Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Antenor, Trojan elder and counselor, had long urged the return of Helen and the treasure to end the war. In the *Iliad* he recalls hosting Menelaus and Odysseus when they came as envoys before the fighting; he advises Paris to give Helen back. At the sack, Greek tradition holds that the Achaeans spared Antenor and his house for that earlier hospitality and for his peace counsel—some say a panther skin or other sign marked his door so that the looters passed by; Apollodorus lists him among those the Greeks allowed to go free, together with strands about Aeneas. His wife Theano, priestess of Athena, and his sons appear in Homeric battle scenes; some sons die fighting, yet the household’s survival becomes a counter-image to Priam’s ruin: the Trojan who practiced *xenia* and counsel lives, while the king who kept Helen falls. Later Italian legend (**Roman**/antiquarian) brings Antenor to the head of the Adriatic as a founder—outside the Greek core, and labeled as such. The classical Greek fact is simpler: at Troy’s end, Antenor is the spared guest-friend and dove of peace amid the slaughter.