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Priam is the king of Troy and the husband of Hecuba. He is also the father of fifty Trojan warriors, including Hector and Paris. Priam is a renowned leader and has earned the respect of both the Trojans and the Greeks by virtue of his level-headed, wise, and benevolent rule. For example, he treats Helen kindly throughout the epic even though he laments the war that her presence in his homeland has sparked and his son’s role in causing it. Priam wants Troy to defeat the Greeks, but his first priority is the safety of his troops. In Book 21, he opens the gates of Troy to his fleeing troops after seeing the mass carnage even though it nearly allows Achilles to take the city.
Priam was a gifted fighter in his youth. In Book 3 he tells Helen he once helped Mygdon, the king of Phrygia, in a battle against the Amazons (a band of fierce female warriors). However, his advanced years have left him too old to fight in the Trojan War. As a result, Priam’s character underscores the text’s thematic emphasis on the glory of war; Priam, recounting past triumphs, laments his inability to join the fight. That Priam’s scenes are often set on the city ramparts suggests he is literally and metaphorically kept at a distance from the Trojan warriors and their glory. Priam is bitter about this, describing his situation as a “sad spectacle of pain.” In Book 22, he watches the battle below and gives a lengthy speech comparing the glorious death of a war hero with the humiliating death of an old man in a fallen city. He worries that he will die only after he has seen the destruction of his children and the collapse of his city while being powerless to stop either. His speech is especially tragic for anybody familiar with Greek mythology because Priam will indeed suffer the exact fate that he outlines in his lament shortly after the events of The Iliad take place.
In the end, Priam’s most significant contribution to the narrative comes when he braves the Achaean camp to retrieve Hector’s body from Achilles so that his son’s spirit may rest. This action parallels the moment in Book 1 in which Chryses travels to the Greek camp to attempt to get his daughter back, bringing the narrative full circle. Priam’s invocation of Achilles’s own father, Peleus, forges a momentary bond between the two men. Achilles knows that, having killed Hector, he is fated never to return to Phthia, meaning that one day Peleus will be the bereft father that Achilles has made Priam. Though nothing changes—though Achilles and Priam are still enemies, and both know the fighting will commence anew soon enough—Priam is able to connect with the fearsome Achilles on a human level and achieve what few others would dare. Achilles’s realization that his own father is doomed to suffer what Priam is now suffering finally melts Achilles’s rage, enabling him to return Hector’s body to Priam and bringing the poem to a close.
