Troy's royal house is the best-documented family in Greek epic and the most thoroughly destroyed. It begins with Laomedon, the king who hired Apollo and Poseidon to build Troy's walls and then refused to pay them, earning the divine hostility that would outlive him. Heracles sacked the city and killed Laomedon, sparing one son, Podarces, who was ransomed and renamed Priam. By his wife Strymo's generation the line had already been broken once; Priam spent a long reign rebuilding it into a household of fifty sons and twelve daughters, and then watched nearly all of them die.
Priam's first wife was Arisbe, daughter of the seer Merops, who bore him Aesacus before the marriage was dissolved. His second and principal wife was Hecuba, daughter of the Phrygian king Dymas, and it is her children who fill the Iliad: Hector, Paris, the twin seers Cassandra and Helenus, Deiphobus, Troilus, the young Polydorus and the daughter Creusa. The fractures run inside this sibling group rather than between families. Hecuba dreamed of a firebrand before Paris was born, and Aesacus read the dream as ruin; Hector rebukes his brother throughout the poem for the war his elopement with Helen began. Cassandra, cursed by Apollo to be disbelieved, could not persuade even her father.
The marriages carry the losses. Hector's wife Andromache came from Cilician Thebe, where Achilles had already killed her father Eetion and all her brothers, so Hector and their infant son Astyanax were the whole of her surviving world; both were taken from her, Hector dragged behind Achilles's chariot, Astyanax thrown from the walls. Helen passed from Paris to Deiphobus after Paris's death, and Deiphobus was killed for it. The one branch that survives is the Dardanian cousin-line: Anchises, loved by Aphrodite, fathered Aeneas, who married Priam's daughter Creusa. Creusa is lost in the burning city, but Aeneas carries out his father and his son Ascanius.
The tree follows Homer's Iliad, composed around the eighth century BCE, filled out from the Epic Cycle, Euripides' Hecuba and Trojan Women, and Virgil's Aeneid, written in the 20s BCE. Virgil's addition is the point of the whole genealogy for Rome: Ascanius, also called Iulus, founds Alba Longa and gives the Julian family its Trojan ancestor. A house annihilated in Greek song becomes, in Latin hands, a beginning — which is why Priam's tree has been copied, argued over and claimed as inheritance for nearly three thousand years.
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