Andromache

Who She Is

Andromache is the wife of Hector, daughter of Eetion, who ruled in Thebe, and mother of the boy Astyanax, whom the Trojans so call because only Hector defended the city. She appears little, but in three moments that the poem chooses with care: the farewell at the Scaean Gates, the house that prepares the bath of a husband who will not return, and the first lament over his body. Achilles killed her father and her seven brothers, and her mother died after being ransomed, and for that reason she speaks of Hector as one who holds everything in one person. She does not ask him to give up the war. She asks him to defend her from a less exposed place, and shows in what she says that she knows what the end of the city brings to a woman and a child.

Trajectory

In Book VI, Andromache runs to the tower of Ilion, certain that the Trojans are in trouble, and finds Hector at the Scaean Gates. The nurse brings the boy. Andromache takes her husband's hand and accuses him that his own fury will destroy him, without pity for their son or for her, who will soon be a widow. She tells him that Achilles killed her father and gave him a pyre and a tomb, killed her seven brothers in a single day, and that her mother, ransomed for an immense price, died in her father's house.

She concludes that Hector is for her father, mother, brother, and young husband all in one, and proposes that he stay in the tower and place the army by the fig tree, where the wall is lower and the best Achaeans have already tried three times.

Hector answers that he is ashamed to draw back and that he knows the city will fall. She laughs through her tears on receiving the boy, who had been frightened by the helmet, and goes home, looking back, shedding tears. At home, she makes the maids weep for Hector while he is still alive, certain that he will not return from the war.

In Book VIII, Hector, pursuing Nestor and Diomedes, speaks to the horses about the care that Andromache set before them before setting it before him, the wheat sweet as honey, and says she takes more care of them than of him, who calls himself her husband.

In Book XVII, Zeus, seeing Hector put on Achilles' armor, says that he will give him great strength because he will not return from the fight, and that Andromache will not receive from him the glorious armor of the son of Peleus.

In Book XXII, she still does not know. In the back of the house she weaves a folded purple cloak, embroidering flowers, and orders the maids to set the great tripod on the fire so that Hector will have hot water when he returns. The narrator calls her a fool, without rebuking her: the water was set for a bath that Hector will no longer have. She hears the cries from the tower, the shuttle falls from her hand, and she leaves the palace like a madwoman. From the wall she sees her husband dragged before the city, falls backward, and flings away the headdress and veil that Aphrodite gave her on the day Hector took her from the house of Eetion.

When she comes to herself, she laments among the Trojan women that she and Hector were born under the same fate, he in Troy and she in Thebe, and that now he goes down to Hades and leaves her a widow with a son still a child. She imagines the harm from the side of the table: the boy whose father is dead goes, with a tearful face, to pull at one man's cloak and another's cape; one of them, out of pity, holds out his cup for a moment, wets his lips but not his palate, and a boy with living parents drives him from the table with blows. He returns weeping to his widowed mother.

She ends by turning to the fine robes that the women wove and that are kept in the house: she will burn them all, of no use to the dead man, who will not lie in them, but so that there may be glory for him before the Trojan men and women.

In Book XXIV, when the body reaches Troy, Andromache begins the lament, with Hector's head between her hands. She says that he died young and left her a widow in the palace, with the boy still a child, and she foresees the fall of the city, because her husband was the one who guarded it: the women will be taken away in the ships, and the boy will either serve a harsh master or be thrown from a tower by an Achaean whose brother, father, or son Hector killed. The greatest grief, she says, is hers, because Hector, dying, did not stretch out his hand to her nor leave her a word to remember by night and by day.

Themes Embodied

Andromache embodies Loss and mourning: she loses her whole family to Achilles, in Thebe, and she loses her husband before Troy. She embodies War from the inside, the side of the women and children who depend on those who fight, and Death as what the poem makes disappear from the house, from the bath that cools to the clothes she burns. Her mourning is at once farewell and calculation, because what she loses is the man and the defense of the city.

Andromache's argument in Book VI mixes affection and war calculation: she wants Hector alive and defending, not giving up. When Hector answers that he knows the city will fall and that this hurts him more for her than for the rest, the poem does not choose between his duty and her request: Hector does not respond to the plan of the fig tree, and Andromache goes home. In Book XXII, the same house receives the news through what she did not notice in time, the hot bath and the embroidered cloak, and she burns the clothes to give Hector, in fire and cloth, what Achilles denies him. In Book XXIV, the grief she calls greatest is that of the word he did not leave her. Two readings coexist for her mourning: that of a woman who looks at the future like someone who has already seen the end of a city, and that of a woman who measures what she loses by what was never said.

Relationships

• Hector: the husband she asks to stay, whom she accuses of being a victim of his own fury, and whom she mourns in Book XXIV.
• Achilles: the warrior who took her father, brothers, and mother, and who drags her husband.
• Priam: the father-in-law who brings back the body and whom she joins, with Hecuba, near the gates, in Book XXIV.
• Helen: the sister-in-law who mourns Hector after her and Hecuba, in Book XXIV.
• Zeus: the god who, in Book XVII, says she will not receive Hector's armor.
• Astyanax: the son who is frightened by the helmet and whom she imagines driven from the table.
• Eetion: the father, king of Thebe, killed by Achilles, who gave him pyre and tomb.