The Myth of Hector | Troy's Hector, Achilles, His Wife, Death, and Ending Explained

When a father in armor reaches out his arms, a baby bursts into frightened tears. The horsehair plume swaying above the helmet was unfamiliar and terrifying. Only after Hector laughed, took off his helmet, and set it down beside him could he take his son into his arms.

Though Hector is called the defender of Troy, the Iliad portrays him not first as a hero of the battlefield but as the head of a household with a mother, a wife, and a young son. Let us follow, in order, the events from his stepping out of the city gates to his never returning.

Bloodstained, He Chooses the Battlefield Over the Temple

In Book 6, Hector briefly returns inside the city to meet his mother Hecuba. When Hecuba offers wine to her weary-looking son, he refuses, saying that he cannot pour wine to Zeus with his body covered in blood and dust.

Instead, he asks his mother to gather the women and offer the finest robes at the temple of Athena, promising twelve heifers as a sacrifice, and to pray that Athena protect Troy from Diomedes. It was a choice to secure the safety of the entire city rather than rest himself.

On his way, Hector stops at the house of his brother Paris. While others are risking their lives outside the walls, he rebukes his brother, who lingers alone in his room—not with resentment but with sharp words. It was a rebuke that this was no time to sit idle while people fought and died for this city. Paris makes excuses, blaming his sorrow, but answers that he will soon arm himself and follow.

Helen, Paris's wife and thus Hector's sister-in-law, addresses him as her elder brother-in-law, laments her own plight, and urges him to sit and rest a while. But Hector declines, saying that before battle takes him away, he must first see the faces of his own household, and turns away.

At the Scaean Gate, Andromache's Final Plea

When he reached the gate, his wife Andromache was waiting for him with their young son Astyanax. She urgently caught hold of him.

Andromache's circumstances had already been shattered once by war. Thebes, the city her father ruled, had been sacked by none other than Achilles, and all seven of her brothers lost their lives then. Her mother, too, was taken captive and ransomed free, but did not live long.

So to her, Hector was father, mother, and brother all in one. She begs him not to make their child an orphan and herself a widow, and pleads instead that he station his troops by the fig tree, where the wall is lowest and weakest.

Refusing to Retreat Out of Shame

Hector did not dismiss his wife's words. But he answers that he could not bear the shame of shrinking back like a coward before the Trojans, and that as a man trained to fight in the front ranks as a warrior, he could not retreat.

He then confesses that he knows the day will come when Troy falls. Yet what truly pained him was not his own death, but what Andromache would endure afterward. Some Achaean would seize her, strip her of her freedom, and carry her off weeping, and she would end up drawing water for others in a foreign land like Argos.

When Hector finished speaking and reached out for his son, the child—as mentioned before—burst into tears at the horsehair plume of the helmet. The couple laughed together at the sight, and only after removing his helmet did Hector lift his son.

Holding the child up, he prayed to Zeus and the gods. It was a prayer that this son might grow up to become a warrior among the Trojans greater than himself, that people would say he surpassed his father, and that he would bring joy to his mother. Then he handed the child back to Andromache.

Andromache received the child, weeping yet smiling. Hector comforted her, telling her not to grieve too much, since no one can escape the fate decreed for them, to go home and attend to her weaving and her maidservants, and that war was the business of men. Then he put his helmet back on and stepped out of the gate.

Returning home, Andromache kept looking back, shedding floods of tears, and the maidservants who followed her mourned with her as if Hector were already dead, a man who would never return from the battlefield.

Striking Down Patroclus

In Book 16, the situation changes dramatically. With the Greek ships burning in crisis, Achilles lends his armor to his desperately pleading friend Patroclus and allows him to go into battle. But there was a condition: once the Trojans were driven back from the ships, he must return at once and must not pursue them to the walls.

Seeing Patroclus in Achilles' armor, the Trojan army mistakes him for Achilles and is pushed back hard. Carried by momentum, Patroclus forgets that promise and drives all the way to the walls of Troy.

That choice immediately exacts its price. As he tried to scale the wall for the third time, Apollo himself appeared and warned him to withdraw, and Patroclus obeyed, halting his assault on the wall and retreating. But he soon leapt back into the fray, and this time Apollo, shrouded in mist, came up behind him and struck his back and broad shoulders with his palm, knocking off his helmet and leaving him dazed. In that moment, Euphorbus, a warrior of Dardania, stabbed him from behind with a spear, and as he withdrew defenseless, Hector drove a spear into his belly for the final blow.

Hector taunted the dying man, saying the Trojan women would take him captive, and mocked the command Achilles had given.

But Patroclus, gasping his last breath, instead leaves him a warning. It was a prophecy that Hector, too, would not live long—that the day of death and doom was already drawing near, and he would fall by the hand of Achilles. With those words, Patroclus breathed his last.

Stripping His Friend's Armor and Wearing It Himself

In Book 17, Hector strips the armor from the fallen Patroclus and puts it on. That armor was originally given by the gods to his father Peleus and inherited by Achilles.

Zeus, watching this from the heavens, could not hide his sorrow. It was a lament that while wearing the armor of a hero feared by many, the man could not reckon at all with the doom that had drawn near to him. This armor he had donned appears again later in the duel with Achilles.

A Parent's Plea from the Wall

In Book 22, the Trojan army has already withdrawn inside the walls, but Hector alone remains outside the gate. His father Priam spots him from the wall and cries out desperately. He begs him not to face that man alone, for he is stronger, but to come inside the walls—otherwise he will die at the hands of the son of Peleus.

His mother Hecuba, too, loosened her robe and bared the breast that had nursed him, clinging to him. It was a plea that for the sake of this milk, he turn back and come within the walls.

Yet Hector did not move. Remembering how he had refused to listen when Poulydamas earlier advised retreat, he was seized by the thought that if he entered the walls now, Poulydamas would be the first to reproach him. He briefly considered offering Helen and the treasures to sue for peace, but concluded that even so, Achilles would show no mercy and would simply kill him as one kills a woman.

In the end, he resolves that it would be better to face him now and find out to whom Zeus grants victory. But the moment he actually came face to face with Achilles, who advanced like the god of war, that resolve crumbled. He turned at the gate and began to flee.

The Chase Around the Walls, and the Scales in Heaven

Achilles, swift as a hawk, pursued him like a falcon swooping on a dove, and the two ran the chase again and again along the walls of Troy, past watchtowers and springs. Like a man in a dream who can never be caught no matter how he is chased, Achilles could not overtake him, nor could Hector fully shake him off.

Zeus, watching from above, pitied Hector and asked whether he might not be spared. But Athena opposed saving a man whose fate had long since been fixed, and Zeus, saying his words had not been spoken in earnest, let the matter go.

As the chase passed the springs for the fourth time, Zeus took out his golden scales and placed the two men's fates upon them. The scales tipped, and Hector's fate sank deep toward the house of Hades, and Apollo, who had stood by him all along, abandoned him in that moment.

Athena's Deception, Disguised as Deiphobus

Athena tells Achilles to halt for a moment, then turns to Hector. She appears at his side wearing the form and voice of his brother Deiphobus. Told that they must stand and fight together against Achilles, who is pressing him hard, Hector takes heart and finally stops fleeing and turns around.

The Final Duel

Hector makes one final proposal. It was a pact that whoever won would return the loser's body with due honors. But Achilles refuses outright, saying that just as there is no pact between lions and men, no such agreement could exist between himself and Hector.

Achilles casts his spear first, but Hector ducks and evades it. Hector's spear then strikes Achilles' shield and glances off. He calls to Deiphobus, whom he believed was at his side, for another spear, but no one answers, and only then does he realize that Deiphobus was in fact inside the walls and that Athena had deceived him. The moment he grasps the deception, he must accept that death has truly drawn near and that the gods have abandoned him. Confirming that he has no spare spear, he draws his sword and charges like an eagle.

At that moment, Achilles finds precisely the one gap exposed between the joints of the armor Hector wore—the armor stripped from Patroclus, which had originally been his own—where the neck and shoulder meet. The spearhead pierced that throat.

A Dying Curse and the Mutilation of the Body

Fallen, Hector spends his last breath on a plea. He begs by his life, his knees, and his parents that a rich ransom be taken but his body be returned, so that the Trojans may give it burial by fire with due honors.

Achilles does not waver in the least. He answers: speak not of knees nor of parents—though they bring ransom ten and twenty times over, they shall not save his body from the dogs.

To this, Hector leaves his final curse. He says he already knows what kind of man Achilles is, and curses him not to hope that the gods' wrath over his own death will fail to reach him, on the day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo bring him down at the Scaean Gates. With those words, he breathes his last.

Achilles at once dishonors the body. Piercing the sinews of both feet, he threads leather straps through them, ties the body behind his chariot, and races along the wall so that the head drags in the dust. Watching this from the wall, Priam and Hecuba collapse where they stand, and Priam clutches at his people, saying he would go out himself, even naked, to pay his son's ransom.

Andromache's Lament

Hearing the wailing from within the city, Andromache runs out too late, and at the sight of her husband being dragged beneath the walls, she faints on the spot. Barely regaining her senses, she pours out a long lament not for her own future, but for that of young Astyanax.

It was her fear that a child who has lost his parents would lose his place even among his peers, and would live with head bowed and tear-stained face, begging as it were among his father's old friends. She says that the fine robes she had lovingly woven for her husband were now of no use, and that she would burn them—that this would be her way of paying him final honors before the Trojans.

Priam Goes to Recover His Son's Body

In Book 24, Achilles has not ceased dragging Hector's body in circles around Patroclus' tomb for many days. Yet the body remains uncorrupted thanks to Apollo, who shielded it with his golden aegis. Even among the gods, voices grow that this has gone far enough, and Zeus finally decides the body must be returned.

Zeus sends Iris to Priam, and through Thetis conveys his will to Achilles. Hermes, transformed into a young man, guides Priam—who sets out by night driving a cart laden with ransom—deep into the Greek camp.

Reaching Achilles' quarters, Priam clasps his knees and kisses the very hands that had killed so many of his sons. Then he pleads with Achilles to remember his own father Peleus, growing old in his homeland, saying that he too is only an old man who has lost a son, like that father.

At these words, Achilles first weeps thinking of his own father, and then, remembering Patroclus, sheds tears with him. Only after the two have wept together for a long while does Achilles raise the old man and agree to return the body.

A Twelve-Day Truce: The Iliad Ends with Hector's Funeral

Achilles has Hector's body washed and carefully wrapped, then promises a truce on the condition that nine days be spent in mourning, one day for the funeral, and another for raising the burial mound, with the fighting to resume on the twelfth day. Hermes urges Priam to leave the camp before dawn.

The first to recognize the cart returning to Troy is his sister Cassandra. As the whole city sinks into grief, Andromache first, then Hecuba, and finally Helen mourn his death in turn. Helen recalls that during her nearly twenty years in Troy, only her father-in-law Priam and Hector had never reproached her but treated her kindly, and laments that with even Hector gone, no one in all Troy is left to speak a kind word to her.

The Trojans, who gathered wood for nine days, on the tenth day lay the body upon the pyre and burn it, and when the fire dies down, they gather the bones, place them in a golden urn, and raise a mound over it. The Iliad ends with the line, "Thus they buried horse-taming Hector." Neither the Trojan Horse nor the fall of the city is an ending this work itself depicts.