Homer: Andromache
Andromache was the young wife of Hector, Priam’s warrior son and defender of Troy. Over against the figure of Helen in the Iliad her gentle integrity stands in mute reproach. It is as though Homer, whose chivalry to Helen will not permit him to censure her, yet feels the claim of a larger chivalry—to womanhood itself. So he seems impelled to create this type of gracious purity, vindicating wifely honour and motherly tenderness; and proving at the same time that if his race had a high ideal of beauty, it had also a profound regard for domestic ties.
Helen and Andromache, therefore, stand side by side in the action of the poem. Their destinies are linked: their lives are passed within the same walls: they own the same relationship to king Priam and to Hecuba the queen; and they are united in suffering. But always they are as far apart in spirit as conscious guilt on the one hand and indignant rectitude on the other ever held two daughters of Eve. Andromache, like all the men and women of heroic poetry, was very human. And we have the feeling that she could not rise to Hector’s generosity toward the Spartan woman for whose sake Paris had brought the war on Ilios. Perhaps the reason was that she had suffered more deeply on Helen’s account. And if she had joined in those reproaches which Helen wailed about in her threnos over Hector’s body, it was from bitter cause.
Andromache had been happy, and a princess, in her girlhood days, before Paris brought a Greek bride from Sparta. Her father was Eëtion, king of Thebes, in ‘wooded Plakos’; and in those times she had a gentle mother and seven strong brothers. But the Greeks came, and in the long years when the Leaguer lay beneath Troy, their terrible hero Achilles had ravaged the countries around, and had taken the city of Thebes. He had slain Eëtion her father and the seven fine youths who were her brothers. Her mother, too, though ransomed from the Greeks for a great price, had died of grief; and Andromache, utterly forlorn, had found refuge in the halls of Priam. She found a mate there too; and in the love of Hector, her father and mother and brothers were all given back to her.
Homer makes the tender devotion of this noble pair stand out in gracious contrast to the stormy passion of Paris and Helen. Yet he does not tell us much about Andromache. He does not describe her—indeed, he very rarely draws a picture of his women—but we know that she is beautiful. In some subtle way there is left on our mind an impression of blended grace and dignity, of sweetness and tenderness and fidelity; but we are not directly told that she possesses these qualities. We do not even see her till, in the Sixth Book of the Iliad, the time has come for her to part from her husband.
The Greeks were at the very gates of Troy, and the last phase had come for the sacred city. Diomedes had driven their god Ares from the field, bellowing with the pain of a wound; and Hector, who saw the end was coming, hurried into the palace to rouse his followers and beg the queen to pray for the cause of Troy in the Temple of Athena. Then, before returning to the fight, he snatched the opportunity to see his wife and child once more. At first he could not find them. Andromache was not in the palace, nor in the Temple of Athena where the matrons of the city were propitiating the goddess. She had heard that the Trojans were hard pressed, and in fear for her husband she had gone down to the tower to watch the battle from the walls.
“Hector hastened from his house back by the same way down the well-builded streets. When he had passed through the great city and was come to the Skaian gates, whereby he was minded to issue upon the plain, there came his dear-won wife running to meet him.... So she met him now, and with her went the handmaid bearing in her bosom the tender boy, the little child, Hector’s loved son, like unto a beautiful star.... So now he smiled and gazed at his boy silently, and Andromache stood by his side weeping, and clasped her hand in his, and spake and called upon his name. ‘Dear my lord, this thy hardihood will undo thee, neither hast thou any pity for thine infant boy, nor for me forlorn that soon shall be thy widow; for soon will the Achaeans all set upon thee and slay thee. But it were better for me to go down to the grave if I lose thee; for never more will any comfort be mine, when once thou, even thou, hast met thy fate, but only sorrow’.”[[4]]
So she weeps to him, forgetting the heroic, as heroes often do in overwhelming human sorrow. Hector is human too; and as she pours out all the pleas that touch him most nearly—her love for him, his love for her, and their mutual love for their child—he cannot utter the reply of the soldier and defender of his people. Andromache thinks she sees an instant of wavering in his eyes; she catches at it wildly, and rushes on to tell of a place where he and his men may screen themselves from the enemy. But that word has lost her cause. Hector’s great refusal is brave and gentle: “Surely ... I have very sore shame ... if like a coward I shrink away from battle. Moreover mine own soul forbiddeth me.... Yea of a surety I know ... the day shall come for holy Ilios to be laid low.... Yet doth the anguish of the Trojans hereafter not so much trouble me, neither Hekabe’s own, neither king Priam’s, neither my brethren’s ... as doth thine anguish in the day when some mail-clad Achaian shall ... rob thee of the light of freedom.... But me in death may the heaped-up earth be covering, ere I hear thy crying and thy carrying into captivity.”[[4]]
Andromache can find no answer, and there is silence between them as Hector turns to caress his boy. But the child shrinks to his nurse in fear of the shining helmet and nodding crest; and the parents laugh through their tears.
“Then his dear father laughed aloud, and his lady mother; forthwith glorious Hector took the helmet from his head, and laid it, all gleaming, upon the earth; then kissed he his dear son and dandled him in his arms, and spake in prayer to Zeus and all the gods, ... ‘Vouchsafe ye that this my son may likewise prove even as I, pre-eminent amid the Trojans, and as valiant in might, and be a great king of Ilios. May men say of him, “Far greater is he than his father,” as he returneth from battle; ... and may his mother’s heart be glad’.”[[4]]