Characters
- Deidamia — mother of Neoptolemus on Scyros (background)
- Deiphobus — brother who later takes Helen (forward link)
- Helenus — prophetic source of the double requirement (bow and son)
- Lycomedes — Scyrian king/grandfather-figure (background)
- Odysseus — fetches Neoptolemus
- Oenone — Idaean nymph; refuses or fails to heal Paris; dies after him (variant)
- Pallas — still in Troy; object of post-Paris contention
- People of Crisa — mortally wounded; seeks Oenone; dies
- Philoctetes — shoots Paris with Heracles’ bow
- Pyrrhus — son of Achilles and Deidamia; fetched from Scyros; receives Achilles’ arms
- Thyestes — dead father whose arms and role Neoptolemus inherits
Places
- Scyros — island where Neoptolemus is raised and fetched
- Shore — Neoptolemus’s arrival; Paris wounded in battle
- Troy — Oenone’s dwelling; Paris’s last appeal
Themes
Narrative
Helenus’s prophecies (and related oracles) demanded not only Heracles’ bow but Achilles’ son. Odysseus fetched Neoptolemus (Pyrrhus) from Scyros, where Achilles had fathered him on Deidamia. Thetis’s or Lycomedes’ household released the youth; Odysseus gave him his father’s arms—the panoply won in the contest with Ajax. Neoptolemus entered the war as Achilles’ heir in fury and prestige.
With Philoctetes healed and present, Paris faced the bow that had once served Heracles. Philoctetes shot him. Mortally wounded, Paris sought the nymph Oenone on Ida—his first love, who had foretold disaster and whom he had abandoned for Helen. She refused to heal him (or arrived too late); he died, and she then killed herself in remorse in many versions. Helenus and Deiphobus remained among Priam’s surviving sons; Helen passed, in the *Little Iliad*’s sequel politics, toward Deiphobus’s bed before the sack. The death of Paris removes Troy’s famous archer-prince and clears the last personal duel-thread of the abduction story—yet the city still stands until the horse.