Book 22 Essays

Everything we learned about Hector in Books 3 and 6 is now brought to bear on the final moments of his noble but doomed life. At the same time, his story and Achilles’ merge, enriching our understanding of both figures. Their relationship continues even after Hector’s death, as Achilles’ treatment of his enemy’s corpse becomes the focal point for the poem’s somber resolution in Book 24.

Since leaving Troy at the end of Book 6, Hector has appeared principally in his persona as fierce warrior and leader of the Trojans. His inner doubts and suffering, which we glimpsed in the scenes with Andromache, have not surfaced again until now. Meanwhile, the main plot of the poem, fueled by Achilles’ wrath, withdrawal, and return, has moved forward through three days of intense fighting. At the end of Book 16 Sarpedon falls to Patroclus and Patroclus to Hector, the latter death finally bringing Achilles back to the battlefield. From Books 19–21, Homer teases us by holding out the prospect of the final showdown between Achilles and Hector, almost bringing them together in Book 20, then having Apollo lure Achilles away to the edge of the battlefield by the end of Book 21, allowing the Trojan warriors to retreat inside the city walls—all but Hector, who makes his last desperate stand as Book 22 opens.

Once inside the city walls the Trojans, sweating and winded, slake their thirst. They are, Homer tells us, like “fawns” (22.1). Meanwhile, the Achaeans draw near, their shields against their shoulders. Repetition of the verb κλίνω, “to lean,” points up the contrast between the two armies: the exhausted Trojans prop their shields against the battlements; the Greeks lean into their shields as they move against the city. We see here Homer’s narrative strategy for the entire book in miniature. He begins with the two armies, one aggressively chasing the other, then narrows the focus down to Hector and Achilles, one charging relentlessly across the plain, the other waiting outside the city gates, bound by his sense of duty.

Homer leaves us with the view of Hector, vulnerable and alone, and abruptly changes the scene to the edge of the battlefield, where Apollo reveals himself to Achilles. In the last scene of Book 21, the god drew Achilles away from the city, disguising himself as the Trojan warrior Agenor. Now the god issues a taunt: Why is Achilles, a mortal, chasing a god? Does he not care about the Trojans, tucked away in their city while he is left out on the margins of battle? Achilles cannot kill him. He is not fated, μόρσιμος, to die (22.7–13). Achilles’ reply is angry and indignant: Apollo has hindered him by luring him away from the city, denying him the chance to kill more Trojans and so robbing him of κῦδος, “glory,” the primary measurement of worth in a heroic society. Worse yet, the god will escape punishment from Achilles, who would “pay him back,” τισαίμην(22.20), if he had the power.

Mortals do not usually talk this way to gods, whose unlimited power and unpredictable nature make any encounter with them dangerous. Talking back to a god could well be fatal. We are some distance from Achilles’ considered response in Book 1 (202–18) when Athena intervenes and asks Achilles politely, on behalf of Hera and herself, not to kill Agamemnon:

I should respect your request, even though
I am very angry in my heart, for it would be better thus;
The gods listen to him who obeys them.

Iliad 1.217-19

Such detachment is no longer possible, scorched away by Achilles’ fury at the killing of Patroclus.

In this brief exchange between Apollo and Achilles, Homer sets up what is to come in a few strokes. By the end of Book 20, Achilles has become a kind of death demon, crushing bodies under the wheels of his chariot, which is splattered with gore up to its railings, his hands dripping bloody filth (20.490–503). We then learn from his encounter with the hapless Lycaon in Book 21 (99–113) that Patroclus’s death has sealed the fate of any Trojan who crosses his path. He will show no one mercy; all must die. Now his brazen words to Apollo show him moving further beyond the pale of human experience, reckless, arrogant, and apparently beyond caring if he lives or dies. This is the man Hector must soon fight.

Though he has been a volatile figure throughout the poem,  Achilles’ portrait darkens after he resolves to avenge himself on the Trojans, and especially Hector, for Patroclus’s death. His wrath, which had been smoldering quietly in his hut by the sea, flares up into a violent rage. Homer marks this change when Athena presents Achilles with armor made by Hephaestus to replace the set that Hector stripped from Patroclus’s corpse (19.12–18). The divine gifts exude an aura that frightens the other Myrmidons, who cannot bear to look at them. But Achilles is not afraid. When he looks at the armor, his eyes shine “like sunflare” (19.16), as if reflecting the menacing power of the gifts. Achilles is semi-divine, and the godlike part of him is stirred by the armor, an elemental force that will sweep all before it until it crashes down on Hector.

Achilles turns away and races across the plain toward Troy. Like Paris and Hector, he reminds Homer of a stallion. But the dominant feeling of those similes was of the horse’s beauty and physical stature. Not so here. It is all about speed:

Speaking thus, he headed for the city, with big thoughts
in his mind; flying like a racehorse with his chariot
who runs easily, plunging across the plain.
So did Achilles ply his legs and quick feet.

Iliad 22.21-24

It suited Homer’s purposes to draw our sympathy toward Achilles in Book 18 after the death of Patroclus, showing him vulnerable to the grief and self-reproach that motivate his bloody rampage. But that man is gone now, replaced by something uncanny, straddling the boundary between human and divine, reaching down toward the savagery of wild animals and up toward the divine fire his mother gave him. At this moment, Homer switches his gaze and ours back to the city, to Priam standing on the walls above his son. Now we see Achilles through his eyes, a terrifying specter, the sun flashing off his armor as he moves ever closer to Hector. Like the “dog of Orion” (29), the brightest star that shines in the murk of night and brings a season of fiery heat, Achilles comes on, an “evil sign” (30). In Priam’s view, his son’s enemy is now beyond the destructive force of wild animals or evil men, something cosmic.

Further Reading

Edwards, M. 1987. Homer: Poet of the Iliad, 290–291. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

De Jong, I. J. F. 2012. Homer: Iliad Book XXII, 7–11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Owen, E. T. 1946. The Story of the Iliad, 215–218. Toronto: Clark and Irwin.

Richardson, N. J. 1993. The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. VI, 105–106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, 140. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 1992. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic, 67. New York: Oxford University Press.

Whitman, C. 1958. Homer and The Heroic Tradition, 138–139. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Achilles has left them both bereft of family, killing or selling into slavery those they love. Priam begs him not to wait οἶος ἄνευθ᾽ ἄλλων, “alone, apart from the others” (39). Do not, in other words, value heroic excellence, which separates you from other mortals and eventually kills you, over the people who love you. He might well have used Andromache’s words, φθίσει σε τὸ σὸν μένος, “your own strength will destroy you” (6.407).

Priam ends his appeal by envisioning, as Andromache does, the grim aftermath of Hector’s death, his sons killed, daughters dragged off into slavery, the royal palace destroyed, grandchildren flung to the ground. Last, and most shocking, is his vision of his own death, killed by some enemy soldier, then torn apart by his own dogs, pets he used to feed dinner scraps now driven wild by the taste of his blood. Like a cinematic tracking shot, his dark vision pulls us past the threshold of the dining room, with its slavering dogs, the ever-tightening focus finally settling on the withered genitals of his own naked body.

The pathetic picture of Priam’s mutilated corpse draws power from various sources. The specter of dogs and birds feasting the dead bodies of warriors appears in the poem’s opening lines (1.4–5) and hovers constantly over the battle scenes. If a man’s corpse is left unburied, his psyche, “soul,” is doomed to wander forever, denied its final rest in Hades, consigned to anonymous oblivion (23.70–74). The treatment of a warrior’s dead body becomes a major theme in the poem beginning with the death of Sarpedon, continuing through the battle over the corpse of Patroclus, and building to a crescendo in Achilles’ abuse of Hector’s body. To this dismal motif Priam’s vision of his own body’s fate adds special, intimate horrors. His description of his own dogs eating his flesh, with its vision of the dog’s affection for their master swept away by a feeding frenzy, is more disturbing than an enemy savaging his victim. These are not wild dogs, but pampered pets, eating the hand that fed them.

Masculine heroes in ancient Mediterranean myth must separate themselves from this nurture to enter adulthood by reaching an accommodation with their father’s world. Hector’s life as we see it does not dramatize that struggle as, for instance, Achilles’ does. He is a fully-formed adult male when we meet him. His deafness to his mother’s pleas here is an extension of his gentle disengagement from her in Book 6. He has already entered his father’s world and struggles to carry its burdens.

The exchanges between Hector, Priam, and Hecabe are part of the overarching theme of parents and children that informs the entire Iliad, beginning with the priest Chryses’ struggle to ransom his daughter in Book 1, which sparks the conflict animating the poem’s central plot, and ending with Priam’s journey to retrieve Hector’s corpse for burial in Book 24. In between, we see a constant stream of parents grieving their lost children, from the otherwise obscure mothers and fathers of the battle scenes, waiting back home, to Zeus himself, weighing whether to bend the cosmic order to save Sarpedon (16.433–38), or Thetis, mournfully releasing Achilles to his death (24.100–19). Unlike the later stories in Athenian tragic drama, where intergenerational conflict is a source of energy for the plot, the relation between parents and children in the Iliad is consistently benign and affectionate.

While reaffirming Hector’s maturity, the scene with Priam and Hecabe also prepares us for his poignant monologue. Physical vulnerability, signified by their aged, naked bodies, makes their emotional vulnerability to the fear of losing everything and everybody they love yet more vivid. Achilles is coming not only for Hector but for them too, and all the Trojans who will soon be defenseless before his fury. Later, in the final moments before his death, Hector imagines himself naked “like a woman” before Achilles, hoping to somehow bargain with the implacable killer. For a fleeting instant, this fantasy seems to offer some escape from the unrelenting pressure always to be in the forefront of battle, never to bend, never to run.

Hector does not respond to his parents’ pleas, but waits for Achilles, who is πελώριον ἆσσον ἰόντα, “coming closer, gigantic” (92). Πελώριος is cognate with πέλωρ, the noun used of Polyphemus and Scylla in the Odyssey (9.428; 12.87). To Hector, Achilles looks not just huge, but unnatural. Homer continues to manipulate our perspective, beginning with his own omniscient view, then letting us look through Priam’s eyes, and now through Hector’s. The shifting focus allows the poet to characterize both Achilles and those who see him coming across the plain. To the poet he is extraordinarily bold, arrogant in the face of divine power; to Priam, something beyond all ordinary creatures, animal or human, a vengeful cosmic force; to Hector, a monster.

Further Reading

Redfield, J. 1975. Nature and Culture in the Iliad, 193–202. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, 150–152. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture, 7–8. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Whitman, C. 1958. Homer and The Heroic Tradition, 143–144. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

The usual elements of the scene are:

1. a warrior finds himself facing an overpowering force, either a group of soldiers or one superior fighter, prompting the exclamation, ὤ μοι ἐγὼν, “ah me”
2. a monologue in which the besieged man debates with himself the merits of flight and resistance and chooses one or the other, the decision marked by the verse ἀλλὰ τί ἤ μοι ταῦτα φίλος διελέξατο θυμός, “but why does my heart within debate these things?”
3. a simile characterizing the choice, and
4. the action that follows

There are three other examples of the pattern in the Iliad: Odysseus surrounded by Trojans (11.401–20); Menelaus defending the body of Patroclus (17.89–113); and Agenor debating whether to fight Achilles (21.550–80).

Though structured around a common set of elements, each of these passages tells us something about the besieged warrior. In the Iliad Odysseus is not primarily the clever trickster we encounter in the Odyssey. His persuasive speech-making is mentioned in Book 3 (189–224) and displayed in Book 10 (400–11), when he convinces the hapless Dolon to reveal information about the Trojans. Otherwise he appears as a no-nonsense soldier. When Agamemnon’s botched strategy sends the Greeks running toward their ships in Book 2 (169–210), it is Odysseus who picks up the scepter and herds them back into the assembly. Later, alone and surrounded by Trojans in Book 11, he has a brisk talk with himself:

Spear-famed Odysseus was left alone; none of the
Argives stood by him, since fear had seized them all.
Troubled, he spoke to his own great-hearted spirit:
“Ah me, what is happening to me? It will be a great evil
if I run in fear of this crowd of enemies, but worse still
if I am taken alone; the son of Kronos has routed the other Greeks.
But why does my heart within debate these things?
For I know that cowards hang back from fighting
and he who would distinguish himself in battle must
make a powerful stand, being killed or killing another.”

Iliad 11.401–10

This is the least elaborate version of the motif, befitting Odysseus’s straightforward character in the poem. He deliberates, decides, and acts. The shame that would attach to him for running finally outweighs his fear of being killed. The Trojans close in, prompting a simile comparing Odysseus to a wild boar cornered by hounds. Odysseus is wounded and withdraws from the field, but not before taking down one more Trojan (11.411–71).

In the scene where Menelaus guards the corpse of Patroclus (17.89–113) the familiar elements are there again. Like Odysseus, he weighs the cost, to himself and others, of running. Menelaus, however, reaches a different conclusion. There would be shame in running, he admits. But fighting a warrior (in this case, Hector) whom some god is backing would bring μέγα πῆμα, “great misery” (99). So none of the Greeks will blame him for abandoning the body to look for help. He begins to back away but keeps turning around toward Hector and his troops. The rare participle ἐντροπαλιζόμενος, “turning back again and again” (109), which we saw applied to Andromache in Book 6 (496), leads into the simile, this time of a bearded lion, slowly giving way before hunters. Menelaus eventually finds reinforcements and returns to guard the body. His sensible decision to avoid death by finding help fits with what we know of him. He is a good fighter, but not among the best; when he volunteers to fight a duel with Hector in Book 7, others dissuade him, and he gives way to Ajax.

Agenor is the least illustrious hero of the group. Homer calls him, ἀμύμονά τε κρατερόν τε, “blameless and strong” (21.546), a standard set of epithets for warriors in the poem. All the usual elements of the type scene appear. He acknowledges Achilles’ superior force, but toys with the idea that he might be able to run away from the city and hide in the bushes until nightfall. But no, Achilles might see him trying to escape and run him down. Better to make a stand in front of the walls. He is a mortal, after all; maybe a spear can wound him. His resolve to stay and fight reminds Homer of a leopard emerging from her lair to fight hunters. She is over-matched but refuses to budge. Agenor’s death will follow shortly, we feel, but Apollo has other plans for him, whisking him away in a cloud and taking his place, then running from the city to draw Achilles away.

Agenor is only important because he is a surrogate for Hector. We have been waiting for the final showdown between Achilles and Hector at least since Book 19. Agenor’s monologue comes shortly before Hector’s and plays its part in setting the stage for the final duel. Though he would have no chance against Achilles, he stays to fight, a decision that will be in our minds when Hector’s moment comes, if we are alert to the presence of the type scene.

In Hector’s version of the scene, the simile comes first. He waits, Homer tells us, like a poisonous snake coiled in his lair. The comparison might seem surprising, given that Hector has been cast as the one pursued by a menacing force. But defending his lair is exactly what Hector is doing. By putting this image here instead of later in the sequence, the poet keeps Hector’s role as the last defender of Troy vividly in our minds.

Though the monologue itself follows the familiar form of deliberation, decision, and action, it is anything but conventional. Drawing on the scenes from Troy in Book 6, sometimes explicitly, Homer completes an intimate portrait of Hector. As in the case of Odysseus, and to a lesser degree, Menelaus, avoiding shame is on his mind as he weighs up his options:

Troubled, he spoke to his own great-hearted spirit:
“Ah me, if I should enter the gates and walls,
Poulydamas would be the first to reproach me,
who urged me to lead the Trojans toward the city
on that dreadful night, when bright Achilles rose up.
But I would not be persuaded, though it would have been much better.
Now since I have destroyed my people with my rash folly,
I feel ashamed before the Trojan men and Trojan women with
trailing robes, that some lesser man would say of me:
‘Hector destroyed his people, trusting in his own strength.’
So they will say. And for me it would be much better
either to face Achilles, kill him and return,
or be killed by him gloriously before the city.”

Iliad 22.98–110

Unlike the other warriors, Hector is specific about who will heap shame on him. Poulydamas plays the role of “wise adviser” to Hector in the story, twice urging restraint (12.210–29; 18.249–83). Hector scornfully refuses his counsel each time, with bad results. Now his regret makes the issue especially personal. His actions do not simply reflect the standards of the heroic shame culture, but more importantly, in his mind at least, they signify the cost of his personal failure to heed his fellow warrior. At the same time, in a way characteristic of him, he assumes responsibility for harming the entire city and its people. As he does so, his words echo verbatim the reply he gave to Andromache when she urged him to regroup inside the walls: αἰδέομαι Τρῶας καὶ Τρῳάδας ἑλκεσιπέπλους (22.105 = 6.442). The echo lingers through the next verse, with one telling change. At 6.407, Andromache predicts that Hector’s own strength will destroy him. Now he expands the thought to include all his people as victims of his overreaching. As he comes closer to death, we are reminded of everything we learned about him when he returned to Troy, but now, with Achilles drawing ever closer, the stakes are much higher.

Still searching for some way to escape, Hector imagines himself bargaining with Achilles. He could promise to return Helen, along with all the riches Paris brought back from Sparta. But he knows his enemy; it will not work. Instead, his wistful dream becomes a nightmare. There will be no pity, no respect, as he sees himself kneeling naked without his armor, “like a woman,” before Achilles, who will kill him. Then, even as he renounces all hope of escape, one last fantasy drifts into his mind:

There is no way, from an oak or a rock,
to chat with him, the way a girl and a boy do,
the way a girl and a boy chat together.
Better to close with him and fight as soon as possible;
we will see to whom the Olympian god grants glory.

Iliad 22.126–30

The unusual verb ὀαρίζειν, which appears in the Iliad only here and at the end of Hector’s parting from Andromache (6.516), surfaces here in a telling way. As he foresees his humiliating death two images float before him: a naked woman, and children flirting. The former recalls his parents’ abject pleading, the latter his wife’s. The dilemma that has characterized Hector throughout the poem reappears for last time. His love for his family fuels his determination to protect them and all the Trojans, but his understanding of himself as a warrior and a man will not let him heed their voices.

Further Reading

De Jong, I.J.F. 2012. Homer: Iliad Book XXII, 80–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edwards, M. 1987. Homer: Poet of the Iliad, 71–77; 291–292. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Owen, E.T. 1946. The Story of the Iliad, 219–222. Toronto: Clark and Irwin.

Redfield, J. 1975. Nature and Culture in the Iliad, 113–119. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, 150–152. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Those were his thoughts as he waited, and Achilles drew near,
like the god of battle, helmeted and ready for war,
shaking the Pelian ash spear over his right shoulder,
menacing; and the bronze blazed around him
like a burning fire or the sun rising.

Iliad 22.131–35

The pathos that has been building around Hector since Book 6, around his heroism and its terrible price, come to a climax in this moment. He chooses to die nobly, as we expect.

But then he runs. To have this enormously sympathetic character lose his nerve at this moment seems a huge risk for the poet. Don’t we admire Hector precisely because he is willing to die to preserve the heroic principles that have cost him so much?

The artistic vision that produced this turnabout defies easy explanation, and the risk of oversimplifying is great. We might condemn Hector as a coward. After all, Odysseus stood his ground when surrounded by Trojans in Book 11, and even Agenor seemed ready to wait for Achilles (21.550–80). Menelaus did give way while trying to guard the corpse of Patroclus (17.89–113), but help was close by, and his decision seems both plausible and in character. Understanding Hector’s choice is much harder precisely because Homer’s portrait of him is so much richer and more intimate than that of any other warrior in the Iliad. We have seen into Hector’s heart, in his frustration with Paris, his struggle to honor his parents, and especially his wrenching encounter with Andromache and their son in Book 6. All these charged moments come to fruition in his monologue, as we hear his innermost thoughts and fantasies of escape. So, while we may condemn him for his failure to stand and face certain death, we may also find that running only makes him more accessible to us. We see behind the heroic gestures a fully-formed, complicated human being.

The contrast with Achilles is instructive. Achilles is the principal hero of the Iliad. His story forms the backbone of the poem’s plot. His decisions and actions are the vehicle for the artistic resolution of the poem that occurs in Book 24. But he is always apart from other heroes by virtue of his semi-divine heritage and the extreme nature of his response to its challenges. In the last third of the poem, we see him ranging further and further away from ordinary human experience, at once more divine and more bestial. There is something mysterious, even repellent about Achilles. Hector, on the other hand, becomes more accessibly human to us as the story progresses, and this contrast holds the key to understanding how the poet is using these two characters to tell his story. Achilles, as powerful and vivid as he is, plays a role that parallels protagonists in other versions of the common Mediterranean myth of the hero’s separation and return: Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Orpheus, Aeneas (see Introduction, “The Second Self Motif”). The shape of that narrative pattern allows exploration of important questions about the place of human experience in the larger cosmic order. Hector, on the other hand, must be Homer’s invention, the character whose presence draws us in and makes the story so emotionally involving.

Now the chase begins. Having Hector run allows Homer to stretch out the final moments before the duel, to hold the dramatic climax a little longer. At the same time, scale usually marks importance in the Iliad, so the poet expands the chase in various ways. Elsewhere, as in the case of Aeneas’s lengthy genealogy in Book 20, we may feel that we are being teased, but not here. Every element of the narrative from now until Hector’s death is charged with meaning, drawing on what we know of both heroes, who they are and what they’ve done. First, a simile: Achilles as a hawk, swift and deadly, preying on Hector, the trembling dove. Then the focus shifts, pulling back so we can see the two men racing under the walls, by the look-out point and the wild fig tree, surely the same one that Andromache urged Hector to make a stand beside in Book 6 (433). Again, as at the end of his monologue, when things look darkest for Hector the poet draws our thoughts back to those last bittersweet moments of peace by the Skaian Gates.

Following the wagon path the two arrive at two “sweet-running well springs” (147) fed by the river Skamandros. Homer pauses to let us see more of the springs. One spouts hot water and steam, the other runs cold, like hail, snow, or ice. Next to them are the stone basins where Trojan women used to wash clothes, “before when there was peace, before the sons of the Achaeans came” (155–56). In these fleeting images, we might recognize a familiar element in Homer’s battle narratives, the poignant biography of the loser, with vignettes from the life about to be ended. The difference here, apart from scale, is that the impending death will not be of one man only, but an entire city. The connection between Hector’s fate and Troy’s, already established by Book 6, will continue through the rest of the poem.

Homer’s narrative style can be leisurely, sometimes frustratingly so, as he pauses along the way to contemplate all kinds of details that might seem trivial. But a closer look often shows a thread of meaning connected to the poet’s larger purposes. So we note that the hot spring sends up steam, as if from a “blazing fire,” πυρὸς αἰθομένοιο (150), the same phrase used just fifteen verses earlier to describe the flash from Achilles’ armor, with one small change in the form of the case ending of the adjective to accommodate the meter (πυρὸς αἰθομένου, 135). Once the fire of Achilles is in our minds, the cold death coming for Hector rises from the other spring. Nothing is wasted.

Next come two more similes, of a foot race and a horse race, foreshadowing the extended description of athletics as denatured warfare that will take up much of Book 23. Here the similes serve to pull us back again from the idyllic setting by the springs to a position like Priam’s earlier, watching Achilles and Hector from afar. Then Homer zooms yet further away, to Olympus, where Zeus and the other gods look down at the desperate foot race. The “divine audience” is a recurring motif in the poem (see 4.1–72, 16.431–61, 20.288–320), inviting us to take a more detached view of the events below. This change in perspective has multiple effects here. Our sense of time changes, as the two figures shrink, and their progress looks slower, something like what happens when a film goes into slow motion. As the action slows, we can stand back from the furious immediacy of the moment and ponder its meaning. And as we assume a divine perspective, the drama of human life and death becomes less charged. In the world of the gods, nothing can change, and no harm is permanent. To a divine audience, there is in one sense no difference between athletic games and Hector’s race for his life.

But precisely because the gods are invulnerable to permanent change the poet can also use them to explore human relationships from a detached position. Here Zeus contemplates saving Hector, since he has always provided the gods with excellent sacrifices. Athena replies firmly: You can do it if you want, but if you do, none of the other gods will approve of you. The dynamics of this exchange appear in two other places in the Iliad, at 16.431–61, when Sarpedon faces his fated death at the hands of Patroclus and Zeus ponders whether to intervene and change fate and save his mortal son; and 20.288–308, when Poseidon considers saving Aeneas from what looks like certain death at  Achilles’ hands.

We seem to have examples of another Homeric type scene, “god ponders whether to rescue a favorite mortal,” like the besieged-warrior scenes we discussed earlier. The outcomes are different—Sarpedon is allowed to die, Aeneas is saved, and Hector will be left to his fated death—but the central dynamic is consistent: an all-powerful being contemplates changing fate to please himself. While we might look in these passages for some definitive answer to the question of the relationship between divine will and fate in the poem, in each case, the god is dissuaded by an argument with a distinctly human resonance. In the case of Sarpedon, as here, Hera admits that Zeus can change fate and save his son, but he will risk disapproval from the other gods. In Book 20, Hera says that she and Athena have been forbidden by Zeus from intervening in the battle, but Poseidon is free to act as he pleases. Instead of stepping downstage to clarify a large metaphysical question, Homer shows us the omnipotent gods entangled in the same messy interpersonal dilemmas that face humans.

There is a crucial difference, since, however annoyed the gods may be about the interference of other deities, finally nothing can change their perfected existence. They cannot grow old, get sick, or die. The stakes for mortals are much higher, and so the moral import of their decisions is much greater. To put it simply, the gods in their own world are necessarily trivial. But when they intervene in the mortal world, their actions can be devastating. So, when Homer creates a situation where a god is contemplating whether to cross the boundary between divine and mortal existence, he prompts us to think about the question that lies behind all Greek tragic literature: What does it mean to be human?

Further Reading

Edwards, M. 1987. Homer: Poet of the Iliad, 292–294. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Griffin, J. 1980. Homer on Life and Death, 112; 179–204. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Owen, E. T. 1946. The Story of the Iliad, 222–227. Toronto: Clark and Irwin.

Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, 180–186. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture, 2–14. Westport, CT: Praeger.

As he did in the earlier simile of Achilles as hawk and Hector as dove (139–42), the poet seems intent on portraying the contest as one-sided, with Hector being weaker and more vulnerable, confirmation that the end is approaching for him. Meanwhile, Achilles as relentless animal predator adds to the long catalog of dark personae he assumes in this part of the poem. If the death of Patroclus pulled our sympathy away from Hector and toward Achilles, the ensuing blood-soaked rampage and Hector’s monologue begin to reverse the process. Homer has been building toward Hector’s death scene since the beginning of Book 22, drawing us toward his flawed humanity and away from Achilles’ ever-expanding cosmic rage. Now the gods will orchestrate the final moments.

The deliberations of the gods have distanced us from the immediacy of the chase and Homer keeps us there, as we look down at Hector’s failed attempts to get back into the city or at least get some cover from Trojan archers on the walls, at Achilles warning off his own men from helping him, to make sure that he gets all the glory (kudos, 207). During this action Homer inserts the only simile about dreams in the entire poem:

As in a dream, when a man cannot catch another who flees;
he cannot escape nor can the other catch up;
So he [Achilles] could not run him down, nor he escape.

Iliad 22.199–201

The language here is both elliptical and somewhat repetitive, which caused a later commentator, Aristarchus, in one of the great critical lapses in the history of scholarship, to condemn the verses as “worthless” (εὐτελεῖς) Virgil, for one, disagreed, creating a brilliant variation at Aeneid 12.908–14. Coming where it does, during a desperate life-and-death chase, this simile has multiple and powerful effects. The slow-motion camera returns, perversely inviting us to admire the beauty of the runners. Such a dream is simultaneously about frustration—thus the repetitive language—and terror. And it is a common dream, one Homer knew his audience had probably experienced. Just as he moves us away from the scene visually, he taps into the deep recesses of our minds with a familiar nightmare.

Apollo has been helping Hector, giving him extra strength and speed. But now the matter moves to the highest cosmic level, as Zeus lifts his golden scales, with the fates of Hector and Achilles on either side. In three short clauses, it is all over:

                                    Hector’s day of death sank;
it moved toward Hades’ house; and Phoebus Apollo left him.

Iliad 22.212–13

An impressive image, but in fact it tells us nothing we did not already know. Zeus foretold Hector’s death as early as Book 15 (59–71). Major events are rarely confirmed only once in the Iliad. Rather, we are apt to see them from multiple perspectives as their implications unfold. Achilles’ own death is handled similarly. When Thetis goes to Achilles in the beginning of Book 24 to tell him to release the body of Hector, he agrees tersely (139–40). In its context, this gesture marks Achilles’ acceptance of his own mortality, a crucial event in the working out of the poem’s thematic resolution. But he first affirms that he will die one day soon in Book 18 (98), when Thetis comes to console him for Patroclus’s death, then repeats the admission in his grim speech to Lykaon in Book 21 (110–13). The first passage shows Achilles in his capacity as Thetis’s son, the second as brutal warrior, and the third in the depths of despair after Patroclus’s funeral. Each context adds a new shading to the admission and its effects on others. So here the cosmic scales reconfirm Hector’s fate, but the image also revisits and refines Zeus’s brief struggle (168–87) over whether to change fate and save Hector. Now the issue will not be decided based on Zeus’s relationships with other gods. It is out of his hands.

Athena wastes no time in joining the forces gathered against Hector, going to Achilles and glorying in the kudos they will both win by destroying the Trojan hero. We might ask why, when Hector is clearly doomed to die soon, with all the power of fate and divine will lined up against him, the poet has Athena pile on in this gleefully cruel way. The answer is that, having tested our allegiance to Hector by having him run from Achilles, Homer now wants to turn our sympathies back yet more firmly to him.

In these verses and those soon to come, Homer puts mortals in close contact with gods, always a potent moment in any tragic story. The motives of divinities who act in the world of death and change must always seem trivial to us, because the gods, however strongly they are gripped by the whim of the moment, have nothing important at stake. Athena’s exuberantly malicious treatment of Hector, whose selflessness and devotion have cost him so much, is hard to contemplate precisely because we know that she cannot care about anything for long. And every time that realization comes over us, we are precisely where any Greek tragic narrative wants us, pondering both the human pain and suffering that comes from confronting mortality and the supreme indifference of higher forces.

Further Reading

De Jong, I. J. F. 2012. Homer: Iliad Book XXII, 108–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nagler, M. 1974. Spontaneity and Tradition: The Oral Art of Homer, 182–183. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Redfield, J. 1975. Nature and Culture in the Iliad, 158–159. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Richardson, N. J. 1993. The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. VI, 105–106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, 94–95. Berkeley: University of California Press.

If we haven’t started to sympathize with Hector yet, this exchange should do the trick. Playing expertly on both his loyalty to family and his selfless sense of duty, Athena sets him up for betrayal. Inspired by her fake support he faces off against Achilles, no longer afraid as he was at first, ready to fight to the death. He offers to forego despoiling Achilles’ corpse if he wins and asks for the same consideration from his enemy. Even in his last moments his belief in the civilizing norms that sometimes inform heroic warfare persists. In his reply (260–72) Achilles himself assumes the persona of wild animal, first lion to Hector’s human, then wolf to Hector’s lamb, confirmation that this battle will be fought well outside the constraints that Hector vainly imagines might govern the encounter. Hector ducks Achilles’ first spear cast, but unbeknownst to him Athena promptly returns the weapon to Achilles. Still unaware of the transcendent forces arrayed against him Hector makes his last stand. He will not run this time. Achilles will have to kill him face-to-face.

It would be painful enough to witness the death of such an honorable figure without the divine machinery engaged here. As it is, what Homer shows us is a frightening world where honor and decency are not only ineffective, but irrelevant. Achilles embodies in this encounter the two poles of his departure from humanity, bestial savagery and divine transcendence. Both represent the triumph of pure force, unchecked by any moral or ethical concerns. This is the place where Achilles’ selfish pride and arrogance have taken the poem, a trip to a hell of his own making.

The katabasis or “downward journey to the underworld” is one of the most common realizations of the “separation and return” pattern that informs Achilles’ story and those of many other heroes from the ancient Mediterranean: Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Orpheus, Heracles, Aeneas. To look death in the face and return to tell about it is the ultimate proof of the hero’s extraordinary stature. On another level the katabasis can represent a journey into the dark places inside us to find certain truths—usually about ourselves—hidden from us in our conscious life. Gilgamesh travels across the Waters of Darkness to the Land of Dilmun, where he confronts and eventually accepts the fact of his own mortality; Aeneas goes to the Underworld where he meets his father, who tells him his role in the future of Rome. Homer’s version here presents the journey into darkness as an internalized drama. After the death of Patroclus, Achilles foreswears the tokens of ordinary participation in human life: food, bathing, sleep, and sex (19.205–14; 23.37–53; 24.4–5, 24.124–31). He travels away from humanity and into the darkness of his own heart. According to the logic of the katabasis paradigm as it appears elsewhere, Achilles should confront some deep truth about himself in this “underworld.” Usually, but not always, that encounter is with the fact of his own mortality in some form. What truth can Achilles be learning here? And how can he confront his mortality when he seems to be moving progressively further from his own humanity? Answering these questions will take us some distance toward understanding how this powerful scene fits into the poem’s overall meaning.

The deaths of Sarpedon, Patroclus, and Hector are thematically linked in various ways, leading to the climactic death scene we are about to witness (see Introduction, “Hector, Patroclus, and the Arms of Achilles”). Each death focuses our attention on the disposition of the fallen warrior’s corpse. Will it be despoiled by the enemy, or saved for a proper burial? At the same time we have noted that the passing of armor from Achilles to Patroclus to Hector raises questions of identity. If Patroclus is wearing Achilles’ armor does he inherit any of his friend’s fighting strength? When Hector strips the armor from Patroclus and puts it on does this act imply any connection between himself and Achilles beyond their implacable enmity? And what will it mean that Achilles will deliver the fatal blow through his own armor?

All these questions are relevant to the “second-self” motif, as it appears in the Iliad (see Introduction, “The Second-Self Motif”), the use of a second character who is complementary to the hero, embodying qualities that he has forsaken, or with which he has lost contact in some way. Enkidu, the wild man the gods created to be a companion to Gilgamesh, plays this role in The Epic of Gilgamesh, as do both Dido and Turnus in the Aeneid. There is always the potential for the appearance of a second self in the hero’s life to be therapeutic, to prompt the healing of the wound inside the hero that caused him to lose track of the qualities displaced onto the second self. But for healing to begin the second self must die, usually driving the hero into grief, and eventually prompting a new understanding of himself and his place in the world.

Both Patroclus and Hector play this role in the poem, one after the other. Patroclus is the repository for the compassion and ability to connect with others that Achilles’ anger and pride cause him to forsake. It is Patroclus who comes to Achilles in Book 16 to beg him to have pity on his fellow Greeks, who are losing the battle against the Trojans. By finally releasing Hector’s corpse to Priam in Book 24, so that the hero may be buried at Troy, Achilles makes contact again with the qualities that Patroclus had embodied. He seems to be restored, however briefly before his own death, to wholeness on the poem’s terms.

If Patroclus carries Achilles’ compassion, Hector becomes the repository of his mortal nature. Homer’s intimate portrait of the Trojan hero in Books 6 and 22, with all his strengths and all his frailty, becomes a foil for Achilles’ frightening departure from ordinary human experience. Though his words sometimes seem to reflect an awareness and acceptance of his own mortality, his actions do not. He is in his own eyes a lion, a wolf to Hector’s lamb, abandoning all pretense to civilized behavior, yearning, as we will see, to eat Hector’s flesh raw, something that both animals and the gods of the Iliad (see 4.34–36) can contemplate, but not humans. Achilles’ titanic rage has finally driven him and us into this darkness. The nadir of the journey comes next.

Further Reading

Beye, C.R. 1976. The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Epic Tradition, 2nd edition, 85–86. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Campbell, J. 1949. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

De Jong, I.J.F. 2012. Homer: Iliad Book XXII, 108–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, 27. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 1992. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic, 3–7, 27–28, 103–107. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hector, buoyed by Athena’s lies and Achilles’ miss, throws his weapon, hits his mark, and watches the spear bounce harmlessly off the divine armor. He calls to Deiphobus for help, and the trap closes:

But he was not nearby.
Hector knew in his heart and spoke:
“Ah, now surely the gods have called me to my death.”

Iliad 22.295–97

Though we have known for some time that the Trojan hero and his city are doomed, the directness of this statement rings ominously. At key turning points in the story, Homer often foregoes his usual expansive style in favor of concision, letting the meaning hit home unadorned. Some examples: Antilochus breaks the news of Patroclus’s death to Achilles in three terse clauses:

Patroclus lies dead; they are fighting over his naked
corpse; Hector of the shining helmet has his arms.

Iliad 18.20–21

Zeus’s golden scales render a verdict, sending Hector to his death:

Hector’s day of death sank;
it moved toward Hades’ house; and Phoebus Apollo left him.

Iliad 22.212–13

Achilles agrees to return Hector’s body, opening the way for Hector’s funeral:

So be it. Let him bring ransom and take the corpse,
if the Olympian himself earnestly urges it.

Iliad 24.139–40

Perhaps only now, with his own simple realization and admission, do we feel the full weight of the desolation that settles over Hector. He has led an exemplary life, devoted to others, and his reward is to die abandoned, utterly alone.

Although—or maybe because—he knows the issue has been decided, Hector makes one last charge, and the poet gives him a valedictory simile: he swoops like an eagle swoops at a tender lamb or a cowering hare. Since we know the imminent result, the simile only adds to the pathos in Hector’s bravado.

With this one final nod to the Trojan hero’s gallantry, Homer shifts the focus to Achilles, whose armor glitters with the uncanny menace we first saw when Athena delivered it from Olympus in Book 18: the beautiful figured shield, the gleaming four-horned helmet with golden tassels, the spear point that shines,

As a star moves among the other stars in the murk of night,
the evening star, the most beautiful one in the heavens…

Iliad 22.317–18

The simile echoes Priam’s earlier nightmare vision of Achilles as the Dog Star, racing across the plain toward Hector (22.26–31). The emphasis there was on the star’s baneful power, bleaching the strength from men’s limbs. Here it is the beauty of the star—which might seem slightly incongruous given Achilles’ savage behavior—that captures the poet’s attention. But despite their differences, the two similes share the quality of transcendence, which may finally be more important for the poet’s purposes. However revolting Achilles’ actions may be, Homer can never let the bestial aspect of his hero entirely overwhelm our sense of awe at his semi-divine nature. The character only works if part of him remains frightening but also mysterious, removed. The Greek word for this quality is δεινός, “awe-inspiring,” which covers a wide range of meaning, from dreadful, terrible, to mighty, even venerable. The twang of Apollo’s bow, the Gorgon’s head on Athena’s shield, the force of the fire snorted out by the Chimaera, all are δεινός. Even as he closes in for the kill, ready to savage his enemy’s corpse, Achilles must inspire not only revulsion but also a horrified fascination. The full force of the poem’s luminous resolution in the last book depends on it.

Achilles closes in for the kill, selecting the most efficient place for the deathblow as our vision narrows with his down to the target: the small triangle of soft tissue at the base of the throat. As he did in Priam’s horrific vision of his own genitals being eaten by dogs (22.66–71), the poet draws us slowly closer to the vulnerable flesh. In the taunting speech that follows, Achilles keeps Priam’s nightmare in our minds, vowing that Patroclus will get an honorable funeral, while Hector’s corpse will be torn apart by dogs and birds. It seems the wrath of Achilles will finally come to fruition:

Sing the wrath, goddess, of Achilles, son of Peleus,
destructive, which sent countless pains upon the Achaeans,
and threw forth many strong souls of heroes to Hades’ house,
but left their bodies as spoils for the dogs
and all the birds…

Iliad 1.1–5

Homer tells us that when Achilles’ spear rips through Hector’s throat it somehow misses the windpipe. He is pinned to the ground like a butterfly on the collector’s page, an inert body, whispering his last words. The gruesomely detailed description of Hector’s body has already begun to change him from valiant hero to lifeless corpse.

Further Reading

Goldhill, S. 1991. The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature, 96–166. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Griffin, J. 1980. Homer on Life and Death, 115–116. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Redfield, J. 1975. Nature and Culture in the Iliad, 31–35. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, 151–152. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 1992. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic, 70–73. New York: Oxford University Press.

Vulnerable and exposed, “like a woman” (22.124–25), he begs Achilles not to leave his corpse to be shredded by dogs and birds, but to accept ransom from Priam so he may be buried by the Trojans. Achilles’ reply is withering. Hector is reduced to a “dog” (345), whose flesh Achilles wishes he could bring himself to slice off and eat raw, joining the other scavengers he predicts will shred his enemy’s body while Patroclus receives a proper burial.

Even before he takes his last breath, Hector has begun to pass over the boundary between human life and death, as he attempts to negotiate on behalf of his soon-to-be-dead self. The image of Hector’s body as he slips slowly toward death is disturbing, even grotesque, but the poet has his reasons for keeping our attention focused on this transition. The entire Iliad is in one sense played out around the boundary between life and death, where we are invited to reflect on the fundamental question of what it means to be human, what it means to be a creature that knows it must die. Hector has become, over the course of the poem, Homer’s most conspicuous example of humanity, with all his virtues and all his flaws. As he passes over into the undiscovered country of death, his body will continue to claim our attention, traveling through the last phases of Achilles’ katabasis, finally coming to rest again in Troy.

Hector whispers his last words, a grim recognition of his opponent’s implacable fury and a warning that his killing might become a μήνιμα, a source of divine anger, on the day when Apollo and Paris kill him by the Skaian Gates. We are not meant to worry, I think, about the fact that Hector, like Achilles’ horse (19.416–17), has suddenly acquired the art of prophecy. Rather, we might hear echoes of Patroclus, seconds before his death:

Boast loudly now, Hector. Zeus, son of Kronos,
and Apollo have given you victory, for they struck me down
easily and stripped the arms from my shoulders.
If twenty men like you had faced me in battle,
they would have died right there, killed by my spear.
But evil destiny and the son of Leto have killed me,
and of men, Euphorbos. You were only my third slayer.
But I will say another thing, and you store it in your heart:
Surely you will not live much longer, but already
death and strong destiny crowd around you,
soon to die at the hands of Aeacus’s strong son, Achilles.

Iliad 16.844–54

The echoes of Patroclus’ death in Hector’s continue as Hector’s soul (psyche) flies off to Hades:

As he spoke, the end of death covered him over;
his soul flew out of his body and went to Hades’ house,
lamenting its fate, leaving behind manhood and strength.

Iliad 22.362–63 = 16.856–57

As if unmoved by the prophecy of his own death, Achilles certifies the end of his opponent bluntly: τέθναθι, “be dead” (365). But then Thetis’s prophecy in Book 18, that Achilles would die soon after Hector, seems to surface in his mind again, as his next words repeat what he said to her there:

I will accept my death whenever
Zeus and the other immortals wish to accomplish it.

Iliad 22.365–66 = 18.115–16

As Hector passes from warm, living intelligence to lifeless flesh, the process is described in language that recalls the deaths of Sarpedon and Patroclus, confirming the linkage that the passage of Achilles’ armor extends beyond the end of the poem to Achilles’ own death.

As the story progresses from one death to the next, the treatment of each warrior’s corpse becomes a yet more prominent issue. As Patroclus closes in on Sarpedon, Zeus ponders whether to intervene, rescuing his son from his fated end. Hera convinces him to be content with arranging for the gods of Sleep and Death to carry him back to Lycia for a proper burial (16.433–61 and 16.666–83). Patroclus’s death prompts a fight over his corpse that lasts for all of Book 17 and much of Book 18. Achilles then keeps the body of his friend with him, refusing to bury it until he kills Hector, so Thetis must intervene to preserve the corpse with nectar and ambrosia. Once he has his enemy’s corpse, Achilles not only refuses to bury it, but relentlessly drags it around the pyre of Patroclus for days, until Zeus intervenes to stop the abuse. When Achilles releases Hector’s body (which has been protected from harm by Apollo) to Priam, the way is clear for the poem to proceed to its thematic resolution with Hector’s funeral.

The theme of the unburied corpse has been present since the poem’s prologue, with its image of warriors’ dead bodies left as carrion on the battlefield, a specter that hovers over all the battles in the Iliad. In its broadest sense, the unburied corpse signifies an interruption in the process by which communities try to reclaim what they can of any human life through funeral rites, gathering the person into their collective memory. That process begins for Hector with the laments that conclude Book 22. But first, we must witness the beginning of Achilles’ vengeful abuse of Hector’s corpse.

The contrast between the great man, vividly present just seconds before, and the inert thing on the ground, is stark and unsettling. An uneasy atmosphere pervades the immediate aftermath of Hector’s death, as the presence of the body seems to prompt Achilles—and so us—to ruminate about life and death and the eerie places in between.

After the stabbing ends, Achilles wonders what the Trojans will do now, “since Hector no longer exists” (Ἕκτορος οὐκέτ᾽ ἐόντος, 384). In context this genitive absolute seems to raise some questions: If Hector is gone, what is that thing on the ground, and why is Achilles talking to it? Achilles is not the only warrior to talk to the corpse of his victim, nor is this the only time he does so (cf. 16.830–42 and 21.122–35). The speech might be aimed in part at the others standing around the body: a vaunt to affirm Achilles’ superior strength, to them and to himself. But in this passage, where our attention will be insistently focused on the connection between the living and the dead, we might well wonder if Achilles is not yet finished with Hector, that a part of him yearns for his enemy to remain present, in more than a lifeless body, to be the object of his hatred and abuse. He has been keeping Patroclus’ corpse with him, unburied, while he hunts down Hector. Now that he has the corpse of his enemy, he will soon bury his friend, as if one body could take the place of the other.

The motives for holding the two bodies seem markedly different. Achilles’ postpones burial for Patroclus out of love. Keeping the body with him delays the moment when he must acknowledge that his friend is gone. This is one reason we have funerals, so we can help each other let go of the person who has died and move on with life. Refusing burial to Hector, by contrast, seems an act of pure hatred toward all the Trojans (who would thus not be able to say goodbye to their hero) and especially toward Hector himself. We learn in Book 23, when Patroclus’s psyche comes to Achilles, that the souls of dead warriors cannot find rest until their bodies are buried (23.69–74). So, while the Trojans yearn to honor Hector, his soul will be condemned to eternal wandering outside the gates of Hades.

The second-self motif suggests yet another motive for keeping Hector’s body available for abuse. As we have said, Hector comes to embody for Achilles his own mortal nature, which he and Thetis both seek to deny. From this perspective, Achilles’ savage treatment of Hector’s corpse is on one level an act of self-loathing, reflecting his impatience with the limits that define human existence, the most important of those being mortality. And here the connection between his clinging to the two bodies becomes clear. It is no accident that Achilles’ acceptance of his own mortality (24.139–40) is the prelude to his releasing of Hector’s corpse to Priam. His love for Patroclus can only reach its fullest expression when he is able to accept who he really is, an acknowledgement signaled by his release of Hector’s body. His own tortured soul can only find rest when Hector’s does.

The existential nature of the questions raised by the abuse of Hector’s corpse by the Myrmidons (369–71) and then by Achilles himself continue to surface in the verses that follow. Hector’s unburied body leads Achilles to think of Patroclus, who lies “unwept, unburied” (386), which leads in turn to the assertion that he, Achilles, will not forget his companion as long as he is alive, that though the dead forget the dead in Hades, “even there” he will not forget Patroclus (390). Typically for him, Achilles assumes that he will not be confined by the limits of ordinary human life. But his claim prompts further questions: What does it mean to be dead? Is there consciousness in Hades?

After glorying in his victory and vowing to bury Patroclus with honor, Achilles turns back to the body on the ground:

He pierced the back of both feet behind the tendons,
between the ankle and the heel, and pulled ox-hide thongs through,
then tied them to the back of the chariot, and let the head drag;
climbing up, he lifted the famous armor inside,
and whipped the horses to go; and they flew forward willingly.
A cloud of dust rose as Hector’s head was dragged, and the dark hair
was spread out on the ground; his whole head, before so handsome,
lay in the dust; then Zeus gave him to his enemies
to disfigure in his own fatherland.

Iliad 22.396–404

The clinical detail, entirely characteristic of Homer’s style, is devastating here. Hector, “before so handsome,” is now just a piece of meat to be flayed in the dust. The brutally swift transition from warm blood to cold flesh, from courageous warrior to dead weight, again fixes our attention on the boundary that defines human life, the site for much of the poem’s meditation on the limits and costs of heroic aggression. We are a long way from the Achilles who spared Andromache’s father (6.414–20).

The death of Hector is the dramatic climax not only of Book 22, but of the entire Iliad. The rhythm of both, a dramatic climax some distance from the end, followed by a falling of tension while the implications of the climax are explored, is found in many works of archaic Greek literature. After Odysseus returns home from Troy, kills the suitors and reunites with Penelope, we then see the impact of his return on his family and household in the last books of the epic. In Sophocles’ Oedipus The King we witness Oedipus learning the terrible truth of his identity, and then what that knowledge does to his city and loved ones. Now that Hector is dead, we will see what his loss means to those who hated him and those who loved him.

Further Reading

Griffin, J. 1980. Homer on Life and Death, 84–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nagler, M. 1974. Spontaneity and Tradition: The Oral Art of Homer, 156–164. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Redfield, J. 1975. Nature and Culture in the Iliad, 160–182. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, 154. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 2006. “Achilles at Work.” North Dakota Quarterly. 73.3: 8–20.

By throwing off her veil, Hecabe gestures toward an inevitable consequence of Hector’s death. In Homeric poetry the veil is a symbol of modesty and/or chastity for women, and a prerequisite for any public appearance. Penelope always wears a veil in the presence of the suitors (e.g., Od. 1.334 and 18.210); when Nausicaa throws her veil aside at the seashore she makes herself vulnerable to the advances of the mysterious naked stranger (Od. 6.100–210); even Thetis must take up her veil when she leaves the cover of the sea and enters mortal society (Il. 24.93–94). The death of Hector will lead to the violation of Trojan women and, as Andromache’s response will soon affirm, to all of Troy. Homer’s fire simile rounds off this chain of misery by implicitly pointing to its agent, the character most consistently associated with fire in the poem, Achilles.

The remainder of Book 22 is given over to the pain and sorrow of those who loved Hector. Their actions reflect an understanding of the experience of grief and patterns of behavior found elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean world and still present today. Achilles’ response to the death of Patroclus is the most powerful example in the poem. When Antilochus brings him the news, Achilles throws himself on the ground (as Priam does here) and covers himself with ashes (18.22–27); Thetis rises from the sea and, finding him stretched out on the ground, holds his head in her hands, a gesture often seen in artistic images of those mourning someone already dead (18.70–721); he later vows to abstain from food, sleep, bathing, and sex until Patroclus is avenged (19.205–14, 24.128–31). All these acts reflect the early stages of grief as it is usually portrayed in the Iliad and elsewhere. At first, those left behind resist letting go; life goes on, but they do not want to go with it. Instead, they may act in ways that mimic the one they have lost, turning toward the dead and letting go of the living. Both Achilles and Priam begin their journey through grief by falling to the ground and covering themselves with dirt, a symbolic burial. Hecabe’s self-mutilation shares the same meaning. Achilles’ behavior in the aftermath of Patroclus’s death, the funereal tableau created by Thetis holding his head, and his abstention from the usual tokens of participation in human life, suggest that when Patroclus dies, Achilles undergoes a symbolic death, as if to follow his friend out of life. When Achilles refuses to eat, Athena compensates by infusing him with nectar and ambrosia, the food of the gods. Thetis uses the same substances to embalm the corpse of Patroclus, protecting it from corruption, another sign from the poet that when Patroclus dies, something in Achilles goes with him.

Eventually, those grieving must let go of the dead and return to the living. In early Greek poetry, those who hope to encourage this change offer a seat and a drink. If the person grieving accepts these tokens, he or she is ready to accept the loss of the dead person and return to full participation in human life. The return of Hector’s body to Priam begins when Thetis accepts consolation from Zeus and Athena for his coming death (24.96–140). Achilles and Priam console each other when the old man comes to beg Achilles to accept ransom in return for Hector’s body (24.476–642). When Achilles releases Hector’s body for burial, it is a sign that his grief is easing and he himself is ready to return to the normal rhythms of human life. In Book 24 he and Priam then share a meal, marking each man’s acceptance of loss. Hector’s funeral, which brings the Iliad to a close, extends the healing to other Trojans who loved him.

This portrayal of grief in the Iliad, though uniquely rich, is not peculiar to Homeric poetry. Vestiges can be found in the literature and culture of the ancient Mediterranean from 1800 to 600 BCE. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh puts on animal skins and roams the wilderness, mimicking his friend’s earlier life as a wild man who lived with animals. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, composed sometime in the 7^th century BCE, the goddess Demeter mirrors the abduction of her daughter Persephone from Olympus to Hades by leaving Olympus and going to live with humans in Eleusis. When the royal family she has joined as a nurse attempt to console her for the loss of her daughter, they offer a seat and a drink. Though she accepts, her grieving is apparently not at an end. Only when a deal is struck between Zeus and Hades, allowing Persephone to leave the Underworld and be with her mother each spring, does Demeter allow the crops to grow again, a sign that she has accepted consolation for the yearly loss of her daughter.

In their helplessness and pain, the laments of Priam and Hecabe echo the opening scene of Book 22 at the walls of Troy, when they beg Hector not to stay and fight Achilles. This ring form is a common structural device in early Greek narrative, giving a sense of closure to the entire book. At the same time, the end of Book 22 anticipates the poem’s final scenes in Book 24: Priam immediately begins trying to set out for the Greek camp to supplicate Achilles, while the laments of Hecabe and Andromache rehearse their last eulogies when Hector’s body reaches Troy. Finally, as we have seen, Hector’s monologue as he awaits Achilles looks back to his poignant exchange with Andromache in Book 6. Much of the Iliad’s power to move us comes from repeated forms, words, phrases, and scenes, as the poet builds meaning by accretion, enriching the familiar forms by placing them in new contexts, training our ears to hear an increasingly complex harmony that reaches its crescendo when Hector finally returns to Troy.

Further Reading

Alexiou, M. 1974. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nagler, M. 1974. Spontaneity and Tradition: The Oral Art of Homer, 44–63, 174–182. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, 150–151. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Whitman, C. 1958. Homer and The Heroic Tradition, 128–153. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

She called to her well-coifed maids in the house
to set up a tripod over the fire, so there would be
a warm bath for Hector, when he returned from battle.

Iliad 22.442–44

The poignant double meaning of Andromache’s preparations, which could describe preparations for the washing of a corpse, is one of many in the verses that follow. The poet uses language often found in battle scenes to describe the brutal impact of Hector’s death on his wife. This kind of metaphor surfaces in her characterization first in Book 6, when Homer uses the participle ἐντροπαλιζομένη, “turning around again and again,” otherwise reserved for retreating warriors or hunted animals, to describe Andromache as she reluctantly leaves Hector at the city gates (6.496). Many echoes of that wrenching exchange color the closing verses of Book 22.

The battle metaphors begin here with the adjective νηπίη (“childish, ignorant, without foresight,” 445), which is often used elsewhere of overconfident warriors about to suffer a setback (e.g. 2.873 and 4.406). Andromache, the good wife attending to her work, is about to learn that her whole world is doomed. When she hears the wailing, foreboding strikes:

τῆς δ᾽ ἐλελίχθη γυῖα, χαμαὶ δέ οἱ ἔκπεσε κερκίς

Her knees shook, and the shuttle fell to the ground.

Iliad 22.448

The verb used for “shook,” ἐλελίζω, also means “whirl around,” and is regularly used in the plural of troops turning around in formation (e.g., 5.497 and 11.214). The basic meaning is of violent, often twisting motion. The word is also used of a spear quivering in the ground (13.558) and Olympus shaking (1.530, 8.199). The second half of the line just quoted echoes a clause found several times in battle scenes, of something shaken from a man’s hand and falling:

τόξον δέ οἱ ἔκπεσε χειρός.

And the bow fell from his hand.

Iliad 8.329 = 15.465

The nouns νεκρός “corpse” (4.493) and δαλός, “torch” (15.421) also appear in the place of τόξον. Here the poet modifies what looks like a formulaic phrase, as κερκίς becomes the subject, replacing χειρός metrically, with the adverb χαμαί in the place of the original subject. The effect of these echoes is to implicitly compare Andromache being struck with fear to a warrior suffering a violent blow on the battlefield.

The battle metaphors continue in Andromache’s first words to her maids after she hears the mourners, when she says her heart leaps from her chest and “beats” (πάλλεται 452), in her mouth and her knees “go stiff” (πήγνυται, 453). Homer uses both verbs in battle scenes, the first of throwing a spear (e.g. 5.495, 6.104 ) or a stone (5.304, 12.449, 20.287), the second of a spear fixed in a shield or the earth (e.g. 5.40, 8.258, 22.276, 22.283). A few verses later, he extends the meaning of πάλλεται in an unusual phrase, παλλομένη κραδίην, “shaken in her heart” (461). Finally, when Andromache sees Achilles dragging Hector’s body behind his chariot, the full measure of horror falls on her, prompting one of Homer’s terse three-clause descriptions:

τὴν δὲ κατ᾽ ὀφθαλμῶν ἐρεβεννὴ νὺξ ἐκάλυψεν,
ἤριπε δ᾽ ἐξοπίσω, ἀπὸ δὲ ψυχὴν ἐκάπυσσε.

Black night covered over her eyes;
she fell backward, and breathed out her soul.

Iliad 22.466–67

The words of line 466 are used twice (with a change of gender in the pronoun) to describe a warrior’s death in battle (5.659, 13.580). The first half of line 467 echoes ἤριπε δ’ ἐξ ὀχέων, the phrase used elsewhere to describe a warrior falling out of his chariot (5.47, 5.294, 8.260).

Homer’s metaphor of Andromache as a fallen warrior is rich in its implications. Her response, as the poet describes it, is typical of grieving figures, mimicking Hector’s death in battle, drawing her closer to her lost husband. When he dies, something in her dies, too. But her intense identification with Hector in this scene is also part of Homer’s portrait of the extraordinary intimacy between the two that stretches back to their meeting in Book 6. There, Andromache tells Hector that he is her father, mother, brother, and husband (6.429–30), that she would rather be dead and buried than live without him, a sentiment he echoes soon after (6.410–11, 6.464–65). Their bond also suffuses Hector’s monologue in Book 22, in the phrases echoing their last meeting in Book 6 and the wistful fantasy of a boy and girl chatting. When she gives voice to her fears after hearing the wailing from the walls, a persistent theme surfaces once more:

How I wish that sound were far from my ears! But bitterly
I fear that bright Achilles has cut off my bold Hector
away from the city, and chases him across the plain,
and might put an end to that painful courage,
which held him always, since he would not stay in the crowd of men,
but would always run to the front, giving way to no one.

Iliad 22.454–59

The essence of a tragic hero in Greek literature is his/her defiance of the limits that usually constrain mortals, no matter the harm to themselves or, in most cases, to others who may love and depend on them. Homer has created in Hector a particularly intimate and therefore painful example: He always runs to the front of battle, in part because he can only understand himself as a man if he is always there (cf. 22.441–46). But unlike most other heroes, self-regard is not his primary motive. He fights in the forefront because he believes that being there is the best way to protect those he loves. Since the poet lets us see into his heart we also witness the pain caused by his separation from them.

Like Hecuba, Andromache throws off her veil when she sees Hector. But instead of καλύπτρα the poet uses the word κρήδεμνον, “head binder,” as he does elsewhere for the veils of Thetis, Penelope, and Nausicaa. By doing so he makes the wider implications of the gesture more explicit. The word in Homer and the Homeric Hymns for the battlements of a city is the plural of κρήδεμνον, the “head binder” for the city, (Il. 16.100; Od. 13.388; Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 2; Homeric Hymn to Demeter 151). As he does with the simile of the burning city that follows Hecuba’s gesture (405–11), the poet puts before us once more the full import of Hector’s death, but now distilled into one potent metaphor: Violation is coming not just for Andromache but for all of Troy.

In the portrait of Andromache’s grief, the poet shows the depth of her connection with Hector. Her grief hits her like the blows that killed him. They are intertwined, body and soul, an intimacy between husband and wife that is rare in a culture as patriarchal as the Iliad’s, perhaps rivaled only by the bond between Odysseus and Penelope, though in an entirely different kind of story.

Further Reading

De Jong, I. J. F. 2012. Homer: Iliad Book XXII, 173–174. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edwards, M. 1987. Homer: Poet of the Iliad, 298–300. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Griffin, J. 1980. Homer on Life and Death, 109–110. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nagler, M. 1974. Spontaneity and Tradition: The Oral Art of Homer, 10, 53. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Richardson, N.J. 1993. The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. VI, 152–154. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, 173–177. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Segal, C. 1971. “Andromache's Anagnorisis: Formulaic Artistry in Iliad 22.437–476.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 75: 33–57

Andromache expresses all these thoughts, but her words also constantly recall moments from her meeting with Hector in Book 6, where they opened their hearts to each other, sharing their hopes and fears. As she did there, Andromache portrays their marriage as one between kindred souls (477–78, see 6.429–30). Verbal and thematic echoes bounce back and forth, from her childhood to her son’s, from the deadly yet relatively honorable Achilles of the past to the present revenge-crazed enemy. Her son has lost his father and protector, as did she when she was a little child. Eetion as a young father was δύσμορος; she and Hector were δυσάμμοροι when they bore Astyanax. Achilles has killed two generations of Hector’s family and orphaned two generations of Andromache’s. Her bleak vision of the future, she a powerless widow, her son begging for food, confirms the fears she expressed in Book 6 (408–14). It is fitting that the centerpiece of her lament is the dismal portrait of Astyanax, helpless without his protector. He is the embodiment of his parents’ love, but also represents the future of Troy and its great civilization, what is sacrificed in the Iliad to the relentless masculine drive for preeminence, for a place at the forefront.

Book 22 completes Homer’s portrait of Hector. Because we are given glimpses of his innermost feelings, of shame, anger, and love, he embodies in a particularly vivid way the limits and contradictions of the heroic life as it appears in the Iliad. Achilles is the principal hero of the poem. His actions form the backbone of the plot. But while his semi-divine nature and outsized appetites can inspire awe and fascination, these qualities also often make him inaccessible to us. His journey back and forth across the boundaries that define human experience offers us the chance to think about big issues, about the fundamental shape of human life, and about the role of mortality in the formation of meaning. But the Iliad would not be the rich, emotionally engaging story that it is without the figure of Hector, who models for us how a mature, courageous, and fully human person navigates the perils of a mortal existence.

Likewise, we would not understand Hector if we had not witnessed his encounters with those who love and depend on him, Paris and Helen, Priam and Hecuba, and most of all, Andromache. Though Book 22 presents a carefully structured, aesthetically unified narrative, the emotional arc of the story it tells begins in Book 6, especially in the last meeting of Hector and Andromache. Those poignant scenes resurface again and again in Hector’s last hours, adding to their tragic power. Finally, though he dies in Book 22, Hector’s story does not end there. His body remains beside Achilles through the last torturous stages of the latter’s return to a fully human existence in Book 24, and then travels with Priam back to Troy and the poem’s hauntingly serene conclusion, an avatar of human experience in all its complexities.

Further Reading

Edwards, M. 1987. Homer: Poet of the Iliad, 317–323. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Muich, R. 2010–2011. “Focalization and Embedded Speech in Andromache's Iliadic Laments.” Illinois Classical Studies 35–36: 1–24.

Tsagalis, C. 2004. Epic Grief: Personal Laments in Homer’s Iliad, 129–132. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Van Nortwick, T. 1992. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic, 75–88. New York: Oxford University Press.

———2008. Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture, 62–67. Westport, CT: Praeger.