Hector- Greek HeroHero"Prince of Troy"

The Tamer of Horses

Hector, eldest son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, bore the defense of Troy for ten years against the war his brother's folly had caused. Homer calls him "tamer of horses" and "Hector of the glancing helm." Unlike Achilles, whose sea-goddess mother made him nearly invulnerable, Hector was fully mortal. No divine blood protected him. He fought for his city and his family, knowing he would likely die in a war he had not started.

Farewell to Andromache

In Iliad 6, Hector meets his wife Andromache and their infant son Astyanax at the Scaean Gates. She begs him not to fight, not to leave her a widow and their son an orphan. Her father Eetion and her seven brothers were all killed by Achilles in a single day at Thebe-under-Plakos. Hector is now her father, mother, brother, and husband all in one.

He knows she is right. He will likely die, and Troy will fall. He can imagine her led away as a slave, weaving at a foreign loom, carrying water from a foreign spring, pointed out as "Hector's wife" by those who remember. Yet he cannot retreat. "I would feel deep shame," he tells her, "before the Trojans and the Trojan women with trailing garments, if like a coward I were to shrink aside from the fighting."

When Hector reaches for his son to kiss him farewell, the baby screams in terror at his father's bronze helmet with its horsehair plume nodding grimly from the crest. Both parents laugh through their tears. Hector removes the helmet, kisses his son, and prays that Astyanax will grow to be "far greater than his father" and bring joy to his mother's heart. The prayer would go unanswered. After Troy's fall, the Greeks threw Astyanax from the walls.

Defender of a Doomed City

Paris had stolen Helen from Menelaus's hospitality, violating the sacred laws of guest-friendship and bringing the combined might of Greece against their walls. Yet it was not Paris who bore the burden of defending the city. Hector repeatedly rebuked his brother for the catastrophe he had caused, yet never abandoned him. For ten years he led the Trojans and held together allied contingents from across Asia Minor.

He challenged any Greek champion to single combat. Ajax answered, and the two fought to a standstill until heralds separated them at nightfall. They exchanged gifts of mutual respect: Hector gave a silver-studded sword and received a war-belt. Both gifts would prove fateful. Ajax later fell on Hector's sword in his madness, and Achilles used the belt's holes to thread the straps that dragged Hector's corpse.

Hector's Aristeia

When Achilles withdrew from the fighting, Hector broke through. With Zeus's favor behind him and Apollo clearing his path, he drove the Greeks back to their ships. He smashed through the wall the Greeks had built around their camp, lifting a boulder that two ordinary men could not move, and led the Trojans in setting fire to the Greek fleet. Had the ships burned, the Greeks would have been stranded, and Troy would have been saved.

Ajax retreated step by step along the ship decks, beating back Trojans with a massive pike. Only the desperate intervention of Patroclus, who begged Achilles to let him fight in his armor, prevented the total destruction of the Greek expedition.

The Killing of Patroclus

Patroclus entered the battle wearing Achilles's divine armor, and the Trojans, believing Achilles had returned, fell back in panic. Patroclus drove them from the ships, killed the Lycian hero Sarpedon, and pressed on toward Troy's walls despite Achilles's warning to go no further. Apollo struck him from behind, knocking away his helmet and shattering his spear. The Trojan Euphorbus stabbed him, and then Hector delivered the killing blow.

Hector stripped Achilles's divine armor from the fallen Patroclus and put it on himself. Zeus watched and pitied him, knowing that this trophy would draw Achilles back to the war and seal Hector's doom. Dying, Patroclus prophesied that Hector would not live long, that death and destiny stood beside him in the form of Achilles. Hector dismissed the warning. The prophecy was already in motion.

The Chase Around the Walls

When Achilles returned to battle, burning with grief and rage over Patroclus's death, the end came swiftly. Hector alone remained outside the Scaean Gates to face him while his parents begged from the walls for him to come inside. Priam reminded him of all the sons he had already lost. Hecuba bared her breast, invoking the bond of nursing. But Hector stayed, bound by the same shame he had confessed to Andromache.

Yet when he saw Achilles approaching, blazing in new divine armor forged by Hephaestus, even Hector's courage failed. He ran. Three times around Troy's walls they raced, hunter and hunted, passing the washing pools where Trojan women once washed clothes in peacetime. The gods watched from Olympus, and Zeus weighed their fates in golden scales. Hector's sank toward death.

Athena then deceived Hector, appearing in the form of his brother Deiphobus and promising to stand beside him. Believing he had an ally, Hector finally turned to fight. He proposed terms: let the victor give back the loser's body for proper burial. Achilles refused. There could be no oaths between lions and men, wolves and lambs. They fought, and Achilles's spear found the gap at Hector's throat, where the armor he had stripped from Patroclus left him exposed. Dying, Hector begged for his body's return. Achilles refused again.

The Ransom of the Body

Achilles pierced Hector's ankles, threaded leather straps through them, and dragged the corpse behind his chariot back to the Greek camp. For eleven days he continued the desecration, circling Patroclus's funeral mound with Hector's body bouncing in the dust. But the gods preserved Hector's corpse from decay, anointing it with ambrosia and shielding it with Apollo's golden aegis.

Zeus commanded Achilles through Thetis to accept ransom for the body. Guided by Hermes through the night, aged King Priam came alone to Achilles's tent, kissed the hands that had killed his son, and begged for the body. Achilles thought of his own father Peleus, old and alone, a man he would never see again. He wept with his enemy. They shared a meal together, and Achilles granted Priam eleven days' truce for funeral rites.

The Trojans lamented. Andromache and Hecuba led the mourning, and Helen spoke last, praising the one Trojan who had never shown her cruelty. They burned his body on a pyre, gathered his white bones into a golden chest wrapped in soft purple cloth, and buried them beneath a barrow. Centuries later, Pausanias records, the Thebans brought Hector's bones from the Troad to a hero shrine near the spring of Oedipodeia, following an oracle. The defender of Troy became the guardian of a Greek city.

The Iliad ends not with Greek triumph but with Trojan mourning. Its final line: "Such were the funeral rites of Hector, tamer of horses."