Priam

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Priam, the last king of Troy, kissed the hands of the man who killed his son. That act, described in book XXIV of Homer's Iliad, stands as one of the most shattering moments in all of Greek mythology. An elderly king, around eighty years old, crossing enemy lines under cover of night, throwing himself at the mercy of the warrior who had stripped his city of its greatest defender. The questions this scene raises reach far beyond a single war: Who was Priam before the war consumed everything? How did a man said to have fathered fifty sons become the last witness to his dynasty's collapse? And what does his death, at the altar of Zeus, tell us about the world the Greeks imagined they lived in?

• 2. A Name and Its Stories

  ›

  Scholars who study Luwian, the ancient language spoken across much of Anatolia, trace Priam's name to a word recorded as Pa-ri-a-mu-a, meaning "exceptionally courageous." That form is attested as the name of a real man from Zazlippa, in the region of Kizzuwatna. A similar form, Paramoas, also appears in Greek inscriptions near Kaisareia in Cappadocia, suggesting the name traveled across languages and cultures long before Homer fixed it in verse.

  A rival tradition, popular in antiquity, reached for a simpler story. The Greek verb priamai means "to buy," and some mythographers spun that coincidence into biography. In this telling, Priam's sister Hesione ransomed her brother's freedom from the hero Heracles by paying with a veil, thereby literally buying him. This story appears in the Bibliotheca and in other mythographical works dated to the first and second centuries AD. Scholars note, though, that those sources postdate the first attestations of the name Priamos by a considerable span of time, making the folk etymology more a creative gloss than a genuine origin.

  A separate historical thread connects Priam to a warlord named Piyama-Radu, known from Hittite records as active near Wilusa, which some identify with Troy. That identification is disputed; Hittite texts describe Piyama-Radu as an ally of the Ahhiyawa against Wilusa, which makes him an unlikely candidate for the city's own king.

• 3. The Man Behind the Crown

  ›

  Two ancient chroniclers attempted physical portraits of Priam, and they disagree in telling ways. Malalas, in his Chronography, described him as "tall for the age, big, good, ruddy-colored, light-eyed, long-nosed, eyebrows meeting, keen-eyed, gray, restrained." Dares the Phrygian offered a different picture: "had a handsome face and a pleasant voice. He was large and swarthy."

  Priam's family was vast. With his chief wife Hecuba, daughter of the Phrygian king Dymas, and with many other wives and concubines, he is said to have fathered fifty sons and many daughters. The list of his children reads like a roll call of Trojan myth: Hector, Paris, Helenus, Cassandra, Deiphobus, Troilus, Laodice, Polyxena, Creusa, and Polydorus. Each of those names carries its own weight of prophecy, grief, and consequence within the war's long arc.

  Before the Trojan War dominated every memory of him, Priam had already been present at other wars. In Book 3 of Homer's Iliad, he tells Helen of Troy that he once helped King Mygdon of Phrygia in a battle against the Amazons, placing him on the margins of other great mythological conflicts well before the Greeks ever beached their ships.

• 4. Father and Supplicant

  ›

  When Achilles kills Hector and refuses to return the body, Zeus intervenes directly. He sends the god Hermes to escort Priam through the Greek camp under cover of night. What follows in book XXIV of the Iliad is one of the few moments in the poem where the killing pauses and two men simply look at each other across everything that separates them.

  Priam's plea survives in a direct quotation that Homer preserves: "I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before - I put my lips to the hands of the man who killed my son." The appeal works not through power but through vulnerability. He invokes Achilles' own father, Peleus, asking the warrior to imagine what it would mean to lose a son. Achilles is moved. He returns the body of Hector to the Trojans.

  Scholar Tim McNiven has shown that the body language Priam uses in this scene maps onto ancient Greek gestures of supplication documented not only in texts but also in vase paintings. The lowering of status, the physical gesture of vulnerability, carried a recognized force in Greek culture that ancient audiences would have read immediately. Achilles gives Priam a promise of nine days of peace to hold a proper funeral for Hector, complete with funeral games. On the twelfth day, the war would resume.

• 5. Death at the Altar

  ›

  Priam's death arrives in Book II of Virgil's Aeneid, and Virgil narrates it in terms of deliberate brutality. When Troy falls, Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, first kills Priam's son Polites in front of his father while Polites is seeking sanctuary on the altar of Zeus. Priam rebukes Neoptolemus directly, and throws a spear at him; it strikes the shield harmlessly. Neoptolemus then drags Priam to the same altar and kills him there.

  Greek vase paintings offer an alternative version that is in some ways more disturbing still. In those images, Neoptolemus clubs Priam to death with the corpse of the king's own baby grandson, Astyanax. Whether in the literary or the visual tradition, the death takes place at a sacred site, in the act of seeking refuge, at the hands of the son of the man who had once shown the old king mercy.

  Priam was around eighty years old at the time of the Sack of Troy. The long interval between his earlier campaigns alongside King Mygdon against the Amazons and his final hours at the altar of Zeus spans a life that witnessed war at both its most merciful and its most pitiless extremes.

• 6. Priam in Later Culture

  ›

  Priam became a fixed presence in Western drama and film, each retelling choosing a different face for the role. In the film Helen of Troy, Cedric Hardwicke played the king; in the later film Troy, Peter O'Toole took the part. On television, John Rhys-Davies appeared as Priam in the TV series Helen of Troy, while David Threlfall played him in Troy: Fall of a City. The Italian production The Trojan Horse cast Carlo Tamberlani in the role.

  On stage, Priam appears in Les Troyens, in which he plays a minor role, and gives his name to the opera King Priam outright. The breadth of that theatrical catalogue, from ancient Athens to nineteenth-century opera to twenty-first-century television, reflects the durability of his most famous scene: the king who begged, and the warrior who listened.

  The Luwian name recorded at Zazlippa, meaning "exceptionally courageous," sits quietly behind all of those performances, a fragment of a real language from a real region that the Greeks transformed into myth and that later cultures never stopped retelling.