellenes, and Achaians. Theirs was the house of Aiakos, and their towns were Alos and Alope and Trachis under Oita, and Phthia and Hellas the home of fair women. No richer name in gold, as Mycenae had; their wealth was a single man. \"Of all these, even fifty ships, Achilles was captain\" — fleet-footed Achilles, son of Peleus son of Aiakos, whose lineage he flung in a river-god's teeth: \"My sire is a man ruling many Myrmidons, Peleus the son of Aiakos, and Aiakos was begotten of Zeus.\"\n\nThey came to Troy as Achaeans, sworn to Agamemnon's cause, and no contingent struck harder in the early years. Before the great quarrel Achilles stormed the outlying towns of the Troad — it was from sacked Lyrnessos and the walls of Thebe (see LYR, THE) that he bore off Briseis of the lovely hair, overthrowing Mynes and Epistrophos, spearmen and sons of king Euenos. That prize became the war's hinge. When Agamemnon of Mycenae (MYC) seized Briseis from him, Achilles nursed the menis, the wrath, and drew his fifty ships out of the fighting: \"these took no thought of noisy war; for there was no man to array them in line of battle.\" The Iliad opens on that withdrawal, and the Achaean host was nearly broken for it — until Patroklos, wearing Achilles' armour, fell to Hector and Apollo, and grief did what Agamemnon's embassy could not. Achilles returned, ran red through the Trojan plain, choked the Skamandros with dead, and slew Hector of Troy (TRO) before the walls.\n\nBut a nostos framed by a barrow, not a homecoming. Dying Hector had prophesied it, and it came true: Achilles was struck down by Paris and Phoebus Apollo at the Skaian gate, \"for all his valour.\" Over his body Achaeans and Trojans fought the livelong day until Zeus stayed them with a tempest; the Danaans bore him to the ships, and his sea-mother Thetis rose with the deathless maidens of the waters to keen him. Seventeen days and nights they wailed, the nine Muses answering one another; on the eighteenth they gave him to the flames. His white bones lie in a twy-handled golden urn, Hephaistos' work, mingled with the bones of Patroklos and set apart from Antilochos — the son of Nestor of Pylos (PYL) whom Achilles honoured next after Patroklos — beneath a great barrow \"high on a jutting headland over wide Hellespont.\" So the king of Phthia never sailed home. In the house of Hades his shade would still trade all that dark lordship to be a hireling under the sun.\n\nAt the dramatic present of the returns, Phthia's throne waits on the son. Achilles left no return but an heir: Neoptolemos, got on Deidameia in Skyros (SKY), whom Odysseus of the Cephallenians (CEP) fetched up from that island in his hollow ship. The boy proved the father's blood — first in counsel, foremost in the charge, slayer of Eurypylos son of Telephus, unflinching in the belly of Epeios' wooden horse, and he came out of sacked Troy unscathed with his share of the spoil. Aged Peleus lingers still in Phthia, honoured or dishonoured among the Myrmidons his son could no longer champion. And the great arms of Achilles, that Thetis set as a prize, went not to Aias of Salamis (SAL) — \"in beauty and in feats of war above all the Danaans, next to the son of Peleus\" — but to Odysseus, a judgement that drove Aias to his own death and left his shade turning away in silence even among the dead.

“Take heed now lest I draw upon thee wrath of gods, in the day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo slay thee, for all thy valour, at the Skaian gate.” — Iliad 22.358-360