The Achilles family tree and the royal house of Troy

The Achilles family tree begins with a son of Zeus. Zeus carried off the nymph Aegina and begot on her Aeacus, who became king of the island named after his mother.¹ Aeacus married Endeis, a daughter of Sciron, and had two sons by her, Peleus and Telamon. By the Nereid Psamathe he had a third son, Phocus.¹ The descent of Zeus himself is drawn on the Greek mythology family tree.

Phocus excelled at games, and his half brothers plotted against him. Telamon killed him with a quoit in a match, Peleus helped to hide the body, and Aeacus drove both sons out of Aegina.¹ Telamon went to Salamis and married Periboea, daughter of Alcathus, the mother of Ajax.¹ Ajax was therefore a first cousin of Achilles, and the two fought side by side at Troy.

Zeus and Poseidon both wooed Thetis, a daughter of Nereus, until Themis foretold that her son would be mightier than his father. On the advice of Chiron, Peleus held her fast through all her changes of shape, and they were married on Pelion while the gods feasted.¹

When their child was born, Thetis put him in the fire by night to burn away what was mortal in him and anointed him with ambrosia by day. Peleus saw the boy writhing in the flames and cried out, and Thetis left for the Nereids.¹ Peleus gave the boy to Chiron, who named him Achilles. Before that he had been called Ligyron.¹

When Achilles was nine, Calchas said that Troy could not be taken without him, so Thetis dressed him as a girl and hid him with King Lycomedes. There he had a son by Deidamia, the king’s daughter, a boy first called Pyrrhus and later Neoptolemus.¹ After the death of Achilles, Odysseus and Phoenix fetched Neoptolemus from Scyros to the war.²

In the Iliad, Aeneas gives Achilles the descent of the Trojan kings before they fight. Zeus “begat Dardanus,” Dardanus begat Erichthonius, Erichthonius begat Tros, and Tros had three sons, Ilus, Assaracus and Ganymedes. Ilus begat Laomedon, and “Laomedon begat Tithonus and Priam.”⁴ Aeneas himself descends from Assaracus, so the two branches of the chart are second cousins at the start of the war.⁴

Apollodorus gives Laomedon five sons and three daughters. One son, Podarces, “who was called Priam,” became king when Heracles took Troy, and one daughter, Hesione, was given by Heracles to Telamon as a prize.¹ Her son Teucer was a half brother of Ajax and a first cousin of Hector, which ties the two halves of this Achilles family tree together.

Priam married Hecuba, whose father Apollodorus names as Dymas, or Cisseus, or the river Sangarius. Her first son was Hector, and her other children include Paris, Cassandra, Polyxena, Deiphobus, Helenus and Troilus.¹ Priam had many more sons and daughters by other women, who are not drawn.¹

Hector married Andromache, “daughter of great-hearted Eëtion,” and their son was the child “Hector was wont to call Scamandrius, but other men Astyanax.”³ Andromache tells Hector that Achilles slew her father and her seven brothers, so that Hector is “father and queenly mother” and brother to her.³

Paris began the war when he took Helen, the wife of Menelaus, to Troy. Her husband’s family is drawn on the house of Atreus family tree. The three red lines of this Achilles family tree then follow the war down the generations.²

Achilles “slew Hector in single combat, and fastening his ankles to his chariot dragged him to the ships.”² Achilles was then shot in the ankle “by Alexander and Apollo at the Scaean gate.”² At the sack of the city, his son Neoptolemus killed Priam, who had taken refuge at the altar of Zeus.²