PIEN HUANG, HOST:
Here's some ancient news. A Greek warrior fought in the Trojan War, invulnerable except for a tiny weak spot on his leg.
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EMILY WILSON: (Reading) Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath of great Achilles, son of Peleus.
HUANG: That's translator Emily Wilson reading from "The Iliad," about the great hero Achilles. You know the next part. The Greeks defeat Troy, but invincible Achilles dies, shot in the heel with an arrow, right?
BARBARA CARE: There's nothing about his invulnerability. There's nothing about a vulnerable point.
HUANG: Barbara Care, a researcher at the University of Lausanne, recently stumbled across some information that is hands and feet apart from the myth you might have heard. Care says those old Homeric poems never say exactly how Achilles dies or that his skin is invulnerable. That story only pops up hundreds of years later around the time of the Roman Empire.
CARE: The Roman version of the myth, we get to learn that his mother tried to make him invulnerable, and he plunged him in the river.
HUANG: And here's where the confusion originates - the word talus...
CARE: Specifically, the talus, which is the Latin word for astragalus.
HUANG: That's what's used to describe the part of the body Achilles was held from in those ancient texts. In modern romance languages, it's the origin of the word for heel. But talus in Latin actually refers more to the ankle.
CARE: Warriors are praised because of this capacity to stand and to run and to fight. So it's a very, very special element because of this.
HUANG: Which means, Care says, we've been getting our sayings wrong for a couple hundred years. But hey, a tiny detail being the fatal flaw in a great myth - if only there was an idiom to describe that.
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