Troilus is a legendary Trojan prince associated with the Trojan War, first named in Homer's Iliad. In Greek myth he is a beautiful youth — son of Hecuba by Priam or Apollo — whose survival to adulthood was linked by prophecy to Troy's safety; Achilles ambushes and kills him at the sanctuary of Thymbrian Apollo. Medieval and Renaissance Europe reinvented him as a chivalric war leader and the faithful lover of Cressida, a story told by Chaucer and Shakespeare.
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I.The classical myth
In the form scholars reconstruct for archaic and classical Greece, Troilus is an adolescent son of Queen Hecuba, so beautiful that he is taken for Apollo's child, though King Priam loves him as his own. A prophecy holds that Troy will not fall if Troilus reaches the age of twenty; Athena therefore urges Achilles to seek him out early in the war.
Troilus delights in horses. Achilles ambushes him — often with his sister Polyxena — when they ride for water to a well in the Thymbra, near a temple of Apollo. Struck by the youth's beauty, Achilles pursues him; Troilus flees into the sanctuary, where Achilles beheads him at the altar. The sacrilege helps motivate Apollo's later role in Achilles's own death.
Homer mentions Troilus only once, when Priam compares surviving sons unfavorably with dead brothers including "Troilus delighting in horses." The Cypria narrated the killing; Sophocles, Phrynichus, and the comic poet Strattis wrote plays titled Troilos. Ancient art — over a hundred Attic vases alone — shows the ambush, pursuit, and murder far more often than any peaceful scene.
II.Variants and ancient reception
Apollodorus lists Troilus last among Priam and Hecuba's sons and notes the tradition that Apollo fathered him; Hyginus simply includes him among Priam's sons. Lycophron's Alexandra alludes obscurely to the youth who snared a dragon briefly then forfeited his head at his father's altar — explained by scholiasts as Achilles's rejected advances and the temple murder.
Horace stresses his youth (inpubes); Dio Chrysostom mocks Achilles for achieving little before Homer beyond capturing a boy. Plautus makes Troilus's death one of three conditions for Troy's fall. Classical writers treat parental mourning for Troilus as the epitome of grief for a lost child. Details of the ambush — fountain, horses, Thymbrian precinct, mutilation of the corpse — vary across Sophocles fragments, scholia, and vase painting.
III.Medieval and Renaissance Troilus
In Western medieval legend Troilus becomes the youngest of Priam's five legitimate sons and a major Trojan war leader who dies in battle at Achilles's hands. From the twelfth century a romance strand adds his love for Cressida (daughter of the defector Calchas): she pledges herself to him, then transfers her affection to Diomedes when exchanged to the Greek camp.
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida are the most famous English tellings. Within the courtly-love tradition Troilus stood as a paragon of the faithful lover and virtuous pagan knight; once that code faded, his fate was read less sympathetically. After relative neglect in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, twentieth- and twenty-first-century retellings often blend classical and medieval strands.