Priam

The One Who Wasn't Angry

Priam has no life outside the poem. He is the old king of Troy in Homer's Iliad, composed around the eighth century BC, and he is almost powerless in it: he has fifty sons, a city under siege for ten years, and no ability to stop any of it. He watches the war from the wall. What Homer gives him instead of power is judgement — when Helen stands beside him on that wall, the woman the entire war is nominally about, he tells her he does not blame her at all, that the gods are responsible, and asks her kindly to name the Greek captains for him. In a poem about rage, he is the one character who declines to be angry at the obvious target.

A Death Homer Never Wrote

Not in the Iliad — Homer stops at Hector's funeral. The rest of the tradition, and Virgil's Aeneid in particular, has Neoptolemus, Achilles' son, break into the palace on the night Troy finally falls, kill another of Priam's sons in front of him at the household altar, and then kill the old man at the altar itself. Virgil's image of the body is a headless trunk on the shore — a death his Roman readers would have recognized. The son of the man who gave him Hector back is the one who does it, and that symmetry is the point.