Priam

Last king of Troy, son of Laomedon and father (in the Iliadic count) of fifty sons including Hector and Paris and fifty daughters including Cassandra and Creusa. The *Iliad*'s most extraordinary scene comes in book 24, when the old king — guided through the Achaean lines by Hermes — crosses the no-man's-land alone at night and kneels before Achilles to ransom Hector's body, kissing the hand that killed his son and asking him to think of his own father Peleus. At Troy's fall the post-Homeric tradition has him killed at the altar of Zeus Herkeios by Neoptolemus, Achilles's son.

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