Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

After the night of the horse and the morning of the sack, the Achaeans divided human spoil. The major allotments in the handbook and tragic consensus run thus: - **Cassandra** — given to Agamemnon as concubine (after Ajax son of Oileus dragged her from Athena’s altar, bringing the goddess’s anger on the fleet). - **Andromache** — given to Neoptolemus. - **Hecuba** — given to Odysseus. - **Polyxena** — not allotted to a living bed but sacrificed at Achilles’ tomb (Neoptolemus as slaughterer in common tellings). - **Helen** — restored to Menelaus (not a slave-lot but a reclaimed wife; Deiphobus, her last Trojan husband, slain). - Lesser women and unnamed captives — distributed among the army; some lists give Laodice various fates (swallowed by the earth, or spared), and Antenor’s house spared by agreement. Astyanax, though male, belongs to this same reckoning of Priam’s line: killed so that Hector’s seed not rise again. The division is the administrative face of victory—lots, heralds, and ship-assignments—before each captive’s separate tragedy unfolds on the nostoi. Catalogue it as the brief synoptic list that the individual files expand.