Hector

Hector is the eldest son of Priam and the commander of the Trojan army. He is not the most beautiful or the most favoured of his brothers—Paris has Helen and Aphrodite—but he is the one who holds the city together. He reproaches Paris for staying in the palace while the war is fought at the walls, and accepts the command that Paris avoids.

His courage is of a different kind from Achilles’. Achilles fights for his own honour; Hector fights for a city, a family, and a people who depend on him. When he goes out to meet Achilles in Book XXII, he does so knowing that Troy cannot be saved and that he will probably die. That makes his bravery less spectacular than Achilles’ and, in some ways, harder.

Book VI contains the most famous family scene in the Iliad. Hector returns to Troy, arranges a sacrifice to Athena, and finds Andromache at the gate with their son. She begs him not to go back to the field, reminding him that she has already lost her father and brothers and that he is all she has. He answers that he cannot hide like a coward: he would be ashamed before the Trojan men and women, and he knows that the day will come when Troy falls and Andromache is led away as a slave.

He reaches out to take Astyanax, but the child draws back, frightened by the plume on his father’s helmet. Hector and Andromache laugh through their grief; he takes off the helmet, lifts the boy, and prays that he may one day be a better man than his father. Then he gives the child back to his mother and goes out to die.

In Book XXII, Apollo abandons Hector, and Athena tricks him into standing his ground by pretending to be his brother Deiphobus. He and Achilles run three times around the walls of Troy. Zeus weighs their fates in his scales and Hector’s sinks. Achilles strikes him in the neck, and Hector, dying, asks that his body be returned to his family. Achilles refuses.

For eleven days Achilles drags the corpse behind his chariot. The city watches and mourns. Then Priam, guided by Hermes, enters the Achaean camp by night and kisses the hand of the man who killed his son. Achilles remembers his own father, and gives the body back. The Iliad ends with the funeral of Hector, “breaker of horses,” and with the women of Troy lamenting the man who guarded their city.