text: Achilles' name can be analyzed as a combination of () "distress, pain, sorrow, grief" and () "people, soldiers, nation", resulting in a proto-form *Akhí-lāu̯os "he who has the people distressed" or "he whose people have distress".The grief or distress of the people is a theme raised numerous times in the Iliad (and frequently by Achilles himself).Achilles' role as the hero of grief or distress forms an ironic juxtaposition with the conventional view of him as the hero of ("glory", usually in war).Furthermore, laós has been construed by Gregory Nagy, following Leonard Palmer, to mean "a corps of soldiers", a muster.With this derivation, the name obtains a double meaning in the poem: when the hero is functioning rightly, his men bring distress to the enemy, but when wrongly, his men get the grief of war.The poem is in part about the misdirection of anger on the part of leadership.Some researchers deem the name a loan word, possibly from a Pre-Greek language.Achilles' descent from the Nereid Thetis and a similarity of his name with those of river deities such as Acheron and Achelous have led to speculations about his being an old water divinity .Robert S.P.Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin of the name, based among other things on the coexistence of -λλ- and -λ- in epic language, which may account for a palatalized phoneme /ly/ in the original language.Birth and early years Achilles was the son of Thetisa Nereid and daughter of the Old Man of the Seaand Peleus, the king of the Myrmidons.Zeus and Poseidon had been rivals for Thetis's hand in marriage until Prometheus, the fore-thinker, warned Zeus of a prophecy (originally uttered by Themis, goddess of divine law) that Thetis would bear a son greater than his father.For this reason, the two gods withdrew their pursuit, and had her wed Peleus.There is a tale which offers an alternative version of these events: In the Argonautica (4.