King Priam of Troy is the ruler of the city besieged by the Greeks in the Trojan War. Despite his regal position, Priam plays an insignificant role, calling to order the war council in 2.2—but participating very little—and unsuccessfully attempting, along with Andromache and Cassandra, to persuade Hector not to fight on a day of disastrous omens in 5.3. 

Hector is the crown prince of Troy, son of King Priam and brother of Troilus and Paris. Hector, the leading Trojan warrior, holds to an ideal chivalric code centered on the notion of personal honor and the possibility of glory. Thus he is a principal element of the play's sardonic presentation of the false glamour of war. 

Though he is to some extent a character type—the romantic warrior-hero—Hector is made more humanly interesting through his deviations from the chivalric norm. He recognizes the defects of his position when, at the Trojan council of war, he advocates returning Helen to the Greeks and ending the fighting, and he points out the evil consequences of permitting 'the hot passion of distemper'd blood [toinfluence] a free determination / 'Twixt right and wrong' (2.2.170-172). However, he subordinates such wisdom to his enthusiasm for personal honor and glory and agrees with Troilus that they must carry on the conflict. Like his Greek counterpart as a spokesman for sanity, Ulysses, Hector presents an image of right behavior that he cannot live up to himself, reinforcing the play's bitter commentary. 

Hector's humanly malleable ideals play a part in his death in 5.8, which results from an ironic combination of obsessive adherence to, and temporary abandonment of, his chivalric code. Citing 'the faith of valor' (5.3.69), he ignores dire omens and refuses the pleas of his father, his wife, Andromache, and his sister, Cassandra, that he not fight. On the battlefield he chivalrously permits Achilles to recover from exhaustion in 5.6. Then, in an uncharacteristic moment of greed and vanity, Hector kills a Greek soldier in order to loot the corpse of its fine armour. While doing so, he removes his own armour, and in this vulnerable moment he is killed by the Myrmidons. Nevertheless, Hector remains one of the most positive figures in the play, self-deluded and weak at a critical moment but essentially honorable. 

Troilus is the one of the title characters of Troilus and Cressida, a prince of Troy, a Trojan leader in the Trojan War, and the lover of Cressida. As the only character to have a major part in both of the play's plotlines—a fighter for the honor of Troy in the warriors' plot and the victim of Cressida's betrayal in the illfated love story—Troilus contributes greatly to the play's central theme: the inadequacy of good intentions in a corrupt world. Self-deluded both as a lover and a warrior, Troilus is a principal component of, and a sufferer from, the play's atmosphere of error and misdirection.

He is a typical romantic hero, but his complex and credible responses make him interesting as well. Most important, he is mistaken in his attitude towards Cressida. Although Pandarus' lewd jests and salacious attitude make perfectly plain what sort of game is afoot, Troilus persists in pretending to himself that Cressida is 'stubborn-chaste' (1.1.97). In fact, their relationship is never more than a sexual affair that cannot be expected to last long. Subconsciously, he is aware of the truth; from the outset he is suspicious that Cressida will prove unfaithful. His language is also revealing. With romantic rhetoric, he describes Cressida as a 'pearl' (1.1.100), Pandarus as a ship, and himself as a merchant; unconsciously, he devalues his lover to the status of an object and the consummation of their love to that of a commercial transaction. When he approaches his long-sought rendezvous with Cressida, his thrill is distinctly sensual rather than emotional (as compared to, say, Romeo). He hopes to 'wallow in the lily beds' (3.2.11) when his 'wat'ry [i.e.,salivating] palate tastes . . . Love's . . . nectar' (3.2.18-19). But he does not acknowledge this, preferring to see himself as a romantic figure, 'a strange soul upon the Stygian banks' (3.2.8).

His capacity for self-deception is also important in the warriors' plot. Just as he deludes himself about Cressida, he also deludes himself about the pointless war for Helen. He feels that she is a 'pearl' (2.2.82) and the Trojans doers of 'valiant and magnanimous deeds' (2.2.201) in defense other. In both cases he confuses the real world with a grander, more ideal situation—like that of traditional literature and legend.

As a self-deluded warrior arguing for the continuation of the war, Troilus unconsciously presents an important theme: the unreliable nature of value judgments that are likely to change with time. In the Trojan council of 2.2 he argues that circumstances determine worth: Helen is valuable enough to fight over simply because she has been fought over already.  'What's aught but as 'tis valued?' (2.2.53), he says, but he is unaware that this argument applies to himself.  Cressida will eventually value him differently, compared to the more available man, Diomedes. 

When Troilus witnesses Cressida's betrayal while eavesdropping on her conversation with Diomedes in 5.2, his self-delusion becomes strikingly evident. He will not acknowledge Cressida's flighty nature, or that he was wrong about their romance. Instead, he hysterically insists that to do so would indict all womanhood, and further, that all 'beauty', all 'sanctimony ... the gods' delight', and 'unity itself (5.2.136, 139, 140) would be flawed. His grief and confusion are real, but his expressions of it are shallow and rhetorical. His focus is on literary images of betrayal, rather than on the particular betrayal that has just taken place. He avoids admitting that his romance was merely a sexual affair by translating it into high-flown abstractions. 

His final response is just as displaced; he translates his love for Cressida into hatred for Diomedes. Significantly, when the berserk Troilus encounters Diomedes on the battlefield, he has completely forgotten why he was so enraged and demands that his foe 'pay the life thou ow'st me for my horse' (5.6.7), a line that is both funny and ironically revealing. 

Paris is a prince of Troy, son of King Priam, and brother of Troilus and Hector. Before the play opens, Paris' theft of Helen, wife of the Greek leader Menelaus, has caused the Trojan War. Thus his story is one of the examples of human folly that comprise a leading theme of the play. Paris is a decadent figure; his father calls him 'besotted on your sweet delights' (2.2.144), referring to Helen, and Paris confirms this judgment when he avoids the battlefield, claiming, 'I would fain have armed today, but my Nell would not have it so' (3.1.132-133). In his other appearances, he is merely one among the Trojan warriors, remarking on the events of the war; he also aids Troilus' courtship of Cressida, covering for his absence from a state dinner and sending a warning to the lovers that a diplomatic delegation is approaching in 4.1. In Act 5 Paris fights with Menelaus, provoking sardonic remarks from Thersites on 'the cuckold and the cuckold-maker' (5.7.9). 

Deiphobus is a Trojan warrior. Deiphobus appears in five scenes but speaks only two lines, serving merely to flesh out the Trojan aristocracy. In the Iliad of Homer, Deiphobus, a son of King Priam, is a prominent warrior.

Margarelon is an illegitimate son of King Priam. In 5.7 Margarelon challenges Thersites on the battlefield, identifying himself as 'A bastard son of Priam's' (5.7.15). Thersites declares himself 'a bastard, too ... bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valor, in everything illegitimate' (5.7.16-18); he then flees. The episode serves only to display Thersites' coarse wit and cowardice. Margarelon speaks only three lines and has no personality. 

Aeneas is a leader of the Trojan forces in the Trojan War. Aeneas serves as an herald, carrying the challenge of Hector in 1.3, accompanying the visiting Greek delegation led by Diomedes in 4.1-4, carrying a warning of their arrival to Troilus in 4.2, and announcing Hector's arrival for his duel with Ajax in 4.5. Aeneas represents the Trojan concern for chivalric honour: he is a stiffly correct model of knightly manners. His exchange with Diomedes in 4.1 of courteous declarations of intent to kill is a bleakly humorous picture of mindless warriors who can reduce the horrors of war to an exercise in etiquette. 

Calchas is the father of Cressida. Calchas, a Trojan priest, has foreseen the defeat of Troy in the Trojan War and has deserted to the Greeks before the play begins. In 3.3.1-29 he proposes a prisoner exchange: the Greeks can repay him for his treason by trading the newly captured Trojan prince Antenor for his daughter. Thus Cressida is removed from her lover, Troilus, just as their affair has begun, and she is exposed to the temptation that leads her to betray Troilus in favor of the Greek warrior Diomedes. Aside from triggering this development, Calchas' role in the play is insignificant. 

Pandarus is the uncle of Cressida who encourages her love affair with Troilus. Pandarus, though a comic character, is also a conventional representation of a procurer of prostitutes. As such, he is a symbol of the moral corruption that permeates the world of the play. (Although Pandarus promotes only a single, non-mercenary affair, in both Shakespeare's play and its sources, he was already well established in Shakespeare's day as a symbol of the profession.) 

Pandarus uses a variety of humorously exaggerated dictions: the rather affected language of the court (as when he uses the word 'fair' is several ways in one sentence, composing an elaborate compliment to Helen in 3.1.42-45); babytalk ('Come, come, what need you blush? Shame's a baby' [3.2.39]); and the bold language of braggadocio—e.g., in his deprecation of the Soldiers as 'Asses, fools, dolts, chaff and bran, chaff and bran; porridge after meat . . , crows and daws, crows and daws' (1.2.245-248). In these passages Pandarus resembles such other Shakespearean comic characters as Falstaff, Feste, and the Nurse of Romeo and Juliet. Aeneas parodies him in 4.2.56-59, emphasizing both his comic aspect and his inferior social status. 

Pandarus insinuates himself into other people's lives and is capable of outrageous interruptions, as in his interception of Cressida's despairing cry to Troilus, 'Have the god's envy?' with the thoughtless 'Ay, ay, ay, ay, 'tis too plain a case' (4.4.27-28), and even if physical intrusiveness ('Let me embrace, too' [4.4.13]). As we know from the eventual result of the liaison he arranges, Pandarus is ultimately malevolent. This is strikingly conveyed by his association with venereal disease in 5.4 and 5.10. character, speakingi verse for the first time, as the formality of the device demands. However, he is still comically reprehensible. His recital on the humblebee, whose 'Sweet honey and sweet notes together fail' is a completely appropriate ending for this play of mistakes, misunderstandings, and failures. His flippant insults serve to distance the audience from the play as it closes. Because the audience is actually not composed of 'traitors and bawds . . . traders in the flesh . . . Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade' (5.10.37, 46, 52), it need not identify with the play's discouraging ending and can feel itself superior to its corrupt world. The satirical nature of the play is confirmed, implicitly allowing for the existence of human virtues in contrast to the vices depicted on stage. Thus Pandarus provides some sense of the high-spirited resolution typical in Comedy. 

Agamemnon is the leader of the Greek forces in the Trojan War. Although Ulysses calls him 'Thou great commander, nerves and bone of Greece' (1.3.55), Agamemnon is in fact an ineffectual leader. He preaches ponderously, but Achilles can safely ignore his orders; the Greek forces are accordingly stymied in their siege of Troy. Much of what Ulysses calls the absence of'degree' (1.3.83, 101, 109, etc.)—a dissolution of the hierarchy on which Greek society has been based—can be attributed to Agamemnon's recurrent weakness. At the play's close, Agamemnon still lacks authority; in the last line spoken by a Greek, he sends a messenger to request submissively the presence of Achilles, just as he has had to do all along. 

Achilles is a Greek warrior in the Trojan War.  Though acknowledged as the greatest Greek warrior, Achilles refuses to fight because he feels he is insufficiently appreciated; he is also motivated by a treasonous desire to please a Trojan lover. Not until Act 5, after his close friend Patroclus is killed, does Achilles, enraged with grief, return to the battlefield. Then, he underhandedly has his followers, the Myrmidons, kill the chivalrous Hector, thereby ensuring the defeat of Troy in the climactic battle. In 5.8 he further discredits himself by declaring that he will mutilate Hector's body by dragging it behind his horse. 

Achilles scandalizes the Greek camp by ridiculing his superior officers, Agamemnon and Nestor.  Ulysses, in a significant passage, holds Achilles' attitude responsible for the Greek failure to defeat Troy despite seven years of fighting. Societies fail, he says, when hierarchical rankings are not observed. Moreover, Achilles' insubordination has spread, and Ajax is behaving similarly. The prideful warrior thus represents a social defect that is one of the targets of the play's satire—the evil influence of morally deficient leadership. Achilles' selfish, traitorous, and brutally unchivalrous behavior is the centre-piece of the play's depiction of the ugliness of war and the warrior's life, in principle dedicated to ideals of valor and honor but in fact governed by immorality. 

Personally, Achilles is rude and uncivil for the most part, and he falsely claims the honor of having defeated Hector, whom he has merely butchered. His villainy is underlined by the obscene and vicious raillery of his jester, Thersites, whose remarks include the accurate observation that Achilles has 'too much blood and too little brain' (5.1.47), and the imputation that he keeps Patroclus as a 'masculine whore' (5.1.16). 

Before he appears, Ajax is humorously described by Alexander as a valiant warrior but a beastlike churl with uncontrollable emotions. (Some scholars believe that this passage [1.2.19-31] is a satirical description of Ben Jonson, though the point is extremely disputable.) When he does appear, Ajax is laughably stupid, incapable of responding to Thersites' teasing except by hitting him. Selected by Ulysses as a substitute for Achilles, Ajax displays ludicrous pride in his undeserved position, especially since he criticizes Achilles for his pride, and elicits the amused asides of the other Greeks in 2.3.201-224. One of the play's funniest passages is Thersites' imitation of Ajax' ego in 3.3.279-302. Ajax issues a preposterous parody of a chivalric challenge as he directs his trumpeter to summon HECTOR for their duel, saying, 'Now, crack thy lungs, . . . stretch thy chest, and let thy eyes spout blood' (4.5.7-10). 

However, Ajax proves a brave soldier who behaves with valor and chivalrous generosity when he actually faces Hector, getting the better of the fight (according to the cries of the spectators in 4.5.113-115) but accepting the truce his opponent desires. Strikingly, when Thersites describes Ajax as 'a very land-fish, languageless, a monster' (3.3.262-263), we see that this brutish fellow resembles a later Shakespearean figure—also sympathetic in spite of his defects—Caliban, the fishy monster of The Tempest. 

Ulysses is a Greek leader in the Trojan War. Ulysses is a voice of sanity among the Greeks, who are fighting a dishonorable war for a pointless cause. Yet such is the corruption of the world of the play that Ulysses fails to influence his fellows and, indeed, gives up his own ideals. In both his idealism and his failure he corresponds to Hector among the Trojans. 

However, the common sense and political wisdom of Ulysses provide a background against which to view the corrupt world of the play. He diagnoses the Greek failure in the war as due to their departure from strict adherence to a system of social hierarchy, like that of the 'heavens themselves' (1.3.85). However, in his effort to convince Achilles that he should return to the battle he abandons this idea and instead encourages the reluctant warrior to consider the loss of status he risks by permitting Ajax to receive the laurels he could receive himself. In giving up his ideals to promote this rivalry, Ulysses reveals himself to be a pragmatist, but the event contributes to our sense of disorder in the play's world. Moreover, his compromise fails in its purpose, for Achilles again withdraws from the battle, and only Patroclus' death finally brings his sword into play. Ulysses, though wise, is no less subject to the chances of war than anyone else. 

Ulysses' judgments of the other characters, though firmly stated, are distinctly, if slightly, mistaken, adding to the play's network of self-deception and error. In 4.5, on the strength of his first impression, he declares Cressida to be a prostitute; while he has perceived her sexuality, he has misread it, for she is merely a frankly sensual woman whom circumstance has placed in temptation's way. Ulysses praises Diomedes for a spirit that 'In aspiration lifts him from the earth' (4.5.16); he recognizes an intensity of purpose, but he fails to see that Diomedes' energies are to be expended on an extremely earthly aspiration: the seduction of Cressida. Similarly, Ulysses says of Troilus that he 'gives not till judgment guide his bounty' (4.5.102), yet we know that Troilus has committed himself to Cressida without judgment. However, Troilus is an idealist in love, and Ulysses' opinion is not wrong, merely uninformed. We are made aware that wisdom and objectivity are no guarantee of knowledge in the world of the, play. 

Diomedes is Greek warrior and seducer of Cressida. Diomedes plays a very minor role in the Trojan War until he is assigned to oversee the exchange of prisoners whereby Cressida is traded for Antenor. When he arrives among the Trojans: he expresses a sharply cynical view of Helen that makes plain his lack of the romantic idealism that has led Troilus to deceive himself about love. Thus, when he manipulates Cressida's emotions in 5.2, using an affected disinterest—the tactic with which she herself beguiled Troilus—we recognize him as a cold blooded seducer. When she agrees to a sexual assignation he demands from her the love token given her by Troilus, thus climaxing her betrayal. Diomedes is coolly amoral, contributing to our sense of the corruption that infects the play's world. 

Patroclus is a Greek warrior in the Trojan War and friend and follower of Achilles. While he himself is not an important figure, Patroclus' death is a key event in the plot, for it sparks Achilles to abandon his withdrawal from the combat and resume fighting, with the result that Troy loses the climactic battle. Batroclus represents Achilles in his dispute with the Greek leader, relaying his friend's statements of non-cooperation and carrying messages back to him. And, in an incidental episode that heightens the aura of decadence that surrounds the warriors, Achilles' jester, Thersites, taunts Patroclus with a piece of malicious gossip, saying, 'Thou art said to be Achilles' male varlet ... his masculine whore' (5.1.14, 16), though the imputation is carried no further and has no dramatic significance. 

Thersites is the jester, or Fool, to Ajax and Achilles. Thersites rails against everyone he encounters, and his diatribes are vicious and hateful. He is also a coward who avoids combat by unashamedly declaring himself too roguish a person to be fought by a chivalrous knight. The unhealthy aura of disgust that distinguishes this play and contributes greatly to its satire owes much to Thersites' outbursts. Thersites is not likeable, but his language is inventive and funny and he is capable of amusing imitations of his targets' especially when he enacts the prideful Ajax in 3.3 279-302. Further, his perception of the follies of the warriors of the Trojan War is refreshingly acute, and we respect his capacity to see through the combatants' pretensions to reason and honor when they persist in fighting a sordid, irrational war. 

Thersites is a composite of two ancient character types: the boastful Miles Gloriosus, a braggart soldier; and the scathing critic, a sort of Chorus whose usually comic commentary provides telling asides on the main action. As a court jester, he is licensed to insult his superiors, and he thus resembles, in a perverse way, other Shakespearean fools such as Feste and the Fool in King Lear. However, unlike them, Thersites is "lost in the labyrinth of [his] fury' (2.3.1-2), and his obscene jests often tell us more about his own disturbed nature than about the warriors he mocks. He displays a morbid excitement when other characters are suffering most, as when he cries out, 'Now the pledge: now, now, now!' (5.2.65), when Troilus witnesses Cressida surrendering to Diomedes the token he had given her. Moreover, he often directs his venom at himself, declaring, for example, 'I am a rascal ... a very filthy rogue' (5.4.28-29), and T am a bastard ... I am bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valor, in everything illegitimate' (5.7.16-18). Thersites' pathology has dramatic value, heightening the sense of disease that the play's world conveys. 

Cassandra is a princess of Troy, the daughter of King Priam and sister to the princes Hector, Troilus and Paris. Cassandra, a seer, twice foretells the fall of Troy. First, she hysterically interrupts a council of war to warn, 'Troy burns, or else let Helen go' (2;2 113), only to be dismissed as the victim of 'brain-sick raptures' (2.2.123). In 5.3, in calmer tones, she joins Andormache and Priam in trying to persuade Hector not to enter battle on a day of ill omens. Rebuffed again, she bids her brother a sad farewell. Although the other characters do not believe her, Cassandra's prophecies contribute to the play's atmosphere of fateful destiny, for they are known by the audience to be ironically correct.

Cressida is one of the title characters and lover of Troilus. Because Cressida's betrayal of her lover in favor of the Greek Diomedes is the focal event of the love plot, many commentators have seen her role as that of a villain, though in fact Shakespeare did not treat her unsympathetically. Her disloyalty is a necessary element of his story, and she is representative of human or perhaps (for Shakespeare) feminine weakness, but she is certainly not a vicious breaker of hearts, nor, despite Ulysses’ mistaken assumption upon meeting her in 4.5, is she a prostitute, for she shows no hint of mercenary motives. Diomedes courts her in 5.2 with the same wiles she used on Troilus earlier—affecting disinterest and a readiness to ignore her—and she is susceptible, though she resists confusedly. She is a frankly sensual woman, as has been evident from her affair with Troilus, and now, alone in a new world, having just been removed from Troy to the Greek camp, she succumbs to her nature.

Cressida is frequently associated with Helen, the worthless prize of the Trojan War, in order to underscore her similar deficiency as a motive for Troilus.  She is a much more alert and interesting personality than Helen, however. She is a knowledgeable flirt, able to consider the tactics of courtship, and she is scornfully aware that Pandarus is 'a bawd' (1.2.286). Once united with Troilus in 3.2, she frankly confesses her love, but in confusion she regrets abandoning her tactical game. Tellingly, she speaks other 'unkind self, that itself will leave / To be another's fool' (3.2.146-147). Swept up in the excitement of the moment, she deludes herself that a real romance is in the offing, but her profession of faith is couched in negative terms, allowing the prediction—recognized by the audience to be accurate in a textbook instance of dramatic irony—that the future will call 'false maids in love ... "as false as Cressid" ' (3.2.188-194). Although she pledges her loyalty to Troilus in the enthusiasm of passion, she recognizes her need for Diomedes in Troilus' absence. She admits her guilt, attributing it to her gender: 'Ah, poor our sex! . . . The error of our eye directs our mind' (5.2.108-109). Such simple awareness of guilt is unique in this play filled with hypocrisy and self-delusion.