Paris

Paris, also called Alexander, was a son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. Before his birth, a prophecy warned that he would bring ruin on the city, and the infant was exposed on Mount Ida to die; shepherds raised him instead, and he grew up tending flocks with no idea of his royal birth. Years later, at the wedding of the mortal Peleus and the sea nymph Thetis, parents of the future Achilles, the goddess Strife threw down a golden apple marked "for the fairest," and Hera, Athena and Aphrodite each claimed it. Rather than judge between them himself, Zeus sent the three goddesses to Paris on Mount Ida. Each offered him a bribe in private: Hera promised kingship over all of Asia, Athena promised victory and wisdom in war, and Aphrodite promised him the most beautiful woman alive. Paris chose Aphrodite, the choice later called the Judgement of Paris, and sailed for Sparta to claim his prize.

In Sparta, King Menelaus welcomed Paris as a guest for nine days before leaving for Crete to attend his grandfather's funeral. With Menelaus away, Paris persuaded Helen, Menelaus's wife, to leave with him, taking a large share of the household's wealth and abandoning Helen's nine-year-old daughter Hermione. The two sailed for Troy by night. Menelaus's return to an empty palace became the occasion for a vast Greek coalition, led by his brother Agamemnon, to sail against Troy and win her back.

Homer's Iliad, set in the war's tenth year, gives Paris a mixed reputation. In Book 3 he challenges the Greeks to single combat, then quails and retreats at the sight of Menelaus advancing to fight him. His own brother Hector rebukes him for it in front of the whole army, telling him he should never have been born rather than bring shame like this on Troy. When the duel finally happens, Menelaus overpowers Paris quickly, but Aphrodite snaps his helmet strap at the last moment and carries him off in a mist to his own bedchamber, leaving Menelaus the technical victor but without his prize.

Later epic tradition credits Paris with a far greater kill than any he manages in the Iliad itself. Guided by the god Apollo, he shoots Achilles in the heel at the Scaean Gate, the blow that finally brings down Troy's greatest enemy - the death of Achilles, which the Iliad never reaches, since the poem ends before either man's death is narrated. Ancient audiences saw the killing as a lesser way to win a fight: Achilles had chosen a short life in exchange for undying kleos, the glory that came from dying in the front rank of battle, and Paris takes it from him with an arrow from a distance rather than a spear at close range. Paris's own end comes not long after in the same tradition. Calchas prophesies that Troy cannot fall without the bow and poisoned arrows of Heracles, so the Greeks fetch their old owner, the archer Philoctetes, to the siege, and he kills Paris with them, clearing one more obstacle before the Trojan Horse ends the war. A lost tragedy of Sophocles is said to have dramatized this final duel, though only Apollodorus's summary of the episode survives complete.