Chapter summary
The battle, left to itself, spreads across the plain between the Simois and the Xanthus. Ajax first breaks the Trojan phalanx and kills Acamas, the best of the Thracians. Diomedes kills Axylus, a rich and hospitable man, and the servant who guided his horses, and other warriors fall on both sides. Menelaus already has Adrastus alive before him, who rolled from his chariot when the horses tangled in a tamarisk, and who embraces his knees and promises an enormous ransom in bronze, gold, and iron, which his wealthy father will pay. Menelaus, convinced, was about to send him to the ships when Agamemnon arrives running and rebukes him: is his brother so pitying toward the Trojans? No one should escape, not even the child still in its mother's womb; all of them should vanish from Ilium without burial and without trace. The counsel, which the narrator calls just, turns Menelaus's spirit, and he pushes Adrastus away with his hand; Agamemnon wounds him in the flank, and Menelaus sets his foot on Adrastus's chest to pull out the spear. Nestor shouts to the Argives that no one should linger over the spoils of the dead: first kill, and then, at leisure, strip the corpses.
The Trojans would already be retreating beaten to Ilium, if not for Helenus, son of Priam and the best of the seers. He tells Aeneas and Hector that the weight of the fight falls on them, since they are the best in combat and in counsel, and orders them to stay there and hold the troops before the gates, before the soldiers fall fleeing into the arms of the women. After rallying the ranks, Hector is to go to the city and tell his mother to gather the old women, open the temple of Athena on the citadel, and lay the most beautiful robe upon the knees of the goddess, promising twelve young heifers if she takes pity on the city, the wives, and the children and drives from Ilium the son of Tydeus, a savage spearman, master of panic, whom Helenus holds to be the strongest of the Achaeans: not even Achilles was so feared, he says, because this Diomedes goes wild and no one matches his fury. Hector obeys his brother: he leaps from the chariot in arms, runs through the army shaking his spears, and rekindles the fight. The Argives fall back, thinking that an immortal has come down from heaven to help the Trojans. Hector shouts to the allies to remember their warlike strength and announces that he will go to Ilium to ask the elders and the women to pray and to vow hecatombs.
Between the two armies, Glaucus, son of Hippolochus, and Diomedes advance against each other. Diomedes, who has never seen his opponent in battle and marvels that he waited for his spear, asks who he is, because he does not fight against gods: he recalls Lycurgus, who pursued the nurses of Dionysus, was blinded by Zeus, and died young, hated by the immortals. If he is mortal, let him come closer and reach the end all the sooner. Glaucus answers that the generation of men is like that of the leaves, and since Diomedes wants to know, he tells his lineage: Sisyphus, the craftiest of men; then Glaucus and Bellerophon, to whom the gods gave beauty and courage. King Proetus, far more powerful, drove him from the land, because Queen Anteia, who desired him in secret and was refused, lied to her husband and said that Bellerophon had tried to force her. The king, furious but scrupulous in spirit about killing a guest, sent him to Lycia with deadly signs engraved on a tablet, so that her father would kill him. The king of Lycia hosted him for nine days, read the message on the tenth, and sent him to kill the Chimera; afterward he fought the Solymi and the Amazons, and finally defeated an ambush of the best Lycians, killing them to the last man. Recognizing in him a son of a god, the king kept him, gave him his daughter and half of the royal honor. From that marriage were born Isander, Hippolochus, and Laodamia, who bore Sarpedon to Zeus. Later hated by the gods, Bellerophon wandered alone across the Aleian plain, devouring his own spirit; Ares killed Isander in combat, and Artemis, in anger, killed Laodamia. Hippolochus, father of Glaucus, sent him to Troy with the order always to be the best.
Diomedes rejoices at the answer, plants his spear in the earth, and speaks gentle words: they are guests by inheritance, because Oeneus hosted Bellerophon for twenty days and the two exchanged gifts, Oeneus's purple belt and Bellerophon's golden cup, which Diomedes keeps at home. Of Tydeus he does not remember, because his father left him as a child, when the Achaean army was destroyed at Thebes. He proposes that each avoid the other's spear in the crowd, for there are Trojans and allies enough for him to kill and Achaeans enough for Glaucus, and that they exchange armor, so that everyone knows they claim to be guests of their fathers. They clasp hands and pledge their word, but Zeus takes the wits of Glaucus, who trades golden armor, worth a hundred oxen, for bronze armor, worth nine.
Hector reaches the Scaean Gates and the oak, and the wives and daughters of the Trojans run to ask after their sons, brothers, friends, and husbands; he tells them all to pray to the gods, and for many grief has already come. In the beautiful house of Priam, with chambers of polished stone for fifty sons and twelve sons-in-law, his mother, Hecuba, comes to meet him with Laodice, the most beautiful of her daughters. She is astonished that he has left the fight, supposes he has come to lift his hands to Zeus from the citadel, and offers wine, so that he may pour a libation to Zeus and then refresh himself, weary as he is. Hector refuses: wine would take away his strength and make him forget his courage, and it is not lawful to pour a libation to Zeus with unwashed hands, stained with blood and dust. He asks her to go to the temple of Athena with the elders and repeats Helenus's message, and he says he will go to summon Paris, wishing that the earth would swallow him, because Zeus raised him as a curse to Troy, to Priam, and to the sons; if he saw him go down to Hades, he would forget his grief. Hecuba gathers the elders, chooses from the treasury the most beautiful and the largest robe, the work of the Sidonian women that Paris brought on the voyage in which he carried off Helen, and goes to the temple. Theano, wife of Antenor and priestess of Athena, opens the doors; the women raise their hands with cries; Theano lays the robe on the knees of the goddess and asks her to break the spear of Diomedes and make him fall face down before the Scaean Gates, promising the twelve heifers. Athena shakes her head in refusal.
Hector goes to the house of Paris, which Paris built himself with the best craftsmen of Troy. He enters with his eleven-cubit spear and finds Paris in his chamber, polishing his weapons, shield, breastplate, and curved bow, while Helen, among her maids, directs the work. Hector rebukes him: it is not good to keep anger in one's heart, men are dying around the city and the wall because of him, and Paris himself would reproach another man whom he saw drawing back from the war. Paris acknowledges that the rebuke was just and explains that he stayed in his chamber not out of anger at the Trojans but out of sorrow; now his wife has cheered him with gentle words, and he is ready to go: let Hector wait while he arms, or let him go on ahead, and Paris will catch up. Hector does not answer. Helen speaks sweetly: she calls herself a bitch, a plotter of evils, and wishes she had been carried off by a storm before all this happened; and since the gods have decreed the evil, she would at least wish for a husband who knew men's reproach; the present one has no firm judgment, nor will he ever have it, and he will pay for it. She invites Hector to sit down, because the labor weighs more heavily on him, on account of her and of the madness of Paris, to whom Zeus gave a bad fate, so that they may be a theme of song for men to come. Hector refuses: his spirit already drives him to aid the Trojans, who miss him; let her hurry Paris so that he can catch up with him while still within the city. He goes to see his house, his wife, and his small son, for he does not know whether he will see them again or whether the gods will already subdue him under the hands of the Achaeans.
At home, Hector does not find Andromache. The housekeeper tells him that she went to the great tower of Ilium, having heard that the Trojans were in trouble and that the strength of the Achaeans was great, and that she ran to the wall like a madwoman, with the nurse carrying the boy. Hector retraces his steps through the streets and reaches the Scaean Gates, through which he would go out onto the plain, and his wife comes running to meet him, the daughter of Eetion, who ruled in Thebe at the foot of Mount Placus. With her comes the nurse, carrying in her arms the little son, beautiful as a star, whom Hector calls Scamandrius and the others call Astyanax, because Hector alone defended Ilium. He smiles in silence at the sight of the boy. Andromache, weeping, takes his hand and speaks: his fury will destroy him, he has no pity for the son or for her, who will soon be a widow, for the Achaeans will kill him by attacking all together; it would be better for her to go down into the earth, because once he is lost there will be no comfort left, only pain. She has no father or mother. Achilles killed her father, Eetion, when he took Thebe, but spared his body and burned it with its armor, and the mountain nymphs planted elms around the tomb; the seven brothers went down to Hades in a single day, all killed by Achilles among their herds; their mother was brought back with the spoils and freed for an immense ransom, and died in her father's house, struck down by Artemis. Hector is for her father, mother, brother, and husband: let him have pity, stay on the tower, and not make his son an orphan and his wife a widow. She advises him to station the army by the fig tree, where the city is most accessible and the wall is lowest, and where the best Achaeans, the two Ajaxes, Idomeneus, the Atreidae, and the son of Tydeus, attacked three times, whether because they knew of some oracle or by their own impulse.
Hector answers that all this weighs on him too, but he is ashamed before the Trojans and the Trojan women with trailing robes, if he were to flee the war like a coward; his spirit does not urge him to, because he has learned to be brave and to fight among the foremost, winning glory for his father and for himself. He knows well, in his inmost heart, that the day will come when Ilium, Priam, and the people of Priam will be destroyed, and what grieves him most is not the future suffering of the Trojans, of Hecuba, of Priam, or of his brothers, but hers: led away in tears by some Achaean, weaving in Argos for another woman and carrying water from fountains not her own under harsh necessity, and someone will see her weeping and say, "that is the wife of Hector, the foremost of the horse-taming Trojans when they fought around Ilium." He would prefer that the heaped earth cover him dead before he hears her cry and knows that she is being dragged away. He stretches out his arms to his son, who shrinks back crying against the bosom of his nurse, frightened by the bronze and by the horsehair crest; the father and mother laugh, and Hector takes off his helmet and sets it on the ground, kisses his son, dandles him in his arms, and prays to Zeus and the other gods that the boy may be, like himself, renowned among the Trojans, strong, and king of Ilium, and that someday people will say, seeing him come back from war, that he is far better than his father, and that he will bring home bloody spoils and gladden his mother's heart. He hands the child to his wife, who receives him against her fragrant breast, laughing through her tears. Hector, moved with pity, strokes her with his hand and tells her not to grieve: no man will send him to Hades before his hour, and no one, neither bad nor good, has escaped fate once born. Let her go home to the loom and the distaff, and have the maids get to work: war will be the concern of men, of all of them, and above all of him. He puts his horsehair helmet back on; Andromache goes home looking back, shedding tears, and on arriving at Hector's house she makes the maids weep: they mourn Hector while he is still alive, certain he will not return from the war.
Paris does not linger in his lofty house: he puts on his gleaming armor and runs through the city, confident in his swift feet, like a stabled horse that breaks its tether and gallops across the plain toward the river where it is used to bathing, its head held high and its mane flying. He catches up with Hector just as Hector was finishing his farewell to his wife and asks whether he is keeping him waiting. Hector answers that no just man would scorn the work of battle, because Paris is brave, but that he yields on purpose and does not want to, and his heart aches to hear the shame the Trojans heap upon him, who endure great weariness because of him. Let them go: the rest will be settled later, if Zeus ever allows them to set a bowl of freedom in the hall for the gods, after expelling the Achaeans from Troy.
Analysis
Hector knows everything that Andromache fears: he knows that Troy will fall (447-449), he imagines her carried off and weeping in Argos, and he returns to combat because he has learned to be brave and to fight among the foremost. The book does not choose between duty and family; it shows both whole, and incompatible. Within the same book there is a counterpoint: Glaucus and Diomedes discover a bond of hospitality and can halt the duel and exchange armor, while Hector, with his wife and son before him, cannot stop. The difference does not lie in affection; it lies in what each one is defending.
Three women try to stop Hector with a domestic gesture: Hecuba offers him wine, Helen offers him a seat, and Andromache offers him the argument of total loss. Hector refuses all three and gives each a different reason: hands stained with blood, which do not allow him to pour a libation to Zeus; the spirit that already drives him to aid the Trojans, who miss him; the shame before the Trojan men and women. The three refusals share one destiny: Hector answers each with a word of care and returns to the war.
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