Achillean

Definition

Resembling or relating to Achilles, the hero of the Iliad.

Etymology

From Achilles + -an.

Example Sentences

• "Guyon subdues these Achillean affections through his own power; but they break out again as Cymochles lapses into lust and Pyrochles burns in the idle lake."
• "Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has offered salutary warnings against seeing in male homosexuality a simple "epitome, ... The two genres of homosocial behavior in the text can be seen as chivalric or antichivalric, Hectoresque or Achillean: the first is active, specular, militant, conservative, apparently (not really) heterosexually inflected; the other is listless, covert, pacifistic, and passively subversive, clearly (not entirely) homosexually inclined."
• "There is, I suggest, a typically Achillean joke at play here, a visual pun, displaying the phoenix as truly phoenix-ian in its exposure of its sex organs and at the same time snidely alluding to the Phoenicians' famed preoccupation with female genitalia."