The absent father
Peleus does not appear in person in the Iliad. He is invoked as the old father Achilles has left behind, and his name carries the weight of a household that the war has emptied. In Book IX Achilles says that he has no desire to return to Phthia, but the possibility of Peleus’s old age remains in the background.
His marriage to Thetis is the occasion of the wedding at which the golden apple was said to appear, and so of the judgment of Paris. The Iliad does not narrate this, but the tradition makes Peleus’s wedding the beginning of the whole chain of events.
The memory that moves Achilles
In Iliad XXIV Achilles thinks of Peleus as he looks at Priam, and the thought of his father’s old age is what allows him to feel pity for the enemy king. The poem does not bring Peleus on stage; it uses him as an absent centre of feeling, the person for whom Achilles is still a son rather than a killer.
Later tradition says that Peleus was restored to youth or made immortal, and that he survived Achilles. The Iliad leaves him at home, old, waiting for a son who will not return.
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The following entries mention “Peleus”.