Andromache

Homer's Iliad makes Andromache the daughter of Eetion, who ruled the Cilicians at Thebe beneath wooded Placus. In Book 6, Hector comes home from the fighting and cannot find her. She has run to the wall with a nurse carrying their baby son. Hector called the boy Scamandrius, Homer says, but the Trojans called him Astyanax, because only Hector guarded Ilios.

She meets Hector at the Scaean gate and begs him not to go back out. Achilles, she says, sacked Thebe and killed her father. He did not strip Eetion's armour but burned him in it and raised a mound over him. Achilles also killed her seven brothers in one day among their cattle. He took her mother captive and freed her for a ransom, and Artemis later struck her down. So Hector is now her father, mother, brother and husband.

Hector answers that he would be ashamed to hang back from the battle. He foresees Troy's fall and says her grief troubles him more than any other. He pictures her led away to Argos, weaving at another woman's bidding and carrying water. Then he reaches for the baby, who shrinks back from his helmet's horsehair crest. Both parents laugh. Hector sets the helmet down, kisses his son and prays that the boy will one day be greater than his father. Andromache goes home, and her maids mourn Hector while he still lives.

In Book 8, Hector urges on his horses by reminding them that Andromache fed them wheat and wine before she served him. In Book 22, she is weaving a purple web and has ordered a hot bath for his return. She hears the cries from the wall, runs out, and sees Achilles's horses dragging Hector's body toward the ships. She faints and throws off her headdress, including the veil Aphrodite gave her on her wedding day. Her lament pictures Astyanax as an orphan, pushed away from other men's feasts.

When Priam brings Hector's body home in Book 24, Andromache leads the women's laments, holding her husband's head. She foresees the city's fall and her own voyage in the Greek ships. Her son, she says, will either follow her into slavery or be hurled from the wall by some Achaean. That man, she guesses, will be angry because Hector killed his brother, father or son.

The Iliad ends before Troy falls, so Andromache's captivity comes from later works. Apollodorus's Epitome says the Greeks threw Astyanax from the battlements and gave Andromache to Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, as a special award. In Euripides's Trojan Women, the herald Talthybius tells Hecuba the same allotment. Andromache herself says her name as a model wife reached the Greek army and ruined her. Achilles's son wanted her, and she must now serve in the house of the men who killed her husband.

Talthybius then brings worse news. Odysseus has told the assembled Greeks that so brave a father's son must not be raised, and the boy is to be thrown from Troy's battlements. Later in the play, the herald reports that Neoptolemus has sailed in haste after hearing that Acastus banished his grandfather Peleus. Andromache sailed with him. She begged leave to bury her son in Hector's shield, and left the body to Hecuba to prepare.

Euripides's Andromache is set in Thessaly, beside a shrine of Thetis. Andromache has borne a son to Neoptolemus, who has since married Hermione of Sparta. Hermione accuses her of secret spells that make her barren, and Andromache swears she submitted to her master against her will. She answers that for Hector's sake she even nursed his children by other women. Hermione's father Menelaus seizes the boy and threatens to kill him unless Andromache leaves the altar. She gives herself up to save him. Old Peleus arrives in time and stops Menelaus.

At the play's end, Thetis reports that Neoptolemus died at Delphi at the hand of Orestes. She orders Andromache to live in the Molossian land, lawfully married to Helenus, Hector's brother. Her boy, Thetis says, is the last of the line of Aeacus, and a succession of Molossian kings will come from him.

Virgil's Aeneid shows her in that new life. In Book 3, Aeneas learns that Helenus rules Greek cities and has married Pyrrhus's queen. He finds Andromache outside the city, pouring offerings at an empty tomb she built for Hector beside a copy of the river Simois. She tells him she bore Pyrrhus a son as his slave. When Pyrrhus sought Hermione, he handed Andromache to Helenus, slave to slave. Orestes later killed Pyrrhus at his own hearth, and part of his kingdom passed to Helenus.

Pausanias gives her later family in most detail. He says Pyrrhus, another name for Neoptolemus, settled in Epirus because of Helenus's oracles and had three sons by Andromache: Molossus, Pielus and Pergamus. After Pyrrhus was murdered at Delphi, Helenus married her and had a son, Cestrinus. Pergamus later crossed into Asia, killed the ruler of Teuthrania, and gave his name to the city of Pergamus. Andromache went with him, and Pausanias says she still had a shrine there.