Achilles' son gave Greek a name for poetic justice
Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, killed King Priam at an altar during the fall of Troy. Years later he himself was struck down at the altar of Apollo in Delphi. The Greeks turned that symmetry into a proverb, the Punishment of Neoptolemus, for anyone who suffers exactly the wrong they once did to another.
He started life as Pyrrhus, meaning red. One story says the name echoed the disguise his father wore on the island of Skyros, where Thetis had hidden Achilles among the women of King Lycomedes' court to keep him from the Trojan War; there Achilles fathered the boy with the princess Deidamia. Neoptolemus, the name he became known by, means new or young warrior, and Cicero later cited him as someone who earned a name through deeds.
Troy could not fall without him. A captured Trojan seer, Helenus, told the Greeks they needed three things: the arrows of Heracles, the stolen Palladium statue, and Achilles' son in the fight. So Odysseus fetched the teenage Neoptolemus from Skyros, and they went on to Lemnos to recover Philoctetes, the abandoned archer holding those arrows, a mission that forms the plot of Sophocles' play Philoctetes.
Ancient writers could not agree on his character. Many portray him as ruthless during the sack of the city, and one commentator nicknamed him the Skyrian dragon. Yet Sophocles shows a decent young man ashamed at being made to deceive Philoctetes, and Euripides' Hecuba presents him as torn. Philostratus judged him handsome and noble, though falling short of his father the way beautiful people fall short of their statues. After the war he took Andromache, Hector's widow, as a captive, sailed to Epirus and became its king; through their son Molossos, legend made him an ancestor of Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great.
Accounts of his death differ. In one, he claimed Hermione, promised to him but married to Orestes, and Orestes killed him at Delphi; in another, he denounced Apollo for his part in Achilles' death and was killed by a Delphic priest. Either way, the Delphians later showed visitors the hearth where he fell, pointed to his tomb, and offered him yearly sacrifices as a hero. Shakespeare kept him alive for new audiences: the player's speech in Hamlet describes Pyrrhus slaying Priam.
Source: Neoptolemus
