Priam

Priam was born Podarces, the son of King Laomedon of Troy, a ruler so treacherous that he had cheated the gods themselves. When Poseidon, the god of the sea who ruled the oceans from his underwater palace of coral and pearl, and Apollo, the god of music and prophecy, had built the walls of Troy for Laomedon, the king refused to pay them and even threatened to sell them into slavery. The gods punished him by sending a sea-monster to ravage the Trojan coast, and Heracles, the hero forced to complete twelve impossible labors, came to kill the beast in exchange for Laomedon's immortal horses. But Laomedon cheated Heracles too, and the hero returned with an army, sacked Troy, and killed the king and all his sons except Podarces, who was ransomed by his sister Hesione. Heracles renamed him Priam, which means "the ransomed one," and he grew up to rebuild the city and restore its glory. Priam married Hecuba, a princess of Phrygia, a kingdom in central Anatolia, and she bore him many children, including Hector, the eldest and noblest, and Paris, the youngest and most beautiful, whose birth was shadowed by prophecy.

When Paris, the prince who had been abandoned on Mount Ida as an infant because of a prophecy that he would destroy the city, returned to Troy and brought Helen with him, Priam faced a terrible choice. The Greeks demanded her return, and the Trojan elders, including Priam's own son Helenus, a prophet who could see the future, warned that keeping her would mean the city's destruction. But Priam, bound by the laws of hospitality and perhaps swayed by his son's passion, refused to surrender her. He welcomed Helen into the palace and treated her as a daughter, and for ten years he watched from the walls as the greatest war in living memory consumed his kingdom. He was an old man by then, white-haired and bowed, and he could not fight, but he could watch and weep. He saw his sons die one by one, his allies fall, and his city's fields burn. He offered sacrifices to the gods, begged for omens, and listened to the prophecies that grew darker with each passing year.

The defining moment of Priam's life came after the death of Hector, his eldest son and the defender of Troy. Hector had killed Patroclus, the dearest friend of Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior, and Achilles had driven his chariot around the walls of Troy dragging Hector's body behind it, desecrating the corpse in a rage that horrified even the gods. For twelve days, Hector's body lay unburied in the Greek camp, and Priam could not bear it. He opened his treasure chambers, gathered gold and precious goods, and loaded them onto a mule cart. Then, guided by Hermes, who disguised himself as a young Trojan guide, he crossed the plain of Troy at night, passed the sentries of the Greek camp, and came to the tent of Achilles. The Greek hero sat with his companions, and Priam entered alone, fell to his knees, and kissed the hands that had killed his son. He begged Achilles to remember his own father, Peleus, an old man waiting in Phthia who would never see his son again, and to feel the grief of a father who had lost his child. Achilles, moved to tears by the old king's courage and sorrow, agreed to release the body. He ordered Hector's corpse to be washed and wrapped in fine robes, and he loaded Priam's cart with the body and the ransom gold. Priam returned to Troy at dawn, and for nine days the Trojans mourned Hector, building a great pyre and burning him with honors that the Greeks had denied him. It was the last moment of dignity Troy would know.

After Hector's death, the war turned irrevocably against Troy. The prophet Helenus, Priam's son, had been captured by the Greeks, and under torture he revealed that Troy could only fall if three conditions were met: the Greeks must fetch the bow of Heracles from the island of Lemnos, where Philoctetes, the wounded archer, had been abandoned; they must bring Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, from the island of Scyros; and they must steal the sacred image of Athena, the Palladium, from her temple in Troy. The Greeks accomplished all three, and with the bow of Heracles, the Greeks shot Paris, who died on Mount Ida where he had been born. But the fall of Troy was now inevitable. The Greeks built the wooden horse, a hollow giant filled with warriors, and the Trojans, deceived, dragged it inside their walls. That night, the Greeks emerged, opened the gates, and the city burned.

Priam's death was as terrible as his life had been tragic. As the Greeks sacked Troy, Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, burst into the palace. Priam had taken refuge at the altar of Zeus, the king of the gods, clutching the sacred hearth and begging for protection. But Neoptolemus dragged him from the altar, across the palace floor where his sons' blood already pooled, and butchered him there, an act of sacrilege that horrified the Greeks themselves and would haunt Neoptolemus for the rest of his short and cursed life. Priam's wife Hecuba was taken into slavery, his daughters were distributed among the Greek kings as concubines and slaves, and his infant grandson Astyanax, the son of Hector, was thrown from the walls of Troy to ensure that no heir of the royal house would survive to rebuild the city. The walls that the gods had helped to build were pulled down, the temples were burned, and Troy was erased from the earth. Priam, who had ransomed his own life as a boy, could not ransom his city as a king. His story is the story of Troy itself, a kingdom of gold and pride that was destroyed by the very beauty and prophecy it had tried to escape.