..........I've been thinking about Hector and Paris lately. First of all, Paris' "proper" name, Alexander, comes up in the historical record via exchange with the Hittites (in Hittite form, Alexandu) in reference to a Wilusan leader they had some client situation with. So maybe the mythological figure— and crazily, Paris, of all people, who comes down to us as the unwanted son, the doom of his country— is some remnant of a real person, preserved in fractured form. (To say nothing of the colossal antiquity of his still-recognizable name.) Like, certainly that's plenty to ruminate on.
But also Paris vs Hector and the changing shape (and associated animal) of prince-hood. Hector is a Bronze Age prince, "tamer of horses," a figure much more of Asia Minor than mainland Greece, and extinct by the Archaic period (hence the weird, ungainly marriage of chariot combat and hand to hand fighting throughout the Iliad.) He is tied to the post-Indo European introduction of the horse and much more closely to the late Bronze Age Near East and it's mounted armies and horse-owning elites. His connection to horses is not only a sign of his regional and temporal identity and his social standing but it provides us a glimpse of his personality as well, his temperament, his connection to his personal horses and their names etc. His association with horses and horse-culture defines him in time and place and in character, and is so closely bound that it is the go-to descriptor applied to his name.
Paris, meanwhile, has all the hallmarks of really old pastoral-society leadership. Compared to the later world of Hector, Paris is a peasant, the son of a shepherd. But this herding connection crops up continually tied to mythological princes from Ganymede to Endymion, in a mold we can follow back to the Mesopotamian shepherd-king, Dumuzi, who was thought a reasonable consort for the fertility goddess Inanna. So it may be the role of a peasant by the Bronze Age, but as much as the possession of horses marks Hector as a Bronze Age prince, the connection to herding sheep and especially raising bulls could indicate the same thing about Paris, but for a much earlier period. Even in Minoan and Mycenaean culture, where settled societies were the norm and more modern treasuries were superseding animal wealth, bulls were still religiously and iconographically significant, and tied to prestige, power, and elite classes and probably had been for ages. The bull cult which at the very least deeply influenced early Mediterranean religion had been going on since the Neolithic (at Çatal Hüyük for example) and spread, with great popularity, into Mesopotamian and Egypt as well. Figures like Dumuzi represent the elites of the pastoral era, with power and wealth held in livestock (and the mastery of natural fertility), not palaces and objects, and blend the herder figure with the king figure because they were on some level, the same person— authority and possession of herds were bound together. And Paris not only looks after and owns herds of sheep, like so many un-pastoral princes after him, but raises bulls as well, and for competition. It's his stolen bull that leads him back to Troy (which could mean nothing...). His reputation as a fair and trustworthy judge, proved in these competitions, is also a form of authority. Before his restoration to his birth family he is married to a nymph, a nature divinity. There's little to separate this "peasant" from Inanna's shepherd consort, except that a lot of upward mobility has opened up in Troy since Dumuzi's era and bulls just aren't as fashionable any more. As we can see a classic type of princehood in Hector, we can clearly spot one, much older, in Paris as well.
So what tied what looks like a pastoral, essentially Stone Age chieftain to a Bronze Age war? Where did the figure of Paris the shepherd-prince come from? (Is this some otherwise lost founder myth?) How did he get potentially blended with a real life Wilusan noble?? And then for a brother, to pair him with the "Tamer of Horses," the prince par excellance of the Bronze Age Near East, making siblings of the pastoral prince of herds and the urban prince of stables!!!
(These are the thoughts and questions that haunt me at night.)
And from a more artistic viewpoint, if we blend all the various interpretations of Paris together and try to make sense of them in a cohesive narrative, we get this fair-minded respected pastoral authority, who the gods choose to adjucate for them, who then gets uprooted and dropped into a Bronze Age city state (which already abandoned him to die once) in the ultimate fish-out-of-water scenario and proceeds to fail miserably at every expectation of leadership this new environment can throw at him, all while the brother who was born into it makes him look even worse by comparison. This is the antithesis of the abandoned-child-returned-to-his-rightful-place story; Paris is only suited for his old life, and going "home" either leaves him completely lost and unsuccessful by their new standards or actually corrupts his original good qualities. And if we throw in Herodotus' take on things, the family decides the way to fix this would be to have Newb Failson participate in the multi-generational woman-kidnapping vendetta they've had going on with the Acheans ("give him something to do," "really feel like part of the family," "set him up with a wife at least") and then not only does the whole world decide they won't tolerate this shit anymore the minute HE finally participates, but it ends up getting him and his whole family killed or enslaved, including Hector the golden age picture perfect prince, Troy completely destroyed, and his name made infamous.
