Priam

Priam was not always called Priam. Apollodorus says that when Heracles took Troy, he shot down King Laomedon and all his sons except the youngest, Podarces. He gave Laomedon's daughter Hesione to Telamon and let her take one captive with her. She chose her brother. Heracles ruled that the boy must first be a slave and then be ransomed. When he was sold, Hesione paid with the veil from her head, and from then on Podarces was called Priam.

Apollodorus says Priam came to the throne after that sack. His first wife, Arisbe, bore him Aesacus, an interpreter of dreams. Priam then gave Arisbe to Hyrtacus and married Hecuba, whose first son was Hector. Before her second child was born, Hecuba dreamed she gave birth to a firebrand that burned the whole city. Aesacus read the dream as ruin for Troy, and Priam had the newborn exposed on Mount Ida. The child survived and grew up to be Paris.

Homer's Iliad shows Priam as an old king who no longer fights. He sits with the elders at the Scaean gates when Helen comes onto the wall. He calls her to sit beside him, tells her she is not to blame, and says the gods roused the war against him. Then he asks her to name the Greek chiefs on the plain, among them Agamemnon and Odysseus. He recalls once fighting as an ally of the Phrygians on the Sangarius, on the day the Amazons came.

In Book 22, Priam is the first to see Achilles racing toward the city. From the wall he begs Hector to come inside. Achilles has already made him bereft of many sons, he says, and two more, Lycaon and Polydorus, are missing. He foresees his own end: sons killed, daughters dragged away, and himself torn at his door by the dogs he fed at his table. Hector does not listen.

After Hector's death, Zeus sends Iris to tell Priam to ransom the body, going alone but for an old herald. Hecuba begs him not to go. Priam loads a wagon with robes, ten talents of gold, tripods, cauldrons and a precious cup from Thrace. Hermes, in the likeness of a young prince, guides him through the Greek camp by night. Inside Achilles's hut, Priam clasps his knees and kisses the hands that killed his sons.

Priam asks Achilles to remember his own father, Peleus, who is as old as he is. Achilles weeps for Peleus and for Patroclus while Priam weeps for Hector. Achilles has the body washed and returned, eats with Priam, and grants a truce for the funeral: nine days of mourning, the burial on the tenth, the mound on the eleventh. Hermes wakes Priam before dawn and leads him out. His daughter Cassandra is the first in Troy to see him return.

The Iliad ends with Hector's funeral, before Troy falls, so Priam's death comes from later works. Apollodorus's Epitome says Neoptolemus killed him where he had taken refuge, at the altar of Zeus of the Courtyard. Euripides agrees in two plays. In the Trojan Women, Poseidon says Priam lies dead at the altar of the god who guarded his house, Zeus Herkeios in the Greek. In the Hecuba, the ghost of Polydorus says his father fell butchered at the god-built altar by Achilles's son.

Virgil turns the death into a full scene. In Aeneid Book 2, the aged king straps on armor he can no longer carry, and Hecuba draws him to an altar in the palace court. Neoptolemus, called Pyrrhus, kills their son Polites before his father's eyes. Priam curses him, saying Achilles showed more respect to a suppliant, and throws a spear that barely sticks in his shield. Pyrrhus drags the old king through his son's blood and drives the sword in to the hilt. Virgil leaves the headless body unburied on the shore. Earlier in the same book, Priam has the captive Sinon unbound and tells him he will be one of the Trojans.

Not every poet put the killing at the altar. Pausanias reports that the poet Lescheos said Priam was dragged away from the altar and killed by Neoptolemus at the gate of his own palace. Elsewhere Pausanias records a saying, the Punishment of Neoptolemus: the man who killed Priam at the altar of Zeus Herkeios was himself killed beside Apollo's altar at Delphi.

Priam's children are counted differently too. In the Iliad he tells Achilles he had fifty sons, nineteen from one mother and the rest from women of the palace. Apollodorus names his children instead of giving a total, and even single sons move between mothers. Homer's Priam names Laothoe as the mother of Lycaon and Polydorus, but Euripides and Apollodorus make Polydorus a son of Hecuba. In Euripides's Hecuba, Priam sends that youngest son to his Thracian guest-friend Polymestor with gold, and Polymestor murders him for it once Troy has fallen.