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Neoptolemus killing Priam

In Greek mythology Neoptolemus, also Neoptólemos or Pyrrhus, was the son of the warrior Achilles and the princess Deidamea. Achilles' mother foretold many years before Achilles birth that there would be a great war. She saw that her only son was to die if he fought in the war. She sought a place for him to avoid fighting in the Trojan War, due to a prophecy of his death in the conflict. She disguised him as a woman in the court of Lycomedes, the King of Scyros. During that time, he had an affair with the princess, Deidamea, who then gave birth to Neoptolemus. Neoptolemus was originally called Pyrrhus, because the female version of that name, Pyrrha, had been taken by his father while disguised as a woman.

Nine years later in the war, after the death of Achilles and Ajax the Great and no signs of victory for the Greeks, the Greeks captured the Trojan seer, Helenus, and forced him to tell them under what conditions could they take Troy. Helenus revealed to them that they could defeat Troy if they could acquire the poisonous arrows of Heracles (then in Philoctetes' possession); steal the Palladium (which led to the building of the famous wooden horse of Troy); and put Achilles' son in the war.

Another version of the events on the Classical Greek hydria

In response to the prophecy, the Greeks took steps to retrieve the arrows of Heracles and bring Neoptolemus to Troy. Odysseus was sent to retrieve Neoptolemus from Scyros. The two then went to Lemnos to retrieve Philoctetes. Years earlier, on the way to Troy, Philoctetes was bitten by a snake on Chryse. Agamemnon had advised that he be left behind because the wound was festering and smelled bad. This retrieval is the plot of Philoctetes, a play by Sophocles. Euripides, in his Hekabe (also known as Hecuba), has a moving scene (ll 566-575) which shows Neoptolemus as a compassionate young man who kills Polyxene, Hekabe's daughter with ambivalent feelings and in the least painful way.

Neoptolemus held by some to be cruel and savage. During and after the war, he killed Priam, Eurypylus, Polyxena, Polites and Astyanax, among others, enslaved Helenus and forced Andromache to become his concubine. The ghost of Achilles appeared to the survivors of the war, demanding Polyxena, the Trojan princess, be sacrificed before anybody could leave. Neoptolemus did so. With Andromache, Helenus and Phoenix, Neoptolemus sailed to the Epirot Islands and then became the king of Epirus. With the enslaved Andromache, Neoptolemus was the father of Molossus and through him, according to the myth, an ancestor of Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great.

Although Neoptolemus is often depicted thus, the play 'Philoctetes' by Sophocles shows him being a much kinder man, who honours his promises and shows remorse when he is made to trick Philoctetes.

Two accounts deal with Neoptolemus' death. He was either killed after he attempted to take Hermione from Orestes as her father Menelaus promised, or after he denounced Apollo, the murderer of his father. In the first case, he was killed by Orestes. In the second, revenge was taken by the Delphian priests of Apollo.

Mark Merlis's Pyrrhus is a modern updating of Neoptolemus's story in which he is both male stripper and warrior called by Odysseus to fight at Troy. The novel was published in the US as "An Arrow's Flight".

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