coming from the play. Fragment 619 refers to Troilus as an andropais, a man-boy. Fragment 621 indicates that Troilus was going to a spring with a companion to fetch water or to water his horses. A scholion to the Iliad states that Sophocles has Troilus ambushed by Achilles while exercising his horses in the Thymbra. Fragment 623 indicates that Achilles mutilated Troilus' corpse by a method known as maschalismos. This involved preventing the ghost of a murder victim from returning to haunt their killer by cutting off the corpse's extremities and stringing them under its armpits. Sophocles is thought to have also referred to the maschalismos of Troilus in a fragment taken to be from an earlier play Polyxene. Sommerstein attempts a reconstruction of the plot of the Troilos, in which the title character is incestuously in love with Polyxena and tries to discourage the interest in marrying her shown by both Achilles and Sarpedon, a Trojan ally and son of Zeus. Sommerstein argues that Troilus is accompanied on his fateful journey to his death, not by Polyxena, but by his tutor, a eunuch Greek slave. Certainly there is a speaking role for a eunuch who reports being castrated by Hecuba and someone reports the loss of their adolescent master. The incestuous love is deduced by Sommerstein from a fragment of Strattis' parody, assumed to partially quote Sophocles, and from his understanding that the Sophocles play intends to contrast barbarian customs, including incest, with Greek ones. Sommerstein also sees this as solving what he considers the need for an explanation of Achilles' treatment of Troilus' corpse, the latter being assumed to have insulted Achilles in the process of warning him off Polyxena. Italian professor of English and expert on Troilus, Piero Boitani, on the other hand, considers Troilus' rejection of Achilles' sexual advances towards him as sufficient motive for the mutilation. Alexandra The first surviving text with more than the briefest mention of Troilus is Alexandra, a Hellenistic poem dating from no earlier than the 3rd century BC by the tragedian Lycophron (or a namesake of his). The poem consists of the obscure prophetic ravings of Cassandra: This passage is explained in the Byzantine writer John Tzetzes' scholia as a reference to Troilus seeking to avoid the unwanted sexual advances of Achilles by taking refuge in his father Apollo's temple. When he refuses to come out, Achilles goes in and