From the astragalus to the heel: revisiting the anatomy of Achilles’ mythical invulnerability

ABSTRACT The myth of Achilles’ imperfect invulnerability, according to which his heel constituted his only weak point, is one of the best-known narratives transmitted from antiquity and a striking example of how mythological paradigms continue to shape modern language. It has not only generated the widely used idiom ‘Achilles’ heel’ to denote vulnerability, but has also left a lasting imprint on medical terminology. Yet the absence of any clear evidence for a specifically vulnerable heel in ancient sources has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention. Roman sources documenting this tradition allude to a different anatomical region: the ankle. More specifically, they refer to the bone that provides this connection between leg and foot, the talus (the Latin name for ‘astragalus’), which later originated the names for ‘heel’ in many Romance languages (the Italian ‘tallone’, the French ‘talon’, etc). This paper revisits the mythical tradition of Achilles’ invulnerability, shifting the focus to the tarsal bone and explaining its significance in ancient belief systems and mythology. I argue that the choice of the astragalus as the hero's vulnerable point in the Roman version of the myth is rooted in the long-standing tradition of viewing the tarsal joint as crucial to the mechanics of the lower limbs.