Who Was Hector of Troy?
Hector is the best man in a doomed city, and he knows it. He is Troy's greatest warrior and King Priam's eldest son — the one person standing between the Greek army and everyone he loves. He also knows exactly how the war ends, and Homer never once lets him pretend otherwise. The Iliad calls itself a poem about Achilles's rage. Its real moral center is Hector: a man fighting a war he has already lost, for people who have nowhere else to go.
Homer does something in Book Six that he does nowhere else in the poem: he stops the war. Not a truce. Not a pause ordered by the gods. He simply follows Hector off the battlefield, through the Scaean Gate, into the city. Past his mother, who offers him wine (he refuses it — a clear head, before what's coming). Past his brother Paris, who is home polishing his armor instead of fighting; Homer needs exactly one unflattering word for him, and it has done its job for two and a half thousand years. Past Helen, who tries to apologize for a war that is, technically, about her. And finally up to the wall, where Andromache is watching the battle with their infant son, Astyanax, in her arms. What follows is the most intimate scene in the Iliad — a husband and wife talking as though it might be the last time, each one understanding something the other won't say out loud. It is also the scene that makes Hector, not Achilles, the poem's real moral center.
Andromache tells him to stop. Not carefully. She tells him to pull the army back inside the walls and make the Greeks come to them (sound tactics, actually — she has worked out the battlefield better than some of Priam's own generals). Then she tells him why it matters this much to her: "Hector, you are my father and my mother and my brother and my husband." It is not a figure of speech. Achilles killed her father and all seven of her brothers in a single raid, before this war even reached the walls of Troy. Hector is what is left of her family — all of it. If he dies, she is alone in a city that is going to fall anyway, with an infant in her arms and nothing left to lose. She has already done the math. She tells him anyway, because telling him is the only move she has left.
What Hector Knows
Hector says it out loud. In the same breath as his farewell to Andromache, he tells her flatly: the day will come when Troy falls, and Priam with it. No hedging, no waiting on a sign from the gods (this is not a case where the gods are being coy) — he just knows. What he asks for is not victory, or even survival. He asks to be dead before he has to hear her cry out when the Greeks drag her away. That is the whole of his request. By the standards of what men ask for in this poem, it is not much.
That is what makes Hector the most morally serious man in the poem: he fights without any good story about how it ends. Achilles fights knowing he will have glory — his name outliving him, the gods on his side, prophecy backing his cause. Hector fights knowing his cause is already lost and his city is going to burn. He fights because someone has to stand between the Greeks and the people behind those walls, and he is the one who can. He fights because Paris is upstairs with his armor and not his spear. He fights because Priam is old, and there are fewer sons left to fight each year. He fights, in the end, because stopping was never really an option for a man who stood at the Scaean Gate and told his own wife exactly how this ends. Hector knows precisely who he is. In the Iliad, that turns out to be the most expensive thing a man can know.
Troy's fall from inside the walls, and the people the epics rush past. That’s my novel The Hound of Troy. Read it on Amazon →
The Farewell
The scene the tradition keeps returning to happens right after this. Hector reaches for his son, and Astyanax screams and shrinks back into his nurse's arms — not from his father, from the war gear. The bronze catches the light. The horsehair crest nods over the crown of the helmet like something alive. To an infant, it looks like a monster wearing his father's voice. Hector laughs, so does Andromache, and he takes the helmet off and sets it on the ground; only then does the boy stop crying and let himself be held. Hector prays over him — not for victory, but that his son grow into a better man than his father, a king people will point to and say, "he is far better than his father." It is a wish for a Troy that no longer needs a Hector standing at its gate. Then he hands the baby back, puts the helmet on, picks up his spear, and walks back to the war. Andromache goes home and starts mourning him immediately, calling her women in to begin the funeral songs while he is still alive, because she already knows how this ends. Homer gives us this in three flat lines and moves on.
Book Twenty-Two closes the loop that Book Six opened. Hector is outside the Scaean Gate. Achilles is coming. He has a choice: go inside, where his father is already begging him to retreat, and live. Or stand. He stands — but only for a moment. When Achilles gets close, Hector runs. Three times around the walls of Troy, Achilles behind him, the Trojans watching from above, the outcome already decided by the gods. That part people mostly remember. What they forget is worse: Athena disguises herself as Hector's brother Deiphobus and appears at his side, and Hector, thinking he finally has backup, turns to fight. He throws his spear and misses. He turns for a second spear from "his brother." There is no brother (Deiphobus is safe behind the walls; he was never there). Hector understands, in the same instant, that a goddess has tricked him and that he is going to die completely alone. He draws his sword and charges Achilles anyway.
Homer gives Hector the only vindication the poem has on offer. Priam ransoms his son's body from Achilles in Book Twenty-Four. There is a funeral. And then the entire twenty-four-book epic — the rage of Achilles, the will of Zeus, ten years of siege — ends on one plain sentence: "Thus they buried Hector, breaker of horses." Not an apotheosis. Not a promise of glory. Just a title he earned by fighting for a city he always knew he could not save, and a burial. Homer had the whole of Olympus at his disposal, and for his last word on the best man in Troy, he chose to give him nothing but the truth.
The Hound of Troy: The Vengeance of Hecuba
Book Three of the Myths of the Ancient World series. Hector's death and what came after for the family he died to protect — drawn from Homer, Euripides, and Ovid.
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