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Polyxena

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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in Greek legend, daughter of Priam, king of Troy, and Hecuba. She had been betrothed to Achilles, who was slain by Paris in the temple of Apollo Thymbraeus, where the marriage was to have been celebrated (Hyginus, Fab. i io). The shade of Achilles afterwards appeared to the returning Greeks in the Thracian Chersonese and demanded the sacrifice of Polyxena, who was put to death by Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, on his father's grave (Ovid, Metam. xiii. 440 sqq.). The tragic story is the subject of the Hecuba of Euripides, the Troades of Seneca and the Polyxena of Sophocles, of which only a few fragments remain. According to Philostratus (Heroica, 20, 18), Polyxena fled to the Greeks after the murder of Achilles and committed suicide on his tomb.