Priamos

Priam (PRY-am), in Greek Πρίαμος (Priamos), is the last king of Troy — the aged ruler who presides, helpless and grieving, over the city's final years and its destruction. He is one of the great human figures of the Iliad, and Homer gives him no monster to fight and no quest to complete; his heroism is of another kind altogether, the heroism of endurance and of love. He is the father of fifty sons and many daughters, among them the three whose names outlast all the rest — Hector, the city's shield and greatest warrior; Paris, whose theft of Helen brought the war; and Cassandra, the prophetess doomed never to be believed — together with Deiphobus, Helenus the seer, the doomed maiden Polyxena, and young Troilus. Around this vast family and the wealth of his city, Priam is the very picture of a great king in the fullness of his years, and of everything such a king can lose.

The Greeks remembered Priam for two scenes above all, and both belong to the closing movements of the Iliad. The first is his night journey across the battlefield, guided in secret by Hermes, into the very hut of Achilles — the man who has killed his son Hector and dragged the body behind his chariot — where the old king kneels, clasps the terrible knees, and kisses "the hands, the dreadful man-slaughtering hands, that had killed so many of his sons," to beg back Hector's corpse for burial. It is the most famous act of supplication in all of ancient literature, and the emotional summit of the poem: two enemies weeping together, the young killer and the old father, each seeing in the other the grief that the war has made. The second scene is Priam's own death, which the Iliad foretells and later poets describe — the old man cut down at his own household altar, the altar of Zeus Herkeios, "Zeus of the Courtyard," by Neoptolemus, the son of the very Achilles before whom he had knelt.

If Perseus is the pattern of the young hero favoured by the gods, Priam is his opposite and complement: the great man at the far end of life, who has had everything the world can give — a kingdom, a famous city, fifty sons — and lives to see it all taken away. His story is the archetypal image of the fall of kings, the reversal that the Greeks called peripeteia, and his death at the altar became, for antiquity and for every age since, the emblem of a proud house brought down and a sacred protection that fails: the king murdered in his own sanctuary, at the hearth of the god of hospitality, on the night his city burned.

The ransomed boy — Priam and the first fall of Troy

Priam's life began, the tradition says, with a rescue and a ransom, and this is where the ancients found the meaning of his name. He was a son of Laomedon, an earlier king of Troy, and in his boyhood he was called Podarces ("swift-footed"). His father Laomedon was a byword for treachery: he cheated Apollo and Poseidon of their wages after they built the walls of Troy, and he cheated Heracles of the promised reward for saving his daughter Hesione from a sea-monster. For that second broken oath Heracles came against Troy with a small fleet, took the city — the first sack of Troy, a generation before the great war — and killed Laomedon and all his sons but one. Only the boy Podarces was spared, because his sister Hesione begged for his life; Heracles let her ransom him, and she gave her veil (or golden headband) as the price. From that buying-back, the story went, the boy took a new name: Priam, "the ransomed one" (from priasthai, "to buy"). (The etymology is almost certainly a later folk-explanation of a name that is really pre-Greek; but the ancients believed it, and it frames his whole life — the child redeemed at the start, the old man who ransoms his son's body at the end.) So Priam was, from boyhood, the survivor of one destruction of his city, set on its throne to rebuild it — and destined to see it fall a second and final time.

The great king and the fifty sons

Under Priam, Troy rose to the height of its wealth and fame, and he became the very image of the powerful eastern king. Homer gives him an enormous household: fifty sons, nineteen of them (in the Iliad's reckoning) born to his queen Hecuba (Hecabe) and the rest to other wives and concubines, together with many daughters — a palace, Homer says, of fifty chambers of polished stone where his sons slept beside their wives, and twelve more across the court for his daughters and their husbands. The most important of his children run like a thread through the whole story of Troy. Hector, eldest and best, was the mainstay of the city, its finest warrior and the defender on whom everything depended. Paris (also called Alexander), the second, was the beautiful, fatal son whose abduction of Helen from Sparta brought the thousand ships against Troy — the child whom Hecuba, pregnant, dreamed she would bear as a firebrand that burned the city, and who was exposed on Mount Ida but survived to fulfil the omen. Cassandra, loveliest of Priam's daughters, was given the gift of true prophecy by Apollo and then cursed, when she refused the god, never to be believed — so that she foresaw every disaster and could prevent none. Others crowd the tradition: Deiphobus, the brave son who married Helen after Paris's death and died in the sack; Helenus, the seer, the one son who survived; Polyxena, the daughter sacrificed at Achilles' tomb after the city fell; and young Troilus, killed by Achilles early in the war, whose death (a prophecy held) sealed Troy's doom. To be Priam was to be father to the whole doomed generation of Troy.

The old man on the wall — the teichoscopia

By the time the Iliad opens, Priam is far too old to fight; his role is to watch, to counsel, and to grieve. In one of the poem's most beautiful scenes — the teichoscopia, the "viewing from the wall" (Iliad 3.161–244) — the old king sits with the Trojan elders on the tower above the Scaean Gate, where the elders are likened to cicadas, their fighting days behind them, their voices thin and sweet. There Helen comes to him, and Priam, far from blaming the woman over whom his sons are dying, speaks to her with startling gentleness: "I do not blame you; I blame the gods, who brought this war upon me." He asks her to name the Greek champions he sees moving on the plain below — the towering Agamemnon, the cunning Odysseus, the giant Ajax — and Helen names them one by one, weeping. It is a quiet interlude in a book of battle, and it fixes Priam's character for the whole poem: the courteous, sorrowing old king who sees clearly what is coming, blames no one unjustly, and can do nothing to stop it.

The father on the wall — the death of Hector

The war's turning brings Priam his sharpest grief. When Achilles, mad with rage at the death of his friend Patroclus, comes storming across the plain, all the Trojans flee inside the walls except Hector, who waits alone before the gate to face him. From the rampart above, Priam and Hecuba see Achilles coming, and the old king breaks down: he stretches out his hands and begs his son, by all the gods, to come inside the walls and not to stand against a man so much stronger (Iliad 22.25–91). He tears his grey hair; he foresees his own end if Hector falls — the city taken, his sons killed, his daughters dragged away, his little grandchildren dashed from the towers, and himself butchered at last at his own door, his body torn by his own dogs. Hector will not listen; shame keeps him at the gate, and Achilles kills him, and lashes the body behind his chariot to drag it in the dust around the walls, in full sight of the father and mother watching from above. It is the deepest wound the war deals Priam before his own death: to watch, powerless on the wall, the killing and defilement of the best of his sons.

The ransom of Hector — Priam in the hut of Achilles

(Content note: this, the summit of the Iliad, turns on a father's grief and the mutilation of a corpse.) For eleven days Achilles dragged Hector's body around Patroclus's tomb, and the gods would not let it be marred; and on the twelfth, moved by the pleas of Apollo and the will of Zeus, they resolved that Hector must be ransomed and buried. Zeus sent word to Priam through the goddess Iris: he must go, alone but for one old herald, with a wagon of treasure, into the Greek camp to beg his son's body from the man who killed him. Against the terror of Hecuba, who begs him not to go into the hands of "that savage and faithless man," the old king loads a ransom of gold, robes, and cauldrons and sets out across the plain in the dark. Hermes, sent by Zeus, meets him disguised as a young Greek soldier and guides him unseen through the guards and the ditch and the gate, and lulls the sentries, and brings him safe to the hut of Achilles (Iliad 24.144–691).

There the greatest scene in Homer unfolds. Priam enters unseen and falls at Achilles' feet, and — before the astonished young man can rise — clasps his knees and kisses "the terrible, man-slaughtering hands that had killed so many of his sons." He begs Achilles to remember his own father, Peleus, an old man far away who at least still has a son alive to hope for; and to pity him, Priam, who has done what no man on earth has ever done — "I have kissed the hands of the man who killed my son." And Achilles weeps — for his own father, and for the dead Patroclus — and takes the old man's hand and gently puts him from his knees, and the two enemies, the young killer and the old father, weep together in the hut, each grieving his own dead. Then Achilles, his anger at last burned out, grants the ransom: he has the body washed and anointed and laid on the wagon, shares a meal with Priam, marvels at the old king's nobility as Priam marvels at his, and grants a truce of eleven days so that Troy may mourn and bury Hector properly. Priam sleeps in the porch, and Hermes wakes him before dawn to steal him home again with his son's body. The Iliad ends not with the fall of Troy but with Hector's funeral — and its final movement belongs to Priam, the father who dared everything to bring his son home to the fire.

The death of the king — cut down at the altar

Homer's Iliad closes before the city falls, but the death of Priam was told in the lost epic the Iliou Persis ("The Sack of Troy") and dramatised by the tragedians and, most vividly, by Virgil in the second book of the Aeneid (a Roman retelling, but drawing on the older Greek tradition). On the last night, when the Greeks poured out of the wooden horse and the city burned, the old king — too feeble to fight — buckled on his rusted armour in a useless gesture of defiance, and his wife Hecuba drew him with her to take refuge as suppliants at the great household altar of Zeus Herkeios ("Zeus of the Enclosure/Courtyard"), the god of the hearth and the boundary, in the open court of the palace. There, before his eyes, Neoptolemus — the young son of the very Achilles to whom Priam had knelt — cut down one of Priam's last sons, Polites, who fled bleeding to die at his father's feet. The old king, in horror, hurled a feeble spear that barely dented the youth's shield and cried out that even Achilles had shown more respect to a suppliant than his son now did. Then Neoptolemus dragged the trembling old man through his son's blood to the altar and killed him there — in the older Greek version, striking him down at the altar itself; in Virgil, sword driven to the hilt as the king's grey head was forced back. So Priam died as he had lived out his last years: at the mercy of Achilles' house, this time given none. His body was left unburied and headless on the shore, "a huge trunk upon the sand, a head hacked from the shoulders, a corpse without a name."

The meaning of the death — the fall of kings

The killing of Priam at the altar of Zeus Herkeios became, for antiquity, the single most concentrated image of the fall of Troy and of the fall of kings in general — sacrilege and reversal in one stroke. The victim is a king and a suppliant and an old man; the place is the hearth-altar of the god who guards the home and the sacred bond of hospitality; the killer is a boy avenging a father, hacking down the father of his enemies at the very seat of divine protection. Vase-painters loved the scene — the aged Priam, often shown seated on the altar with the body of his little grandson Astyanax across his knees, as Neoptolemus strikes — and it stood in the tradition as the crime that most stained the Greek victory and drew down the gods' anger on the returning fleet. In Priam's death the Greeks saw the whole terrible arithmetic of Troy: the greatest king of the age, father of fifty sons, redeemed as a child and reduced in his last hour to a nameless trunk on the beach, killed at his own hearth on the night his world ended.

A figure of epic, not of cult

Priam is a hero of story rather than an object of worship, and no significant cult of Priam is attested — he received nothing like the hero-cult that clustered around figures such as Achilles, Hector, or Perseus. His importance to the ancients was literary and moral: he lived in the Iliad, on the tragic stage, in vase-painting, and in the schoolroom, as the supreme example of the great man overthrown, the king who tastes every reversal that fortune can inflict. Where a hero like Hector had a tomb and honours, Priam had something in a sense larger — a place at the emotional centre of the poem the Greeks held most sacred, and a name that stood, all by itself, for the fall of kings.

The old king on the tragic stage

It was above all in tragedy that Priam and his ruined house were kept alive and made to speak. Euripides built two of his most harrowing plays around the aftermath of Priam's fall — the Trojan Women, in which Priam's widow Hecuba and daughters Cassandra and the others face enslavement over the smoking ruin of Troy, and the Hecuba, on the sacrifice of Priam's daughter Polyxena and Hecuba's revenge. Priam himself, already dead when these plays open, hangs over them as the measure of all that has been lost; his name is invoked again and again as the emblem of a greatness now utterly undone. Through the tragedians the story of Priam's family became the Greek theatre's favourite study of suffering, war, and the reversal of fortune, and the old king its unseen presiding figure.

The image of the altar

In the visual arts Priam's death was one of the defining scenes of the fall of Troy. From the Archaic period onward, painters showed the Iliou Persis, the Sack, with the old king slain at the altar of Zeus Herkeios — frequently in the terrible compressed image of Neoptolemus using the body of Priam's grandson Astyanax as a club against the grandfather, or striking the seated old man as he clung to the altar. The scene appears on Attic black- and red-figure vases and in the great painted cycles the ancient sources describe. For the Greeks who saw these images, Priam at the altar was shorthand for the whole meaning of Troy's fall: the sacrilege that crowned the victory and the pity that outlasted it.

Not a god but an enduring figure

Priam has no place in the modern devotional revival of Hellenic religion in the way the gods and the cult-heroes do — he is a figure of literature and memory rather than of the altar. What endures instead is his hold on the imagination as one of the most moving human beings in all of ancient poetry, and the scenes attached to his name are among the most retold and most studied in the Western canon. Readers and writers return to Priam not to petition him but to be undone by him: the father on the wall, the enemy in the tent, the old man kissing the hands that killed his son.

The night in Achilles' tent

The meeting of Priam and Achilles in Iliad 24 is regularly named among the greatest scenes in all of literature, and it has shaped the modern understanding of what the Iliad is about — not the glory of war but its cost, and the fragile, astonishing possibility of shared grief and mercy between enemies. It has been translated, imitated, and reworked endlessly; Alexander Pope, and in our own time translators such as Robert Fagles and Emily Wilson, have laboured to carry its weight into English, and poets and novelists (from George Chapman to the modern retellings of the Trojan War) have circled back to the old king's supplication as the moment where the poem opens its heart. To read Priam kneeling before Achilles is, for many readers, the moment the ancient world becomes unbearably close.

The archetype of the fallen king

Beyond that single scene, Priam survives as an archetype — the great king at the end of his life who loses everything, the figure of reversal itself. His name recurs whenever the fall of the mighty is invoked, and his death at the altar remains one of the enduring images of sacrilege and the end of an age. Shakespeare has the Player in Hamlet declaim the slaughter of "the unnerved father" Priam, "the mobled queen" Hecuba running barefoot through the flames — a set-piece Shakespeare could count on his audience to know as the very type of tragic grief. Wherever the fall of a proud house or a doomed city is figured, the old king of Troy, cut down at his own hearth on the last night of his world, stands behind it.