Hector

Hector, eldest son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, commands the Trojan army and is honored on both sides of the war as the city's greatest fighter and its last real defense. When Achilles withdraws from the fighting after his quarrel with Agamemnon, Hector drives the Greeks back toward their own ships and kills Achilles's companion Patroclus, who was wearing Achilles's own armor - though Patroclus's own dying words insist that the god Apollo and the spearman Euphorbus struck him down first, and Hector only delivered the final blow. Hector strips the armor from the body and boasts over him that even Achilles could not save him. That death draws Achilles back into the war with rage aimed squarely at Hector.

Earlier in the war, Hector fights a different Greek champion to a draw: a full day's single combat against Ajax, broken off at nightfall by heralds as an even match. Rather than parting as enemies, the two exchange gifts of respect, Hector's sword for Ajax's war-belt - the same sword Ajax later uses to kill himself, in a detail Homer's Iliad itself never mentions.

Tricked by Athena, disguised as his brother Deiphobus, into standing his ground rather than retreating inside the walls, Hector finally faces Achilles alone; Achilles drives his spear through the one gap in Hector's armor, at the throat, and kills him, then ties the body to his chariot and drags it back to the Greek camp. King Priam eventually comes to Achilles's tent in person to beg for his son's corpse, and the Iliad ends with the Trojans burning Hector's body and burying his bones beneath a stone mound.

Homer's Iliad ends with Hector's funeral and never narrates the fall of Troy itself. The fate of his infant son Astyanax, thrown from the city walls after its capture so that he could never grow up to avenge his father, is preserved only in later summaries such as Apollodorus's Epitome, composed centuries after Homer, not in the Iliad itself.