Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

While Paris still herded on Mount Ida—before the Judgment made him Aphrodite’s champion—he loved the nymph Oenone, daughter of the river Cebren. She had healing skill from Apollo (or was herself prophetic) and warned Paris against sailing for Helen; she said that if he were ever wounded, only she could cure him. Paris abandoned her for Helen and the Trojan princess’s fame. When Philoctetes’ arrow (Heracles’ bow) mortally wounded him late in the war, Paris crawled or was carried back to Ida and begged Oenone to heal him. She refused—bitterness for the desertion outweighing pity—and he died on the road or at Troy. Repenting too late, Oenone then killed herself: by hanging, by casting herself on his pyre, or by leaping from a rock (variants). Parthenius and Quintus expand the pathos; Apollodorus states the marriage, the prophecy, and the fatal refusal in handbook brevity. The tale completes Paris’s erotic career: nymph of Ida, then Helen of Sparta, then the nymph’s revenge-by-refusal that no god reverses. Helen’s war-prize story thus ends with the first wife’s grief.