in Cassandra: Princess of Troy but little remains of the classical or medieval versions except that he fights Diomedes. However, some of the over sixty re-tellings of the Trojan War since 1916 do feature the character. Once more a man-boy One consequence of the reassessment of sources is the reappearance of Troilus in his ancient form of andropais. Troilus takes this form in Giraudoux's The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, his first successful reappearance in the 20th century. Troilus is a fifteen-year-old boy whom Helen has noticed following her around. After turning down the opportunity to kiss her when she offers and when confronted by Paris, he eventually accepts the kiss at the end of the play just as Troy has committed to war. He is thus a symbol of the whole city's fatal fascination with Helen. Troilus, in one of his ancient manifestations as a boy-soldier overwhelmed, reappears both in works Boitani discusses and those he does not. Christa Wolf in her Kassandra features a seventeen-year-old Troilus, first to die of all the sons of Priam. The novel's treatment of the character's death has features of both medieval and ancient versions. Troilus has just gained his first love, once more called Briseis. It is only after his death that she is to betray him. On the first day of the war, Achilles seeks Troilus out and forces him into battle with the help of the Myrmidons. Troilus tries to fight in the way he has been taught princes should do, but Achilles strikes the boy down and leaps on top of him, before attempting to throttle him. Troilus escapes and runs to the sanctuary of the temple of Apollo where he is helped to take his armour off. Then, in "some of the most powerful and hair-raising" words ever written on Troilus' death, Wolf describes how Achilles enters the temple, caresses then half-throttles the terrified boy, who lies on the altar, before finally beheading him like a sacrificial victim. After his death, the Trojan council propose that Troilus be officially declared to have been twenty in the hope of avoiding the prophecy about him but Priam, in his grief, refuses as this would insult his dead son further. In "exploring the violent underside of sexuality and the sexual underside of violence", Wolf revives a theme suggested by the ancient vases where an "erotic aura seems to pervade representations