The helmet
In the meeting at the Scaean Gate in Iliad VI, Andromache brings the child to Hector. He reaches for him, but the boy shrinks back, frightened by the bronze helmet and the horsehair crest. Hector laughs, takes off the helmet, and dandles him, praying that he may grow up to be a better man than his father and to bring his mother joy.
The scene is brief and almost domestic, and it is placed at the exact centre of the poem’s first movement. The child’s fear of the armour is a small, precise image of what war does to the family, and Hector’s prayer is one of the poem’s most painful ironies.
After the fall
The Iliad does not say what happens to Astyanax. Later tradition, especially the Trojan Women of Euripides and the sack narratives, has the Greeks throw him from the walls so that no avenger may grow up. The Odyssey does not name him.
His fate is the logical conclusion of the poem’s concern with continuity. Hector hopes that his son will inherit his city and his honour; the fall of Troy makes that inheritance impossible. The child who was frightened by a helmet becomes the image of a whole city’s extinction.
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