Hector

The family in Troy

Apollodorus, who collected the Greek myths into a book, makes Hector the first son born to Priam by Hecuba, Priam’s second wife, and puts him ahead of Paris and the rest of the family. He records a disagreement about Hecuba herself and leaves it open: she was the daughter of Dymas, or, as some say, of Cisseus.

In the Greek epic of the war at Troy, Homer’s Iliad, Hector’s wife is Andromache, the daughter of Eetion, who ruled the men of Cilicia from Thebe under Placus. Hector called their son Scamandrius. Everyone else in the city called the boy Astyanax, lord of the city, because Hector alone guarded Ilios, which is Homer’s other name for Troy. Homer’s standing name for the father is Hector of the flashing helm, and the last line of the poem calls him horse-taming Hector.

At the Scaean gate

Book 6 of the Iliad puts him at the Scaean gate, one of the gates of Troy, with Andromache asking him to fight from the wall and stay off the plain. Achilles had sacked her father’s city, and she told Hector so.

He refused her. Shame before the Trojans and before the Trojan women in their trailing robes would not let him skulk apart from the battle. The day would come, he said, when sacred Ilios would be laid low, and Priam and the people of Priam with it. What he said he could not bear was the thought of Andromache led away captive.

The challenge, and the lots

Hector challenged any Greek to meet him in single combat, and the leaders of the Achaeans, as Homer calls the Greeks, held back. Nestor, the old man among them, chid them for it, and nine stood up. Homer names them in order: Agamemnon first, then Diomedes, the two men called Ajax, Idomeneus, Meriones, Eurypylus, Thoas and Odysseus.

Each of the nine marked his own lot, Nestor shook them in Agamemnon’s helmet, and the lot that leapt out was the one the army wanted, the lot of Ajax. This is the moment the Achaeans later dedicated as a group of statues at Olympia.

Fire at the ships, and the death of Patroclus

Hector got as far as the ships. He came up to Ajax and cut the bronze head off his ash spear with a sword stroke close to the socket, and the Trojans set fire to a Greek ship. That fire is what sent Patroclus, the companion of Achilles, out onto the field in Achilles’s armour. Patroclus left one weapon behind him, Achilles’s own spear of Pelian ash.

Hector killed him with a spear thrust into the lower belly that drove the bronze clean through. Dying, Patroclus told him the killing was shared and that Hector came last in it: fate and the god Apollo first, then a Trojan named Euphorbus, and Hector third. Then he foretold Hector’s own end: Hector would not be long in life, death and mighty fate stood close by him, and he would fall at the hands of Achilles. Hector asked him why he prophesied destruction, and said Achilles might be struck down by his own spear first.

Three circuits of the walls

Achilles came on outside the gates, brandishing the Pelian ash over his right shoulder, and trembling took hold of Hector when he saw him. He did not dare stay where he was. He left the gates and ran, and the two of them circled the city of Priam three times on swift feet while all the gods watched.

Zeus pitied him while the chase ran, and named what Hector had given him over the years: the thighs of many oxen burned on the ridges of Mount Ida.

The one gap in the armour

He stopped running because he believed his brother Deiphobus was beside him. Deiphobus was inside the wall. The goddess Athena had beguiled him into thinking otherwise.

By then his own spear was thrown and gone. He was wearing the armour he had stripped from Patroclus, which was Achilles’s own, so Achilles knew the one place it left bare: the opening where the collarbones part the neck and shoulders, at the gullet. The spear went through it.

Dying, Hector asked for his body to be given back to his home, so that the Trojans and the Trojan women could give him his due of fire. Achilles refused him. His last words are a warning that the gods will turn on Achilles on the day Paris and Apollo kill him at the Scaean gate.

Dawn after dawn behind the chariot

Achilles bound him behind the chariot, dragged him three times round the barrow of Patroclus, and did it again at dawn after dawn. Homer has Apollo keep all defacement from the flesh through it, pitying the warrior.

The body went home in the end. Achilles granted Priam a truce that would hold until the twelfth dawn. The Trojans spent nine days bringing in wood, burned Hector on the tenth, gathered the bones into a golden urn, wrapped them in soft purple robes, and laid the urn in a hollow grave under a mound with watchers set on it. The Iliad ends with that funeral.

A grave at Thebes

Pausanias, who wrote a description of Greece as he travelled through it, records a grave of Hector at Thebes in Boeotia, near the spring called the Fountain of Oedipus. The Thebans told him they had brought the bones from Troy because of an oracle in verse. It addressed the Thebans who dwell in the city of Cadmus, and told them that if they wanted blameless wealth for the country they lived in they should bring home the bones of Hector, Priam’s son, from Asia, and reverence him as a hero according to the bidding of Zeus.

The lines name the bidding of Zeus and nothing else. Pausanias does not say which oracle issued them.

The monument at Olympia

At Olympia, the sanctuary of Zeus in Elis in the north-west of the Peloponnese, the statue group of the challenge did not show Hector himself. Its inscription named the Achaeans as the givers and Zeus as the god, and called the Achaeans descendants of Pelops, the son of Tantalus. The sculptor signed the shield of Idomeneus, who was identifiable by the cock emblazoned on it: Onatas of Aegina, son of Micon.

Eight of the nine were standing when Pausanias saw them. He was told that the Roman emperor Nero had carried the ninth, the Odysseus, to Rome. Only Agamemnon’s figure carried a name, and the writing on it ran from right to left. The group stood in the Altis, the sacred grove at the centre of the sanctuary.