Achilles heel

Dying Achill by Ernst Herter (in the garden of Achilleion (Corfu) ).

The Achilles heel comes as a term from Greek mythology : the heel was the only place where the legendary hero Achilles was vulnerable. Today the term is mainly used as a metaphor and describes a vulnerable point in a system or a tactic.

description

Peter Paul Rubens : Thetis dips Achilles into the Styx , 1630–35

As the son of Peleus , a human father, and a divine mother, the sea goddess Thetis , Achilles was mortal. Thetis tried to make him invulnerable and dipped him into the river Styx , which separates the underworld from the upper world. The spot on the heel where she held Achilles in her hand, however, was not wetted by the water of the river and thus became the only vulnerable spot.

In the most famous versions of Achilles' death, he was struck in the vulnerable Achilles heel by Apollo himself or by a - perhaps poisoned - arrow from Paris directed by Apollo. So the Achilles heel from mythology gave its name to the human Achilles tendon .

The motif can be found among other things in the Nibelungen saga. Here a linden leaf covers a spot on Siegfried's back when he was bathing in dragon's blood in order to become invulnerable. At precisely this only vulnerable point he is killed from behind with a spear in the later course of the Hagen saga .

In Norse mythology , the motif of the unique vulnerability appears in the shape of a mistletoe , which makes the Balder vulnerable and ultimately kills it. One day Balder has a dream of his own death, whereupon his mother Frigg goes to every animal and every plant and asks them to take an oath that they will not harm Balder. Only the young mistletoe seems to be too insignificant for Frigg to take an oath from him.

Examples

In the press, the Achilles heel is used quite often as a critical vulnerable point, e.g. B .:

• " Investment banking : Deutsche Bank's Achilles heel ?"
• "The nerves are on edge: BVB - defense becomes Achilles heel"
• " Venezuela's Achilles heel hit - Venezuela's ambassador in Vienna , Jesse Chacón, admits that his country is import-dependent ."

See also

• Single point of failure

literature

• C. Fleischer: Achilles . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 1,1, Leipzig 1886, Sp. 24-24 ( digitized version ).
• Gustav Schwab : The most beautiful sagas of classical antiquity . dtv, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-423-70314-8

Web links

Wiktionary: Achilles heel  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Statius , Achilleis 1.269-270; 1,480
2. ^ Hyginus , Fabulae 107
3. ↑ Ovid , Metamorphosen 12, 597-606; Quintus Smyrnaeus 3.60-88
4. ↑ Rolf Obertreis: Investment Banking: The Achilles heel of Deutsche Bank? In: Tagesspiegel. Verlag Der Tagesspiegel GmbH, May 2, 2019, accessed on May 21, 2019 . 
5. ↑ Lissy Beckonert: The nerves are on edge: BVB defense becomes Achilles heel. In: sport.de. HEIM: SPIEL Medien, May 14, 2019, accessed on May 21, 2019 . 
6. ↑ Konstanze Walther: The hit Achilles heel of Venezuela. In: Wiener Zeitung. Wiener Zeitung GmbH, May 21, 2019, accessed on May 21, 2019 .