Hector: The Man Who Knew He Was Going to Lose

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Who Was Hector of Troy?

Hector was the greatest Trojan warrior in the Iliad and the man Homer spends the most careful attention on — which is remarkable, given that the poem is nominally about Achilles. He knew his city was going to fall. He knew the outcome before he walked back out through the Scaean Gate. He fought anyway, not because he expected to win but because the people inside the walls had no one else to stand in front of them. The Iliad is officially a poem about Achilles. Hector is the reason it matters.

Homer does something in the sixth book of the Iliad that he does nowhere else in the poem: he pauses the war. Not a truce, not a pause mandated by the gods — he simply follows Hector through the Scaean Gate into the city, through the streets, past his mother who offers him wine, past Paris's room where Paris is polishing his armor with the self-satisfaction of a man who has decided that someone else will handle the difficult parts — Homer conveys this in a single unfriendly adjective, which is economical and has been doing its work for two and a half thousand years — past Helen who tries to apologize, and finally to the tower where Andromache stands watching the battle with their infant son Astyanax in her arms. The scene that follows is the most intimate passage in the Iliad — a husband and wife talking to each other, knowing this may be the last time, each understanding something the other will not say aloud. It is also the scene that makes Hector the central moral figure of the poem, which is remarkable given that the poem is ostensibly about Achilles.

Andromache tells him to stop. Not carefully, not diplomatically. She says stop. Pull the army back to the walls, fight defensively, make the Greeks come to you — she has worked out the geometry of the situation better than most of the Trojan generals have, and she does not pretend otherwise. And then she says why she is saying it, which is the line that strips everything else away: "Hector, you are my father and my mother and my brother and my husband." She lost her entire family to Achilles before the war reached its current phase — her father and her seven brothers in a single campaign, which has a tendency to make one's feelings about the war somewhat less abstract than everyone else's. Hector is everyone she has left. If he dies, she is alone with an infant in a city that is going to fall regardless of whether Hector is in front of it, and she has done this calculation, and the calculation is not in her favor, and she knows it, and she is telling him anyway, because telling him is the only thing she can do.

What Hector Knows

Hector knows the city is going to fall. Homer does not make him say it directly in the scene with Andromache — the poem is not that explicit — but it is there in everything he does not say. He tells her that he knows the day is coming when Troy will be destroyed, when Priam will fall, and he says this while asking only that he be dead before he has to hear her cries when the Greeks take her. He is not expressing hope that Troy will survive. He is expressing a preference about the order of events. He would like, if it is at all possible, to be dead before he has to watch what comes next. This is the only thing he is asking for. It is not, by the standards of what people ask for in this poem, a great deal.

This is the quality that makes Hector the most morally serious figure in the poem: he fights without the consolation of a good narrative about the outcome. Achilles fights knowing he will have glory, knowing his name will outlast his life, knowing the Greek cause is going to prevail — all the divine assurances and the structural certainties of the heroic tradition are on his side. Hector fights knowing his cause is lost and his city is going to burn. He fights because the people inside the walls need someone to stand in front of them and he is the person who can. He fights because Paris is upstairs with his armor, because Priam is old, because the sons of Priam who were capable of fighting are fewer than they were last year and will be fewer still next year. He fights because the alternative is to stop, and stopping is not a thing that is available to you if who you are is the kind of man who stood at the Scaean Gate and told his wife he already knew how this ended. Hector knows, with absolute precision, who he is. That turns out to be the most expensive kind of self-knowledge the Iliad has to offer.

The Farewell

The famous moment — Hector reaching for Astyanax and the baby flinching from the helmet's bronze cheekpiece — is one of those images that the literary tradition has returned to for two and a half thousand years because it is technically perfect and emotionally devastating. The warrior removes the helmet and sets it on the ground — we are meant to hear the weight of it — and the baby, now seeing a face instead of a face made of metal, stops crying and reaches out. Hector prays over his son, asking that the boy be greater than his father, which is not a wish for excellence so much as a wish for a different world than the one Hector was built to live in. He gives the baby back to Andromache. Then he puts the helmet back on, picks up the spear, and walks back to the battle. The scene ends. The war resumes. Andromache goes home and begins mourning Hector while he is still alive, calling her women to lament, because she already knows how this ends. Homer tells us this in three lines, with complete calm.

The fight in the twenty-second book — Hector waiting outside the Scaean Gate while Achilles approaches — completes what the sixth book began. Hector considers his options: go inside, face his father's pleading and his mother's, lose the chance to fight. Or stand. He stands. Then, when Achilles is close enough, he runs — three times around the walls of Troy, Achilles behind him, the gods watching, the Trojans watching from the walls, a race that is already decided, since Athena has intervened to take Deiphobus's form and trick Hector into thinking he has an ally beside him, and when he turns to fight he finds the phantom gone and his spear in the ground and Achilles advancing. He knows at this moment what has been done to him. He charges anyway. This is the last thing Homer tells us about what kind of man Hector was.

The tradition after Homer gives Hector the only form of vindication the poem has on offer: his body is returned, his funeral is the closing act of the Iliad, and the final line — "Thus they buried Hector, breaker of horses" — has a plainness that the poem seems to reserve for him specifically, as though after everything that has happened, the least Homer can do is not dress it up. The Greeks tend to end their poems with heroes ascending into legend. Homer ends his with a burial and six words. It is the right ending for the man who fought without the consolation of winning, who knew from early on what the outcome was, and who kept fighting because that is what you do when the wall behind you contains everyone you love and you are the best person available to stand in front of it. The Iliad is, officially, a poem about Achilles. Hector is the reason it matters.