Priam

Priam was the king of Troy in Greek mythology, at the time the Greeks launched an attack against the city, known as the Trojan War. His father was the Trojan king Laomedon.

Who Was King Priam of Troy?

Priam was the last king of Troy, the ruler who held the city through the ten years of the Trojan War and was killed on the night it fell. He was an old man throughout Homer’s Iliad, father of Hector and Paris, and he is remembered above all for one scene: crossing the battlefield alone to beg Achilles for the body of his son.

• Father: Laomedon, the previous king of Troy; mother: Strymo, or Placia in some accounts
• Wives: first Arisbe, then Hecuba, who bore him Hector, Paris, Cassandra, Helenus, and many more
• Reign: roughly sixty years, during which Troy grew rich and powerful before the war destroyed it
• Death: killed at the altar of Zeus by Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, during the sack of the city

Who Was the King of Troy?

Troy had two kings who matter in the myth, and they were father and son. Laomedon ruled first and was killed by Heracles; Priam ruled after him and was the king during the Trojan War, which is who people usually mean by “the king of Troy.”

• Laomedon cheated both Apollo and Poseidon out of their wages for building Troy’s walls, and later cheated Heracles as well
• Heracles sacked Troy in revenge, killing Laomedon and all his sons but one – the boy who became Priam
• Priam was never succeeded: his heir Hector died before him, and the city fell before any son could take the throne
• Aeneas, a Trojan of the royal line but not Priam’s son, escaped the sack and carried the bloodline to Italy

Why Was Priam Called Podarces?

Podarces, meaning “swift-footed,” was his birth name. He became Priam only after his sister Hesione ransomed him from Heracles, and the new name was understood to mean “the ransomed one,” from the Greek verb priamai, “to buy.”

• Heracles let Hesione choose one captive to save, and she chose her youngest brother
• Heracles then demanded a price for him, and she gave up her golden veil to buy his freedom
• The name-change story is an ancient explanation rather than a true etymology; scholars suspect the name is not Greek at all and may be Anatolian in origin
• Heracles left the boy on the throne of a ruined city, which Priam then spent decades rebuilding

When he was born, Priam was given the name Podarces. When Heracles sacked Troy and killed his father and brothers, Podarces alone was spared: his sister Hesione ransomed him with a golden veil of her own. After this event, Podarces changed his name to Priam.

Priam’s Family

Priam was famous for the size of his household. Homer credits him with fifty sons, nineteen of them by Hecuba, and later writers add roughly as many daughters, housed in a palace built with chambers for all of them.

• Hector, his eldest son by Hecuba and heir to the throne, was Troy’s greatest warrior
• Paris caused the war by carrying off Helen; Cassandra and Helenus were both prophets
• Others include Deiphobus, Troilus, Polites, Polydorus, Polyxena, Laodice, and Creusa, the wife of Aeneas
• Almost all of them died in the war or in the sack; Helenus was the only son to survive it

Priam in the Trojan War

Priam was too old to fight and took no part in the battles. His role in the Iliad is that of a ruler watching a war he cannot control and did not choose, and Homer treats him with unusual sympathy.

• He sat on the walls with Helen and asked her to name the Greek commanders below, speaking to her kindly and refusing to blame her for the war
• He would have returned Helen to end the war, but Paris refused and the Trojan assembly backed his son
• He ignored Cassandra’s warnings about the fall of the city, as everyone always did
• He watched from the walls as Achilles killed Hector, and begged his son not to face him

Priam and Achilles

Towards the end of the Trojan War, when Achilles had already killed Priam's son, Hector, and had desecrated the body by tying it on his chariot, Priam appeared in front of the Greek hero and pleaded to give him his son's body back, so that it can be buried. Achilles initially refused to give it back; Priam broke in tears and told Achilles to pity him, as he had suffered more than anyone else on the earth. Achilles was eventually persuaded to return the body to the Trojans, and agreed to a nine-day truce between the two sides, so that there could be a proper burial and funeral games.

The scene closes the Iliad and is the reason Priam is remembered at all. He crossed the plain at night, alone but for one herald, entered the tent of the man who had killed his son, and kissed the hands that did it – asking Achilles to think of his own father, Peleus, waiting far away. The two men wept together and then ate a meal, and the poem that opened with rage ends with a funeral.

The Death of Priam

Following the fall of Troy, Priam was killed by Achilles' son, Neoptolemus, as he was seeking refuge on the altar of Zeus. Neoptolemus caught Priam, brought him to the altar and killed him there.

• In Virgil’s account, Neoptolemus first killed Priam’s son Polites in front of him, then dragged the old king through his son’s blood to the altar
• Priam died as a suppliant at the altar of Zeus Herkeios, protector of the household – a killing the Greeks themselves regarded as sacrilege
• His death became one of the standard images of the sack of Troy in ancient vase painting and Roman art
• Hecuba was enslaved, his daughters were taken as prizes, and his grandson Astyanax was thrown from the walls

Misconceptions and Lesser-Known Facts

“Priam’s Treasure” Was Not Priam’s

The gold hoard Heinrich Schliemann unearthed at Troy in 1873 and named after Priam has nothing to do with him. It comes from a layer of the city roughly a thousand years older than any plausible date for the Trojan War.

Priam Did Not Start the War, and Did Not Want It

The war was caused by his son Paris, not by Priam. Ancient sources present the old king as willing to return Helen and end the conflict, overruled by his own family and bound by loyalty to his son.

Was Priam a Real King?

There is no historical evidence that Priam existed. Troy itself was a real Bronze Age city in northwest Anatolia, destroyed and rebuilt many times, but no inscription or record names any of its kings from the mythological tradition.

See Also: Trojan War, Laomedon, Hesione, Achilles, Hector, Zeus, Hecuba, Paris, Cassandra, Neoptolemus, Helen