Resembling or relating to Achilles, the hero of the Iliad.
1995, Eric Scott Mallin, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England, 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.
2004, Helen Morales, Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, 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.
2009, David A. Powell, 21st-Century Gay Culture, We are once again reaching a period in our collective cultural history when we may resume the post-Platonic, Achillean conversation.
1890, , The London Medical Recorder - Volume 3, Tendon-reflexes, as a rule, remain intact, except the Achillean one, which is frequently either absent or lowered.
1901, , The Medical Examiner and General Practitioner, The Achillean reflex is the contraction obtained in the gastrocnemii and solei by the percussion of the tendo Achillis.
2015, Yasser El Miedany, Musculoskeletal Ultrasonography in Rheumatic Diseases, The posterior compartment contains the Achille's tendon, the deep pre-Achillean and superficial retro-Achillean bursae, and the posterior aspect of the talo-calcaneal joint.
Of or relating to sexual or romantic intimacy between men, in the style of Achilles' relationship with Patroclus.
1959, A.C. Hamilton, Spenser's Treatment of Myth, 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.
1995, Gay Wilson Allen & Ed Folsom, Walt Whitman & the World, Thus, he exalts as a means of republican cohesion, as the unshakeable basis of the modern nation what he calls "manly love," a sort of Achillean friendship, but at the same time it is this love, this passionate friendship that he sings.
2007, Waldemar Heckel, Lawrence A. Tritle, & Pat Wheatley, Alexander's Empire: Formulation to Decay, For Theocritus Idyll 29.34 the sexual love between Achilles and Patroclus was so uncontroversial that it could be referred to in a pederastic poem by means of the shorthand "Achillean friends"
A fighter on the side of Achilles in the Trojan war; an Achaean.
1881, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The History of Don Quixote of la Mancha, page 453:A singular genius, whose mathematical studies gave him in his own day the reputation of a necromancer, espousing fervently the cause of Hector, called out in a voice of thunder, "Let us see whether the Achilleans can fight as well as speak?"
2009, Velio Bocci, Women At The Helm, Arena books ():Even the romantic and glorious vision of this war is mostly rhetoric because the cunning Ulysses with the Achilleans invented the successful stratagem of the horse for committing great evils with the destruction of the city, ...
