Hektōr

Hector (HEK-tor), in Greek Ἕκτωρ (Hektōr), "the Holder" or "Upholder," is the greatest warrior of Troy and the chief defender of the city, the eldest son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, and — with Achilles — one of the two poles around which Homer's Iliad turns. If Achilles is the story's terrible engine of wrath and glory, Hector is its heart: the man who fights not for plunder or renown but for his home, his aged parents, his wife, and his baby son, standing between the walls of Troy and the ruin that is coming for it. He is the defender rather than the aggressor, and Homer makes us love him for it. Alone among the great fighters of the poem he is shown at home as well as on the field — as husband, father, son, and brother — so that when he dies we feel the death not of a hero only but of a whole city, whose fall his death foretells.

What makes Hector tragic is that he is doomed and half-knows it, and fights on anyway. He carries a burden not of his own making: the war came to Troy because his brother Paris carried off Helen, and Hector, who blames and rebukes Paris for it, must nonetheless bear the cost of his brother's folly and defend the city his brother endangered. He is a good man tied to a losing cause, upholding a duty he did not choose against an enemy — Achilles — no mortal can defeat. The Greeks, who might have painted the enemy champion as a brute, did the opposite: they made Hector the most sympathetic figure in their national epic, braver than his cause deserved and gentler than his profession allowed.

His story gives the Iliad its most unforgettable scenes: the tender farewell to his wife Andromache and their infant son Astyanax at the Scaean Gate, when the baby shrinks in terror from the nodding horsehair crest of his father's helmet; his great day of triumph when he drives the Greeks back to their ships and sets the fleet ablaze; his fatal duel with Achilles, the flight three times around the walls of his own city, and his death; the shocking dishonour of his corpse dragged behind Achilles' chariot in the dust; and — most movingly of all — the night old King Priam crosses into the enemy camp to kneel and kiss the hands of the man who killed his son, and to beg back the body for burial. The Iliad ends there, with the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses.

The eldest son and the shield of Troy

Hector was the firstborn son of Priam, king of Troy, and his queen Hecuba, and the eldest and greatest of their many children — Priam is said in the Iliad to have fathered fifty sons, but Hector stood above them all. His brothers included Paris (also called Alexandros), whose abduction of Helen brought the war; Deiphobus, who would fight beside him and, in the end, be part of the trick that undid him; Helenus the seer; and the young Troilus, among many others; his sister was the prophetess Cassandra, doomed to speak true and never be believed. In this teeming royal house Hector was the one on whom everything rested. Homer's word for it is caught in his very name: he was the holder, the one who held Troy together, and the Trojans knew that while Hector lived the city stood and when he fell it would fall. He was married to Andromache, daughter of Eëtion king of Thebe-under-Placus (a city Achilles had already sacked, killing her father and seven brothers), and they had one child, an infant son the people called Astyanax, "lord of the city" — a name that was itself a prayer and, as it turned out, a cruel irony.

The defender, not the aggressor

(Content note: this is a war story, and it turns throughout on killing, grief, and the threat of a city's destruction.) What sets Hector apart from the heroes on the Greek side is the nature of his fight. Achilles, Agamemnon, and the rest have come across the sea for another man's wife and for the glory and plunder of sacking a rich city; Hector defends the walls behind which his own people sleep. He did not start the war and does not want it — in a bitter scene he curses his brother Paris, wishing he had died unborn rather than brought this ruin on them all — yet he shoulders the whole weight of Paris's crime without flinching. This is the moral centre of his character: he fights for what is his to protect, knowing the odds, knowing (as the prophecies and his own foreboding tell him) that Troy is fated to fall and that he will likely die before it does. He is courage in the service of duty rather than desire, and Homer never lets us forget the difference.

The farewell at the Scaean Gate (Iliad 6)

The most beloved scene in all of Homer, and perhaps the tenderest in ancient literature, comes in Iliad 6, when Hector goes back into the city in the thick of the fighting and meets his wife Andromache on the wall by the great Scaean Gate, their baby in the arms of a nurse beside her. Andromache pleads with him not to go back out — she has already lost her father and brothers and mother to this war, and she tells him, in words that have never lost their force, that he is now father and mother and brother to her as well as husband: "Hector, you are all these to me." Stay, she begs, fight from the tower, do not make me a widow and your son an orphan. Hector answers with terrible gentleness. He cannot hide behind the walls like a coward; he has learned to be brave and to fight in the front rank, to win glory for his father and himself. And he knows the truth she cannot bear to hear: "there will come a day when sacred Troy shall perish" — and what grieves him most is not his own death, nor even his parents' or brothers', but the thought of Andromache led away weeping into slavery by some Greek soldier, her freedom gone. Then he reaches out to take his son — and the baby screams and shrinks back against the nurse's breast, terrified by the gleaming bronze and the horsehair crest nodding fearfully from the top of his father's helmet. Both parents laugh through their fear, and Hector lifts the great helmet from his head and sets it shining on the ground, and takes up his boy and kisses him and prays over him: that Astyanax may grow to be a better man than his father, and rule in Troy, and that someday men may say of him, "he is far better than his father," as he comes home from war with the bloody spoils, and his mother's heart be glad. Then he gives the child back to Andromache, who takes him "to her fragrant bosom, smiling through her tears," and Hector pities her and strokes her with his hand, and tells her to go home to her weaving and her maids — war is the men's concern, and his above all. It is a scene of almost unbearable tenderness precisely because the reader knows how every prayer in it will be answered: Astyanax will not grow up, Andromache will be led away a slave, and Hector will not come home.

The aristeia and the burning of the ships

Hector's great day of glory — his aristeia, the surge of triumph the Iliad grants each of its champions in turn — comes when Achilles, in his rage at Agamemnon, has withdrawn from the fighting and the Greeks are left without their best man. With Zeus himself tipping the scales toward Troy to make good his promise to Thetis, Hector drives the Greek army back in rout across the plain, back over their own defensive wall and ditch, back among the beached ships. In Iliad 8 he pens the Greeks against their camp; through the long central books he is unstoppable, a wall of the Greeks against him and he shattering it. He calls for fire to burn the fleet — for if the ships burn, the Greeks can never go home, and the war is won. In Iliad 15 he reaches the ships at last and lays his hand on the stern of one of them, roaring for a torch, and the Trojans fling fire, and the first ship goes up in flame. This is the high-water mark of the Trojan cause and of Hector's life: the enemy trapped against the sea, the fleet burning, victory a single push away. But it is exactly here, with the ships on fire, that the tide turns against him — for the burning ships are what finally move Achilles.

The killing of Patroclus (Iliad 16)

(Content note: a death aided by a god's ambush.) Achilles will not fight, but he cannot bear to watch the ships burn, so he lets his dearest companion Patroclus go out in his place, wearing Achilles' own armour, to frighten the Trojans and drive them from the ships. It works — the Trojans, thinking Achilles himself has returned to the field, break and flee, and Patroclus, carried away by his success against Achilles' explicit warning, pursues them all the way back to the walls of Troy and there does terrible slaughter, killing among many others Sarpedon, a son of Zeus. But Patroclus is fighting past his fate. At the wall, the god Apollo — Troy's great divine protector — comes against him unseen, strikes him a stunning blow from behind that knocks the helmet from his head and looses his armour, and leaves him dazed and defenceless; a Trojan named Euphorbus spears him in the back; and only then does Hector close in and drive his spear home, finishing the half-slain, disarmed man. It is not Hector's cleanest victory — Homer is scrupulous that Apollo and Euphorbus did the real work — but it is Hector who deals the death-blow, Hector who strips the fallen Patroclus of the divine armour of Achilles and puts it on his own body, and Hector over whom the dying Patroclus speaks a prophecy with his last breath: Hector too will not live long, for death and Achilles are already standing close beside him.

The duel with Achilles and the flight round the walls (Iliad 22)

The death of Patroclus brings Achilles roaring back into the war, transformed by grief into a force of almost pure destruction, caring now for nothing but to kill Hector and avenge his friend. New armour is forged for him by Hephaestus, and he sweeps the Trojans before him in carnage back to the very gates of the city. And here comes the climax of the whole poem, Iliad 22. The Trojans flee inside the walls — all but Hector, who alone will not go in. His father Priam and his mother Hecuba call down from the ramparts, begging him to come inside, not to face Achilles; Priam foretells his own ruin and the sack of the city over his son's corpse; Hecuba bares her breast and pleads. But Hector stays, wrestling with himself: shame will not let him retreat behind the walls after his own overconfidence has cost so many Trojan lives, and he knows the fault is partly his. For a moment he thinks of setting down his arms and offering Achilles Helen and all the treasure back — but he knows Achilles is past bargaining and would cut him down defenceless. Then Achilles comes on like the war-god himself, and at the last, Hector's nerve breaks: he turns and runs. Three times the two of them race around the great walls of Troy, Achilles the swifter but unable to close the gap, Hector unable to reach the safety of a gate, while the watching gods look on and the whole city holds its breath. At last Athena, who means Hector to die, works the final cruelty: she takes the shape of his brother Deiphobus and appears at his side, promising to stand and fight beside him — and Hector, heartened, no longer flees but turns to face Achilles two against one. He casts his spear; it strikes Achilles' god-made shield and bounces off; he turns to call Deiphobus for a fresh spear — and Deiphobus is not there. The goddess has vanished. In that instant Hector understands everything: the gods have tricked him, his death is here, he is alone. "So now my death is upon me," he says. But he will not die without a fight, "not without a struggle, nor ingloriously, but in some great deed for men to come to hear of" — and he draws his sword and rushes in. Achilles, knowing every weak point of his own old armour that Hector now wears, drives his spear through the one gap at the throat, and Hector falls. Dying, he begs Achilles for one thing: not to let the dogs and birds tear his body, but to give it back to his parents for burial, for a ransom of bronze and gold. Achilles refuses him savagely — he wishes he could eat Hector's flesh raw for what Hector's people have done — and Hector, with his last breath, warns him that his own death waits at the Scaean Gate, at the hands of Paris and Apollo. Then he dies, and his soul goes wailing down to Hades, "leaving manhood and youth behind."

The dishonouring of the body

(Content note: mutilation and abuse of a corpse.) What follows is the ugliest thing Achilles does, and Homer means it to appal. In his unslaked grief and rage, Achilles will not let the body rest. He pierces the tendons of Hector's ankles, threads them with a leather thong, and binds the corpse behind his chariot, and drags it face-down in the dust from the walls of Troy all the way back to the Greek camp, the head that was once so beautiful trailing and fouled in the dirt — while on the walls above, Hecuba shrieks and tears her hair, Priam has to be held back from rushing out through the gates, and Andromache, who has been quietly weaving indoors and heating a bath for a husband she does not yet know is dead, hears the wailing, runs to the wall, sees her husband's body dragged toward the ships, and faints away, the bright headdress Aphrodite gave her on her wedding day falling from her head. Day after day, through the funeral games for Patroclus and beyond, Achilles drags Hector's body around Patroclus's tomb, trying to work off a grief that cannot be worked off. But the gods will not permit the outrage to stand: Apollo wraps the corpse in a golden cloud and keeps it whole and unmarred, untouched by rot or wound, no matter how it is abused — for even in death Hector is beloved of the gods, and even the immortals are sickened by what Achilles is doing.

The ransom of Hector (Iliad 24)

The Iliad, which began with the wrath of Achilles, ends not with a battle but with an act of mercy, and it is the most moving thing in the poem. The gods in council decide the abuse must stop; Zeus sends word by Thetis that Achilles must give the body back, and sends the goddess Iris to old Priam with the astonishing command that the king should go, alone but for one aged herald, into the enemy camp by night to ransom his son. Guided in secret by Hermes, who takes the shape of a young squire and leads him unseen past the Greek sentries, the old king comes to Achilles' hut in the dark, and does the thing no one watching could have believed: he kneels before the man who has killed so many of his sons and killed and defiled his best, and he takes Achilles' hands — "the terrible, man-slaying hands that had killed so many of his sons" — and kisses them, and begs. He asks Achilles to remember his own father, Peleus, far away and old, who at least still hopes to see his son come home; Priam has no such hope, and has done what no other man on earth has ever done, to raise to his lips the hands of the man who slew his children. And Achilles, hearing this, is broken open. He thinks of his own father whom he will never see again, and of Patroclus, and the two of them, the old enemy king and the young killer, weep together in the hut — Priam for Hector, Achilles for Patroclus and for Peleus — until the whole tent is filled with the sound of their grief. Then Achilles, gentled at last, raises the old man up, and grants him the body, and has it washed and anointed and wrapped with his own hands so that Priam will not see it defiled and cry out; and the two of them eat together and look at each other in wonder, the old king marvelling at the young man's beauty and the young man at the king's nobility. Achilles promises a truce of eleven days so that Troy may mourn and bury Hector properly, and sends Priam home with his son's body in a wagon. The poem closes with the burial: the lamentations of Andromache, of Hecuba, and of Helen — who mourns Hector as the one man in Troy who was always kind to her and never spoke a harsh word — the raising of the pyre, the gathering of the bones into a golden casket, the heaping of the great mound, and the funeral feast in Priam's halls. And the last line of the Iliad is his: "Such was the burial of Hector, tamer of horses."

After the Iliad — the ruin foretold

Homer's poem ends before Troy falls, but the tradition carried Hector's story to its bitter close in the fates of those he left behind, all of them foreshadowed in his lifetime. Troy fell not long after his death, as he had always known it would; Achilles himself was killed at the Scaean Gate by an arrow from Paris guided by Apollo, exactly as the dying Hector had foretold. When the city was sacked, Hector's infant son Astyanax — the "lord of the city" over whom his father had prayed for a better life — was taken from his mother's arms and hurled to his death from the walls of Troy by the victorious Greeks, who feared that the son of Hector might one day grow up to avenge his people. And Andromache, Hector's widow, was carried off into slavery as a prize of war, given to Neoptolemus the son of Achilles — the very fate Hector had wept to imagine for her at the Scaean Gate, come true in every particular. Every tender thing in the farewell scene was answered by its opposite, and the completeness of that reversal is part of why Hector's story has never lost its power.

A hero, not a god

Hector was honoured in the way proper to a hero rather than an Olympian: with cult centred on his tomb and his bones, directed to a mighty and beloved dead man believed to watch over and protect the living, and offered the chthonic (earth-directed) sacrifices and libations given to the powerful dead rather than the sky-facing offerings of the gods. As the noblest of the defeated Trojans and the most sympathetic figure of the Iliad, he was a natural object of such honour, and — remarkably for the champion of the losing, "barbarian" side — his cult took root on the Greek mainland itself.

The tomb at Thebes

The chief seat of Hector's worship was not at Troy but at Thebes in Boeotia. Pausanias (Description of Greece 9.18.5), touring Boeotia in the second century AD, records that the Thebans possessed the tomb of Hector near the spring called Oedipus, and tells the tradition behind it: an oracle had declared that the Thebans would prosper if they brought Hector's bones from Troy (from a place called Ophrynion) and honoured them, and so they fetched the relics and gave the hero cult. The transfer of a hero's bones at an oracle's command, and the promise of civic good fortune in return for honouring them, is a characteristic pattern of Greek hero-cult — the same logic by which cities competed for the relics of Orestes, Theseus, and other mighty dead. That the Greeks should have adopted the great enemy of the Iliad as a protecting hero of a Greek city is a striking measure of the reverence Homer's portrait won for him.

The manner of his honours

Where Hector's tomb stood, worshippers would have brought the customary hero-offerings — libations poured out at ground level onto the earth, and animal sacrifice of the chthonic kind given to a hero rather than to the Olympians — and kept his memory with the observances that attached to such a shrine. As a hero associated above all with the defence of a city, he belonged to the class of protecting dead whose continued goodwill a community courted for its safety, and whose story it recited as an example of courage and duty. Beyond formal cult, Hector lived everywhere in the ancient world through the Iliad itself: recited by rhapsodes, learned by schoolchildren, and painted on vases and walls, his farewell to Andromache and his death at Achilles' hands were among the most familiar images in Greek and Roman art.

A hero honoured in a distinct key

Hector is a hero rather than a god, and modern Hellenic practice honours heroes differently from the Olympians — not as deities who order the cosmos, but as great and beloved ancestor-figures whose memory is kept and whose example is invoked. A devotee drawn to Hector might honour him as a patron of courage in the face of certain loss, of duty to family and homeland, and of the quiet, unglamorous heroism of the one who defends rather than conquers — the values his whole story embodies. Following the ancient shape of hero-cult, offerings to a hero are traditionally poured out at ground level rather than raised to the sky-gods: a libation of wine poured onto the earth, a candle lit in his memory, or the telling of his story keep his name alive in the way the ancients believed a hero most wanted, to be remembered.

The enduring pattern of the noble enemy

More than through formal cult, Hector endures as one of literature's first and greatest portraits of the sympathetic enemy — the good man on the losing side, braver than his cause and gentler than his trade, whom the storytellers refused to flatten into a villain. Every later tragedy and epic that grants dignity and inner life to the opponent is in some sense his heir. His name has passed into the language: "to hector" someone came, by a strange later turn, to mean to bully or bluster (from the swaggering Hector of medieval and Renaissance drama, a coarsening of the Homeric figure), even though the Homeric Hector is the opposite of a bully; and "Hector" remains a living given name across Europe. In the medieval "Nine Worthies," the great exemplars of chivalry, Hector stood first among the three pagan heroes, remembered as the very model of the noble knight.

The farewell that never loses its force

Above all, Hector lives on through the two scenes Homer gave him that have never been surpassed: the farewell at the Scaean Gate, where a soldier lifts off his terrifying helmet so his baby will know him and prays for a son who will be better than himself — perhaps the most humane moment in ancient literature — and the ransoming of his body, where a grieving father and the killer of his son weep together and, for one night, the war stops. Poets, novelists, and scholars return to these again and again; they are taught wherever the Iliad is read, and they remain the clearest proof of why the Greeks chose to end their national epic not with a triumph but with the funeral of the enemy they loved best: "Such was the burial of Hector, tamer of horses."