A commonly attested episode in ancient art and literature is the brutal death of Troilus at the hands of Achilles. Priam's son is mostly depicted as a defenceless pais (‘young man’ or ‘boy’), slain in a cruel ambush outside Troy while on horseback on some non-military business.Footnote ¹ The Iliad makes no reference to the slaying of Troilus. The only mention of him is in Book 24, where Priam, after a visit from Iris, the divine messenger, becomes determined to go and visit Achilles in order to ransom the body of Hector. It is at this moment that in an emotional outburst the Trojan king berates his surviving sons for the mere fact that they still live, while Mestor, Troilus, and Hector, his three ‘most excellent sons’, have lost their lives as a result of the war (Il. 24.255–60):

The killing of Troilus receives no specific mention in this passage, yet the contextual components invite us to imagine that the Trojan prince fought and died as a warrior on the battlefield. Both the use of the expression ‘Ares has slain them all’ (260) and the fact that Troilus is designated as áristos (255), which is very often used of those who prove themselves to be excellent in martial virtue, are highly suggestive. Even though it is not explicitly stated, the Iliad leaves us with a strong impression that at the time of his death Troilus was a grown man and was killed as a distinguished warrior.Footnote ³ This, however, raises the question whether the story of Troilus’ ambush off the battlefield pre-dates the monumental composition of the Iliad and whether its absence from Homer reflects a meaningful omission rather than ignorance.

Our evidence, as is so often the case, does not allow us to answer with certainty. There is, however, some indication that the ambush of Troilus formed part of the epic tradition that crystallized in one of the Cyclic poems, the Cypria (now only fragmentarily preserved), which narrated the origins of the Trojan War and its first events.Footnote ⁴ Proclus’ Chrestomatheia Footnote ⁵ gives us an outline of the relevant section of the poem:

In the Cypria the ambush of Troilus takes place relatively shortly after the arrival of the Greek forces at Troy. The Trojans are given the chance to negotiate, but they reject the demand of the Greeks to return Helen and the property. As a result, Troy becomes a city under siege, and the Greek army destroys the surrounding settlements. Achilles seizes the cattle of Aeneas, sacks Pedasos and Lyrnessos (among other Trojan cities), ‘slays’ (phoneúei) Troilus, and captures Lycaon, whom he sells as a slave through Patroclus. According to Il. 20.90–3 and 188–94, Achilles attacked Aeneas while he was tending his cattle on Mount Ida; and according to Il. 21.34–44 (cf. Il. 21.77–9), he captured Lycaon while he was cutting branches in Priam's orchard. The inclusion of the murder of Troilus in a sequence of narrative incidents which take place off the battlefield and in a context of siege suggests that Achilles ambushes the Trojan prince while the latter is carrying out some non-military business, just as he ambushes both Aeneas and Lycaon.Footnote ⁷

Proclus’ scanty reference to the murder of Troilus becomes a little clearer when we consider it in the light of the A scholia on Il. 24.257b:

Here the scholiast rather tellingly notes that, in contrast to Homer's depiction of Troilus as a grown man, the post-Homeric writers (hoi neṓteroi), building upon the Iliad’s use of the epithet hippiokhármēs,Footnote ⁹ represented Priam's son as a pais pursued on horseback. Is this the version that the Cypria poet followed? Possibly yes. The earliest extant literary evidence for this version comes from a fragmentary lemma that is contained in an also fragmentarily preserved commentary on the sixth-century bc lyric poet Ibycus,Footnote ¹⁰ but our earliest pictorial testimony comes from two Protocorinthian aryballoi. The first vase, dated around 700 bc, depicts an unarmed male figure on horseback followed by another walking male figure in armour (no names),Footnote ¹¹ and the scene on another vase of about the mid-seventh-century bc shows Troilus hastily riding away on a horse while being pursued by a running (armed?) Achilles (the figures are identified as ‘Troilus’ and, though fragmentarily, ‘Achilles’).Footnote ¹²

There is, therefore, some suggestive evidence in pictorial representations around the first half of the seventh century bc for the popularity of the version which has the unarmed Troilus being pursued on horseback. This is enough to say with some confidence that this version dates to as early as the late eighth or early seventh century bc and belongs to the early epic tradition that is now represented in the Cypria.Footnote ¹³ The corollary of this is that Homer, too, may have been aware of this grimmer version of Troilus’ death. If so, then its absence from the Iliad has to be dealt with as a case of deliberate omission by the poet rather than ignorance. The scholiast assigns this version to ‘the post-Homeric writers’ (hoi neṓteroi), but this may be misleading. The designation of the poets of the Epic Cycle as neṓteroi, which is typical of the scholia tradition (presumably because the scholiasts only had the means to refer to known texts),Footnote ¹⁴ is usually problematic, for there is very often good reason to believe that stories which ultimately crystallized in a post-Homeric written form were derived from earlier and perhaps pre-Homeric oral mythopoetic traditions. For the most part, the Cyclic authors are neṓteroi only in the sense that the textualization of the tradition in the form in which our sources have it postdates the monumental composition of the Homeric poems.Footnote ¹⁵

At some point in its mythopoetic recreation, the ambush of Troilus, from being a random incident of guerrilla warfare, came to acquire some dramatic function in the progression of the story of the Trojan War. According to Plautus’ Bacchides 954, Troilus had to be killed before Troy could be taken,Footnote ¹⁶ as the stealing of the Palladium was one of the incidents necessary to the fall of Troy.Footnote ¹⁷ Likewise, the first Vatican Mythographer (1.210) mentions that Troy would not be taken if Troilus reached the age of twenty. On the basis of suggestive evidence, the motif can perhaps be traced as far back as the archaic period but certainly goes no further than the sixth century bc.Footnote ¹⁸

Furthermore, there are sources that assign the eros of Achilles for Troilus as the motive behind the murder. In Lycophron's Alexandra 307–13 (with Tzetzes ad loc.), the handsome young Troilus is killed on the altar of Apollo, where he takes refuge, rejecting Achilles’ advances.Footnote ¹⁹ Lycophron possibly draws on Attic tragedy.Footnote ²⁰ Phrynichus, an early tragic poet who won his first victory in 511 bc, seems to have depicted Troilus as eromenos (the younger partner in a homosexual relationship) (Phryn. Trag. fr. 13 Snell = Ath. Deipn. 13.564f): Φρύνιχός τε ἐπὶ τοῦ Τρωίλου ἔφη ‘λάμπειν ἐπὶ πορφυραῖς παρῇσι φῶς ἔρωτος’. (‘And Phrynichus said about Troilus: “The light of love shines on his rosy cheeks.”’Footnote ²¹ ) According to Athenaeus (Deipn. 13.603e–604a), this verse was quoted by Sophocles at a symposium in admiration of a boy's beauty. If not a fanciful anecdote, Athenaeus suggestively makes Sophocles familiar with the legend of Troilus as a handsome youth with erotic appeal. Some fragments of Sophocles’ now-lost tragedy Troilus, in which the murder of Troilus appears to have taken place outside battle,Footnote ²² are indeed indicative of an erotic context,Footnote ²³ and it may well be the case that such was the context in Strattis’ homonymous comedy, which is supposed to have parodied Sophocles’ play.Footnote ²⁴

A hint of homosexual desire on the part of Achilles can also be traced on an early sixth-century bc bronze shield-band relief, which depicts an armed warrior menacing with a sword a naked boy at an altar with a cock standing on it.Footnote ²⁵ The presence of the cock, the favourite love gift given by men to their eromenos in archaic art, may be taken as an indication that the artisan was familiar with the love theme.Footnote ²⁶ Nevertheless, although Achilles’ unrequited eros for Troilus might well account for the straightforward violence depicted in iconographic representations from the first half of the sixth century onwards,Footnote ²⁷ there is no evidence, either literary or pictorial, that the love motive dates from the period before the sixth century.

Such as it is, our evidence from both Proclus’ summary of the Cypria (with Σ (A) Il. 24.257b) and the pictorial representations on the two seventh-century Protocorinthian aryballoi indicates that the ambush of Troilus in the early stages of its emergence and development in the mythopoetic tradition was nothing more than a random and extremely savage incident of guerrilla warfare. Troilus, who had ventured forth unarmed, was only a pais at the time of the ambush, apparently on some non-military business. That he was not yet a grown man is noted by the scholiast and is also implied by the relatively small size of his figure compared to that of Achilles in the two representations. Seen in this light, the incident exudes extreme cruelty and shows traits of indiscriminate primitive savagery.

Even though the ambush theme is commonly attested in the Homeric epics,Footnote ²⁸ as well as in the wider epic tradition,Footnote ²⁹ Homer's primary focus in the Iliad is on pólemos – face-to-face fighting on the battlefield. For the most part, both the Greeks and the Trojans try to weaken and ultimately destroy their respective opponent's military force by using battlefield tactics in open confrontation. As is so articulately described by Glaucus in Il. 6.206–9, the Iliadic hero fights for aristeia, namely, for visible pre-eminence, which can perhaps explain why ambush tactics are much less readily acknowledged. The underlying, if unspoken, principle seems to be that the killing of mass numbers in open battle, where the odds are less obviously favourable in the absence of the advantage of surprise and where both exposure and risk for the individual hero are greater, engenders commensurately greater glory.

Within the governing framework of the Iliad, Achilles is undeniably a stellar spearfighter who excels in pólemos. The widest possible scope of his substance and power as a hero is exposed by Homer in Il. 22.26–32 in a simile that tellingly compares a warring Achilles to a bright star:

As has been rightly noted, however, ‘Achilles should not be pigeonholed as solely the hero of bíē, for he, too, is an ambusher.’Footnote ³¹ The Iliad knows that in the recent past Achilles ambushed Lycaon and sold him as a slave through Patroclus (Il. 21.34–44, 77–9; 23.746–7),Footnote ³² and he also attacked Aeneas on Mount Ida and seized his cattle (Il. 20.90–3, 188–94).Footnote ³³ In Il. 9.325–7, moreover, Achilles probably alludes to night-time ambush activity, as he claims that he spent many sleepless nights fighting with men over their wives.Footnote ³⁴ Therefore, when in Il. 1.226–8 he attacks Agamemnon for his nonparticipation in ambushes, he presumably obliquely reminds the Achaean general that he himself has had the endurance to go on such missions.Footnote ³⁵

Of course Achilles does not perform any ambush operations within the Iliad, which invariably refers to his ambush exploits as past events; but there is suggestive evidence, as we have seen, that a version of both the seizure of Aeneas’ cattle and the capture of Lycaon was part of the epic tradition represented in the Cypria, which, in turn, allows us to assume that in non-Homeric tradition ‘Achilles’ was in fact less narrowly conceived. This assumption coheres well with the A scholia on Il. 22.188: μόνος Ὅμηρός φησι μονομαχῆσαι τὸν Ἕκτορα, οἱ δὲ λοιποὶ πάντες ἐνεδρευθῆναι ὑπὸ Ἀχιλλέως (‘Only Homer says that [Achilles] fought Hector in man-to-man combat. All the rest say that he was ambushed by Achilles’).Footnote ³⁶ What this suggests is that outside the Iliad there were (perhaps epic) versions in which the confrontation between Achilles and Hector was conceived of as ambush, as in Dictys 3.15, which is in fact the only surviving attestation of the variant. Such as it is, therefore, our evidence offers good grounds to believe that the ambush activity of Achilles, though not given narrative space in the Iliad, was part of the traditional characterization of the hero outside Homer; and we see that the poem does establish a degree of continuity with the wider epic tradition that knows of Achilles as ambusher, even though it focuses narrowly on him as a foremost battlefield fighter. Nevertheless, Homer still makes no reference to the commonly attested ambush of Troilus.

The Troilus ambush goes unmentioned, presumably because unlike the Lycaon or the Aeneas ambush episodes, which the Homeric tradition acknowledges, the incident remarkably exceeds not only the limits to which the Iliad confines ambush in the conceptualization of its key hero but also the normal run of heroic brutality. It points to an Achilles who would butcher anyone brutally and indiscriminately, whereas, as has been rightly observed, ‘[Homer's] Achilles can certainly be brutal, but there are limits to his brutality, and it emerges only under the influence of a grievance, or a grief, that is of properly heroic proportions.’Footnote ³⁷ Besides, indiscriminate and unreflecting brutality is generally not part of heroic conduct, with the notably unique exception of Agamemnon, who advises Menelaus not to spare a single one of the Trojans, ‘not even the boy whom his mother carries in her womb’ (Il. 6.57–60). Nevertheless, the Iliad does make reference to Troilus, and so it is interesting to see how his story gets filtered through Homer's lens.

Referring to Troilus at Il. 24.257, Priam uses the epithet hippiokhármēs, a hapax legomenon in the Iliad which is open to double interpretation. If the second word in the compound is khármē, which in Homer means either ‘battle’Footnote ³⁸ or ‘ardour for the fight’,Footnote ³⁹ then the epithet may well mean ‘fighting from chariot’, or, as has been suggested, ‘finding the joy of battle in the clash of chariots’,Footnote ⁴⁰ inviting the audience to think of Troilus as a ‘chariot-fighter’. However, if the second word in the compound is the noun khárma, which is related to the verb khaírō and in Homer means either ‘joy/delight’Footnote ⁴¹ or ‘source of joy/delight’,Footnote ⁴² then it is also entirely possible that hippiokhármēs means ‘horse lover’ and that its use here evokes in the audience's minds the brutal slaying of the young Trojan prince off the battlefield – an incident that, as we have seen, indicates an Achilles who would use tactics of indiscriminate violence. In and of itself, therefore, the epithet is equivocal.Footnote ⁴³

The polysemic significance of hippiokhármēs is possibly coincidental and unintended. Yet, rather than simply supposing this, we can instead make the opposite assumption, that the epithet was in fact devised by Homer to be understood in both ways. Viewed from one perspective, hippiokhármēs hints at the barbarous ambush of the young Troilus, pointing suggestively to the version that has Troilus being pursued on horseback as a pais. From another perspective, the compound also holds suggestive connotations of military prowess. These connotations, framed in a context that pointedly designates the Trojan prince as an áristos killed on the battlefield, become prominent and in the process overshadow any less favourable overtones. On this reading, the epithet hippiokhármēs is seen as a double entendre, through which the Iliad sub-textually acknowledges but simultaneously refutes the traditional Troilus incident, thereby setting its own filter restrictions on a strand in the tradition in which we meet the characterization of Achilles as a brutal guerrilla attacker.

It is, however, also true that, in the broader context of the Iliad’s tacit refutation of the desultory cruelty in the Troilus incident, there is a constant play with the inherent tendencies in the traditional characterization of Achilles and, by implication, with the audience's expectations about the hero. In Iliad 24, Achilles is, for all his pity, still close to uncontrollable anger. When he asks Priam to sit down but Priam refuses the offer of a seat, Achilles’ anger begins to flare again. In a scene which prefigures the killing of the defenceless and unarmed Priam in the Sack of Troy by Neoptolemus, Achilles’ progeny,Footnote ⁴⁴ he bluntly warns the Trojan king not to provoke him (Il. 24.560–70): ‘Do not provoke me further, old sir,…stir my heart no more among my sorrows, lest, old sir, I spare not even you inside the huts, my suppliant though you are.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Homer therefore acknowledges the tradition, while largely refining away Achilles’ unselective violence, in very much the same way as he does with other aspects of Achilles, such as his capacity for eros.Footnote ⁴⁶

What the Iliad offers is a refined conception of the heroic ideal, in which the indiscriminate violence that Achilles shows in the Troilus incident has no part. Homer carefully refines his Achilles against the background of an Achilles who, among other things, is a raider of the sort we encounter in Nestor's reminiscences (see Il. 11.671–83), but, while acknowledging this tradition, his focus is on an Achilles who fights in full battle. He presents an Achilles who is certainly capable of extreme violence but whose violence is always directed against people who meet him as equals on the battlefield in the context of a competitive quest for honour, so eloquently described by Sarpedon (see Il. 12.310–28), and not against the weak or inferior. Even Lycaon, for all the pity which the narrative invites for his fate, is after all a warrior on the battlefield.Footnote ⁴⁷ The lexical ambiguity of the epithet hippiokhármēs may well be seen as a tool in the purgation of the Achillean heroism into a more heroic and honorific brutality. In the person of Achilles the Iliad repudiates indiscriminate violence and enacts the limpidity of heroism. The result is a narrower conception of what heroism means.