Andromache

Not to be confused with Euripides’ tragedy Andromache.

Andromache was the wife of Hector, the Trojan prince, and the mother of his son Astyanax. In the Iliad she is the voice of what the war costs Troy’s families: she meets Hector on the city wall before his last battles and mourns him when he is dead. After Troy fell, she became the captive of Achilles’ son Neoptolemus.

Family and Marriage

Andromache was the daughter of Eetion, king of the Cilicians, whose city Thebe lay below wooded Mount Placus in the Troad (Iliad 6.395–397). She was not taken to Troy as a prize: she was already Hector’s wife when the Iliad begins, and the poet recalls the day when Hector led her as his bride from the house of Eetion “after he had brought bride-gifts past counting” (Iliad 22.470–472). In the sixth book she tells Hector that Achilles killed her father and sacked Thebe, killed her seven brothers, and took her mother captive; the mother was ransomed but was later struck down by Artemis (Iliad 6.414–428). She adds that Hector is now “father and queenly mother” to her, and brother and husband as well.

Hector and Andromache had one son. Hector called him Scamandrius, after the river of Troy, but the Trojans called him Astyanax, “lord of the city,” because Hector alone guarded the city (Iliad 6.402–403).

The Meeting on the Wall

In Iliad 6, Hector goes home to find his wife and learns that she has hurried to the wall with the child and a nurse, fearing the Trojans are losing. They meet at the Scaean Gate. Andromache begs him not to leave the boy an orphan and her a widow. Hector answers that he cannot hold back from the fighting, and that he knows Troy will fall and she will be taken into slavery. When he reaches for Astyanax, the child shrinks from the horsehair crest on his helmet; Hector laughs, takes off the helmet, kisses his son and prays to Zeus that the boy may grow up better than his father. He tells her that no man will send him to Hades before his fate. Andromache goes home weeping, and the women of the house mourn Hector while he is still alive (Iliad 6.390–502).

Hector’s Death

When Hector is killed by Achilles, Andromache is at home. She hears the wailing from the wall, runs out, sees her husband dragged behind the chariot, and faints, casting off the headdress and the veil that Aphrodite had given her on her wedding day (Iliad 22.437–515). When his body is brought back to Troy in book 24, she leads the lament. She says that Hector has died young and left her a widow, and that their son will not grow up: either the city will fall first, or some Achaean whose brother, father or son Hector killed will hurl the child from the wall (Iliad 24.723–745).

After the Fall of Troy

In Euripides’ Trojan Women the herald Talthybius tells Andromache that she has been allotted to Neoptolemus, and that the Greeks, persuaded by Odysseus, have decided to kill Astyanax by throwing him from the walls (lines 709–725); the child’s body is later brought back on Hector’s shield for Hecuba to bury (1118–1250). Apollodorus likewise says that after the sack the Greeks threw Astyanax from the battlements (Epitome 5.23). The lost epics named the killer differently: in the Little Iliad Neoptolemus himself tore the child from his nurse’s breast and flung him from a tower by the foot before taking Andromache as his prize (fr. 14, quoted by the scholiast on Lycophron 1268), while in Proclus’ summary of the Sack of Ilium it is Odysseus who kills him. Quintus of Smyrna has the Greeks hurl the baby from a tower out of hatred for Hector and drag Andromache away among the captives, longing to die (Fall of Troy 13.251–290).

In the division of the spoils Andromache fell to Neoptolemus as a special award, as Cassandra did to Agamemnon and Hecuba to Odysseus (Epitome 5.23). Neoptolemus travelled overland with Helenus to the country of the Molossians, in Epirus, where he became king and had a son, Molossus, by Andromache (Epitome 6.12–13). Pausanias gives her three sons by Neoptolemus: Molossus, Pielus and Pergamus, the youngest (1.11.1).

In Euripides’ Andromache, set in Phthia, Neoptolemus’ wife Hermione, helped by her father Menelaus, tries to kill Andromache and her young son by Neoptolemus while he is away at Delphi; old Peleus arrives in time to save them. Neoptolemus is killed at Delphi through the plotting of Orestes, and the goddess Thetis, appearing at the end of the play, decrees that Andromache shall go to the land of the Molossians and marry the Trojan prophet Helenus, Hector’s brother, and that her son will found a line of kings there (lines 1243–1252). Virgil, too, has Aeneas find Andromache and Helenus ruling at Buthrotum in Epirus, where she pours offerings at an empty tomb she has built for Hector and tells how she was passed on to Helenus when Neoptolemus pursued Hermione (Aeneid 3.294–355).

Pausanias adds that Andromache bore Helenus a son, Cestrinus, and that in old age she went with Pergamus to Asia, where he won the kingdom of Teuthrania and named its city Pergamum after himself; a shrine of Andromache still stood there in Pausanias’ day (1.11.1–2). The marriage to Helenus is not in Apollodorus, who instead gives Helenus the hand of Deidamia, Neoptolemus’ mother (Epitome 6.13).

See Also: Hector, Trojan War, Achilles, Neoptolemus, Helenus, Hermione, Menelaus, Orestes