Achilles (son of Zeus)

In Greek mythology, Achilles, also spelled Achilleus, was the son of Zeus and Lamia, and the main subject of a minor myth. He is not to be confused with the more famous Achilles, the hero of the Trojan War.

Etymology

tablets attest to the personal name Achilles in the forms a-ki-re-u and a-ki-re-we ; the latter being the dative of the former.
Achilles' name can be analyzed as a combination of ἄχος "distress, pain, sorrow, grief" and λαός "people, soldiers, nation", resulting in a proto-form *Akhí-lāu̯os "he who has the people distressed" or "he whose people have distress". Furthermore, laós has been construed by Gregory Nagy, following Leonard Palmer, to mean "a corps of soldiers", a muster.
Some researchers deem the name a loan word, possibly from a Pre-Greek language. 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 /l^y/ in the original language.

Mythology

Achilles was a man of an irresistible beauty, and won a beauty contest judged by Pan, the god of wilderness. Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love, was irritated and so she made Pan fall in love with the nymph Echo, who spurned him, and made Achilles become as ugly and unattractive as he had been pretty and attractive. It is not clear whether Aphrodite was simply dissatisfied with the result as part of the audience, or she herself lost to Achilles as a contestant, but the latter seems likely enough.