Parisor Alexander

Paris, or Alexander, one of the chief personages in the Homeric story, was the second son of Priam, King of Troy and Hecuba, who dreamed that she had brought forth a firebrand. Euripides makes his father give him to a shepherd to be exposed on Mount Ida, where, however, he was fed by a she-bear and brought up by the shepherd, till at length he is discovered and owned by Priam. His wife CEnone warns him not to go to Greece, but he does so, and carries off Helen from her husband Menelaus, King of Sparta. This gave rise to the siege of Troy by the Greeks, led by Agamemnon, brother of Menelaus. Hera and Athene took the side of the Greeks, because Paris had given the golden apple, the prize of beauty, to Aphrodite. She it was who saved him when worsted in the combat by Menelaus. During the siege Paris kills Achilles by a stratagem, but is wounded when the city was taken by a poisoned arrow shot by Philoctetes. Of this wound he dies, the injured CEnone refusing to heal it.