When Thetis forsook her infant and fled to the sea, Peleus carried the child up the mountain to Chiron, and there the boy was reared on a diet no ordinary nursery could set. Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography compiled in the 1st-2nd century CE) tells it in a single line: the centaur "fed him on the inwards of lions and wild swine and the marrows of bears", and named him Achilles because as a babe "he had not put his lips to the breast". The meat is not merely food; it is the making of the man.

What the bare narrative leaves unspoken, the apparatus draws out. In a note by the volume's translator and annotator, Frazer, the shelf reads the meal as magic and gathers the variants: by one account Chiron fed the boy "not on ordinary victuals, but on the flesh and marrows of lions"; by another, on the marrows of fawns, food "thought to ensure the fleetness of foot" for which Achilles would later be famous. The logic, once named, is simple. Frazer's note calls it "the principle of sympathetic magic", by which many peoples "acquire the qualities of certain animals by eating their flesh". Lion and boar and bear pass their strength and courage into whoever eats them; the deer surrenders its speed.

The same note reaches past Greece to prove the rule universal: in some African tribes, men "eat the hearts of lions" to grow lion-hearted, while others refuse the tortoise lest they turn slow-footed. So the magic meat of a Thessalian childhood turns out to belong to the wide world's kitchens. It is worth marking that the motif reaches us here through the editor's note more than the myth's own line — the primary text feeds Achilles, but it is Frazer who tells us why.

If a hero is what he is fed, was Achilles' wrath already waiting in the lion's heart the centaur cooked for him?