Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Neoptolemus.
The gallery
Neoptolemus Killing Priam (Attic black-figure amphora)
Attributed to the Class of Cambridge 49, c. 520-510 BC
On this Attic black-figure amphora from Vulci, Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, delivers the most infamous act of Troy's fall: the slaying of the aged King Priam. The vase compresses the horror of the sack into a single brutal image, with the young warrior striking down the suppliant king who had taken refuge at an altar. Standing roughly 24.5 cm across and now held in the Louvre's Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, the scene became a touchstone of archaic Greek painting for its unflinching treatment of impiety and the wages of war.
Neoptolemus Sacrificing Polyxena (Tyrrhenian amphora)
Attributed to the Timiades Painter, Tyrrhenian Group, c. 570-550 BC
This Attic black-figure Tyrrhenian amphora, made in Athens and recovered in Italy, shows Neoptolemus performing the grim sacrifice demanded by his dead father's ghost. The rigid, shrouded body of Polyxena, daughter of Priam, is held horizontally over the tomb of Achilles by three armed warriors as Neoptolemus draws the knife across her throat. One of the earliest narrative depictions of the episode, the vase is among the prized archaic holdings of the British Museum, where it captures the cruelty that haunts the Greek victory.
Andromache and Pyrrhus
Pierre-Narcisse Guerin, 1810 (Salon of 1814)
Guerin's vast Neoclassical canvas, more than three metres tall and exhibited at the Salon of 1814, dramatizes a scene drawn from Racine's tragedy Andromache rather than Homer: Pyrrhus, the alternate name of Neoptolemus, presses his suit upon the captive Trojan widow Andromache, while her young son Astyanax clings between them. The painter sets the conqueror's imperious longing against the grieving mother's resistance, charging the marble interior with restrained passion and political menace. The painting hangs in the Louvre (INV 5183).
The Death of Neoptolemus at Delphi (Pompeian fresco)
Unknown Roman painter, 1st century AD
This Roman wall painting from the winter triclinium of the Casa di Marco Lucrezio Frontone in Pompeii illustrates the end of Neoptolemus, drawn from Euripides' tragedy Andromache. Orestes strikes down Neoptolemus at the altar of Apollo at Delphi, while the despairing Hermione, wife of Neoptolemus but once promised to Orestes, kneels at the foot of the altar. The fresco completes the hero's arc with the same sacrilegious violence he had once inflicted on others, now turned against him in the god's own sanctuary.