Paris was the Trojan prince whose judgment of the three goddesses and whose abduction of Helen brought on the ten-year war that destroyed his city. He was the second son of King Priam of Troy and Queen Hecuba, and his given name was Alexander (the “defender of men”), but he is known in the Greek tradition by the diminutive Paris, and it is Paris who has survived in Western literature. The story of Paris is unusual in that the cause of the war is not the hero’s choice but a choice imposed on him by the gods. The Iliad is, in part, the story of how a divine beauty contest and a single woman turn into the destruction of a city.
The Birth and the Exposure
Hecuba, the wife of Priam, dreamed on the night before Paris was born that she gave birth to a firebrand that set the whole of Troy ablaze. The seer Aesacus, son of Priam by a previous marriage, interpreted the dream: the child would be the ruin of Troy. The infant was therefore exposed on Mount Ida, the great mountain range to the south of Troy, and left to die. He was, however, suckled by a she-bear for nine days, then found by a shepherd named Agelaus, who took him home and raised him as his own son.
This is the standard Greek version, and it follows the same pattern as the exposure of Oedipus, of Telephus, of Pelias and Neleus, and of other exposed princes. The child is saved by shepherds or by animals, grows up in ignorance of his royal parentage, and is recognised at the moment when the city most needs him not to be. The motif is older than the specific Paris story, and it is one of the structural staples of Greek myth. The Paris version is also important for what it says about Troy: the city that will be destroyed by the war, in this reading, had the chance to be saved at the moment of its greatest weakness (the birth of a single child), and it failed.
Paris on Mount Ida
Grown to manhood on Mount Ida, Paris became a shepherd, and as a shepherd he had the famous encounter with the three goddesses. The story is told in the Cypria, the first poem of the Epic Cycle, in summary by Proclus, and in many later sources (and in the art of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE). The three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, came to Paris to be judged. Each offered him a bribe. Hera offered him power and kingship. Athena offered him wisdom and skill in war. Aphrodite offered him the most beautiful woman in the world.
The bribe is the heart of the myth. Paris was not asked which goddess was most beautiful — that was the question the poets posed for the audience — but which reward he preferred. The choice is a moral test, and Paris failed it. He chose Aphrodite’s bribe, and he was given the woman: Helen, the daughter of Zeus and Leda, already married to Menelaus, king of Sparta. The judgment, in this reading, is a choice of the beautiful over the good. Hera and Athena, spurned, become the divine enemies of Troy, and their anger is one of the engines of the Iliad.
Paris and Oenone
Paris, before he was recognised as a prince, had married a nymph of Mount Ida named Oenone, daughter of the river-god Cebren. The marriage is the one happy and human thing in the Paris story, and it is what makes his later death so poignant. Oenone, the nymph, had the gift of prophecy and healing, and she warned Paris against the journey to Sparta. He went anyway.
After the fall of Troy, Paris was wounded by Philoctetes with the poisoned arrows of Heracles, and he returned to Mount Ida, to Oenone, to be healed. The nymph, who could have saved him, refused. He died on the mountain. Then, in one of the most affecting variants of the story, she relented, ran out to where he lay, found him dead, and threw herself on his body in grief. The story is not in the Iliad and is probably Hellenistic in origin, but it became the standard version in the Roman poets and is the source of the famous Ovidian epistle, Heroides V, in which Oenone writes to Paris, begging him to return.
The Recovery of Hesione and the Bow of Heracles
After the recognition of Paris on Mount Ida — and the recognition story has several forms, the most common being that he distinguished himself in a funeral games held by Priam and was identified by Cassandra, who had seen the lost child long before — Priam sent him on an embassy to Sparta. Paris’s reason for the embassy was ostensibly the recovery of his father’s sister Hesione, who had been taken by Heracles and given to Telamon of Salamis, and never ransomed. The real reason, in the Cypria, was the fulfilment of Aphrodite’s promise: to bring back the most beautiful woman in the world.
The embassy is the moment that turns the story from a divine beauty contest into a war. Paris, on his way, stopped at Sidon in Phoenicia and took Helen from her husband Menelaus while the king was away in Crete attending a funeral. Whether Helen went willingly or was carried off is disputed: in the Cypria she went willingly, in some later sources she was carried off, in Stesichorus’ famous palinode (the Helen of Stesichorus, of the late seventh or early sixth century BCE) she never went to Troy at all but was detained in Egypt. The ambiguity is preserved in the Iliad, where Helen is shown as a sympathetic figure, often weeping for the destruction she has caused and blaming Aphrodite, but never denying that she is the cause.
Paris in the Iliad
The Iliad does not have a great deal to say about Paris. He is a competent warrior, but he is not in the first rank, and Homer several times makes the point that he would be a better poet than a soldier. He is the man whom Hector, his elder brother, contemptuously calls “woman-mad Paris” and “beauty-mad Paris” when he is needed on the battlefield. His aristeia in Book III is the duel with Menelaus, which is broken up by Aphrodite when Menelaus is winning; he is rescued by Aphrodite again in Book VI, after being wounded by Diomedes; and he is the one who, in the later tradition, shoots the arrow that kills Achilles at the Scaean Gate. The death of Achilles is the most famous action of Paris, and it is the act for which the Trojans paid the highest price.
The killing of Achilles is told in the Aethiopis, the next poem of the Epic Cycle, and was a famous scene in archaic vase painting. Paris shoots the arrow under the guidance of Apollo; the arrow strikes Achilles in the heel, the one place the waters of the Styx had not touched. In the Aethiopis, Apollo himself is the actual killer, and Paris is the instrument. In some later variants, Apollo takes the form of Paris to shoot the arrow, and Paris himself is not responsible. The standard Homeric version is the bow one.
The Death of Paris
The Iliad does not record the death of Paris. The later tradition, beginning with the Little Iliad of the Epic Cycle, makes Paris’s death one of the smaller tragedies of the war’s final phase. Philoctetes, the abandoned Greek hero who had been left on Lemnos with the wound of the water-snake, came to Troy with the bow of Heracles, and it was with one of Heracles’s poisoned arrows that he shot Paris. The wound was incurable. Paris returned to Mount Ida, to Oenone, and died. The Roman version, in Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica and in Dictys of Crete, makes the death even more pointed: Paris is brought to Oenone, and she refuses to heal him; he dies; she relents, and kills herself. The story became a favourite of the Latin elegiac poets and is the source of Ovid’s Heroides V.
Paris in the Visual Arts
The judgment of Paris was subjects in Greek and Roman art, from the famous cup by the painter Xenokles in the Vatican (early fifth century BCE) to the wall-paintings of Pompeii. The three goddesses in a row, the shepherd Paris in his cap and cloak, the gold apple in the centre: the scene is so regular that it serves as a chronological marker for archaeologists. The Roman and medieval depictions are by contrast scarce; the revival begins in the Renaissance, and Rubens’ Judgment of Paris (c. 1638–39, now in the Prado) is the best-known of the modern versions.
A Note on Reading the Myth
Paris is the clearest example on this site of a hero whose tragedy is his own, and whose story turns not on a choice he made but on a choice the gods imposed on him. The Cypria makes the point clearly: Paris was a shepherd, raised in ignorance of his royal blood, and the three goddesses came to him, and he had to choose. The choice is also a moral failure — Aphrodite’s bribe is the bad one — and the failure is what brings on the war. But the failure is also the gods’ design, and the Iliad is a long meditation on what it means for human choices to be ruled by divine ones. The Paris story is, in that sense, the cautionary tale of the entire Trojan cycle.
For more, see the Trojan War guide, the Helen of Troy page, the wooden horse truth page, and the profile of Aphrodite (whose bribe Paris chose).