Andromache

In Iliad VI Andromache runs to the Scaean Gate with the nurse and the child, having heard that the Trojans are hard pressed. She begs Hector to stay inside the walls and to fight from a position of safety, and she reminds him that she has no father, mother, or brothers left: Achilles killed them when he took Thebe. “You are my father and mother and brother,” she says, “and my husband.”

Hector answers that he cannot withdraw without shame, and that he fears the day when Troy falls and she is carried away as a captive. The scene is built around the impossibility of protecting the people one loves by the very activity that endangers them. The child Astyanax is frightened by his father’s helmet, and the laughter that follows is one of the poem’s brief moments of relief.

In Iliad XXII Andromache is at home preparing a bath for Hector when the cry goes up from the wall. She runs out and sees his body being dragged behind Achilles’ chariot. Her lament looks forward to the life of a captive and to the fate of their son, who will be excluded from the community of free men. She names the child’s future humiliation before the poem has shown it.

The lament is also a criticism of heroic values from the inside. Andromache does not deny Hector’s courage; she shows what it costs her and the household. The Iliad ends with the funeral of Hector, and her grief is the last human note before the poem’s final quiet.