Iliad, Book 6 — Hector and Andromache at the Scaean Gate

Reading Troy — chapter 6 of 74 · Iliad, Book 6

Iliad, Book 6 — Hector and Andromache at the Scaean Gate (Day 23 of the Iliad continues, afternoon; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; the plain before Troy, then inside the city)

With the gods withdrawn from the field (Ares wounded, Aphrodite gone), the battle becomes pure mortal slaughter. Homer prints another catalogue of small obituaries — Acamas the Thracian, Axylus the rich host of Arisbe who kept open house for all comers, Dresus, Opheltius, Aesepus and Pedasus born of the nymph Abarbarea — and then settles into one of the cycle's strangest interludes: the meeting of Diomedes and Glaucus.

Glaucus the Lycian and Diomedes the Argive square up across the field. Diomedes asks who he is, for I will not fight with a god. Glaucus answers with a long genealogy — as is the generation of leaves, so is that of men — tracing himself back to Bellerophon, the hero who killed the Chimaera and rode Pegasus. As soon as Diomedes hears the name Bellerophon he plants his spear in the earth: their grandfathers had been guest-friends, and Oeneus entertained Bellerophon twenty days with a purple belt and a golden cup. The hereditary tie of xenia outweighs the day's killing. The two exchange armour as a token — and Glaucus, to whom Zeus took away his wits, gives gold armour worth a hundred oxen for bronze worth nine. Homer notes the bad bargain with deadpan irony and lets the men part. It is the Iliad's clearest single demonstration that the war is being fought across a network of older friendships, and that the network sometimes wins.

Meanwhile Hector enters the city. Helenus the seer-brother has told him to organise the women's intercession at Athena's temple. Hector goes up through the Scaean Gate; the Trojan wives press around him asking after their husbands, and he answers none — go and pray to the gods. He reaches his mother Hecuba's chamber. She offers him wine; he refuses lest he lose his strength, and tells her instead to take the richest robe in the treasury, the work of Sidonian women that Paris brought over from Sidon when he sailed with Helen, and lay it on Athena's knees, vowing twelve heifers if the goddess will pity Troy. The women go in procession; the priestess Theano takes the robe and lays it on the seated statue's knees — but Pallas Athena nodded refusal.

Hector then goes to find Paris. He finds him in his upstairs chamber polishing his armour with Helen sitting near him at her loom directing her women's work. Hector lashes him — the people perish around the city for your sake, and you sit here sulking. Paris, surprisingly mild, agrees to come; he was just shamed enough to come out, he says, and victory shifts from man to man. Helen turns to Hector with the most piercing self-condemnation in the poem — would that I had been the wife of a better man who could feel the bitter words of others; this one has no firmness in his heart, and never will. She offers Hector a seat, for upon you most of all has the labour fallen because of me, shameless creature that I am. He refuses; he must see his wife and son.

Hector goes home. Andromache is not there; the maid says she has run to the wall like a woman gone mad on hearing the Trojans were giving ground. He follows to the Scaean Gate. There she finds him. The scene is the Iliad's tenderest and most-quoted: Andromache holds the infant Astyanax — whom the people called Astyanax because Hector alone protected Ilios — at her breast. She begs Hector to fight inside the walls and not on the plain; her father Eëtion is dead, killed by Achilles; her seven brothers all killed by Achilles in one day at Thebe-under-Plakos; her mother taken and ransomed home only to die of grief. Hector, you are father and mother and brother to me, and tender husband. Hector answers that he knows he must die — the day will come when sacred Ilios shall fall, and Priam, and the people of Priam of the good ashen spear — but that he cannot hide from the war he has been raised to fight; let her go inside and tend her loom and her servants. He reaches for the baby; Astyanax shrieks at the bronze helmet's nodding plume. Hector laughs, takes the helmet off, sets it on the ground gleaming, kisses the boy and tosses him in his arms and prays: Zeus, grant that this child may be as I am, foremost among the Trojans, and that men may say of him one day, he is better far than his father. He gives the boy back to Andromache; she takes him to her breast, smiling through her tears. Hector tells her not to grieve — no man, brave or coward, escapes his fate. He puts the helmet back on. Paris catches him at the gate, freshly armed, bright as a stallion when he has fed at the manger and breaks free, head high, mane streaming, to gallop down to the river. The two brothers go out together.

Analysis

A book that goes inside the city

After five books on the plain, Book 6 is the Iliad's first sustained look inside Troy. The poem withdraws from killing into rooms — Hecuba's treasury, Paris's bedroom, Hector's empty house — and ends at the Scaean Gate, the threshold between the world of women and the world of war. Homer's structural decision is breathtaking: at exactly the point where the Trojans are about to break under Diomedes's aristeia, he stops the battle and shows us what is being fought for. The reader who has never seen a Trojan home now sees three of them in succession. The city is no longer a fortified concept; it is a treasury of Sidonian robes, an upstairs room with a polished suit of armour, an empty house where the wife has run mad to the wall. The Iliad's case against the war is being built here, not as argument but as inventory.

The Glaucus-Diomedes scene as an ethical experiment

Homer inserts the Glaucus-Diomedes meeting at exactly the moment we are most braced for more killing. The reader is set up to watch another Diomedes-aristeia kill. Instead the two warriors stop, speak genealogy, find a hereditary guest-friendship between their grandfathers, and trade armour. The trade is famously uneven — Glaucus gives gold for bronze, the wits taken from him by Zeus — but the unevenness is the point. The bond of xenia is so binding that it overrides not only enmity but rational economics. The Iliad has been telling us since Book 1 that the war is a structure of insulted xenia (Paris broke Menelaus's hospitality). Book 6 says: the bond Paris broke is the bond Diomedes and Glaucus, on this one afternoon, refuse to break. The war is a violation of a code its participants still honour individually. The passage is also the Iliad's first sustained piece of leaf-imagery — as is the generation of leaves, so is that of men — which the cycle will carry forward to Virgil's leaves of Avernus in Aeneid 6 and back to Homer himself in Odyssey 11's dead souls.

Three women, three refusals

Book 6 is structured around three women's scenes, and all three refuse the war's logic in their own way. Hecuba lays Athena's richest Sidonian robe on the goddess's knees and the goddess nods refusal — the religious appeal fails. Helen, in Paris's room, condemns herself and her husband to Hector's face and tells him he carries the war's whole weight because of me. Andromache at the gate begs Hector to fight defensively from the walls and not on the plain. None of these women is heard. The goddess refuses; Paris ignores Helen; Hector refuses Andromache. The book is a sequence of female intercessions defeated. It is the Iliad's clearest statement that the war is a male machine the women must mourn but cannot stop, and it sets up the cycle's long catalogue of grieving women — Andromache, Hecuba, Cassandra in the next twenty books of the Iliad and through Posthomerica 13, Dido in Aeneid 4, Penelope in Odyssey 19, Anticleia in the Nekyia.

The Astyanax helmet-scene as the cycle's tenderest moment

The image of Astyanax shrieking at his father's helmet, Hector laughing and setting the bronze on the ground, kissing the boy and tossing him in his arms while praying for him to be better far than his father — is the most quoted single moment in all four epics, and rightly so. It does what only Homer dares to do: hold the war's whole weight on the body of a baby. The Iliad has just enough room for one such scene before the killing resumes, and Homer puts it here, six books in, so that every battle from Book 11 onward is fought against this image. Forward-readers should hold the picture in the mind: when Astyanax is murdered in the sack of Troy (Posthomerica 13 and Aeneid 2.501ff narrate it both), the helmet that he shrieked at is the helmet his killers wear.

Butler's prose at maximum tenderness

Butler's plain English is often called too flat for Homer's tonal range, but Book 6 is the test case for the opposite claim. Then his dear father laughed aloud, and his mother also, and Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it all gleaming upon the ground. The sentence does not embroider. It does not try to compete with the original Greek meter or the King James register. It just prints the action — the laugh, the helmet, the gleam — and lets the moment land. Pope's couplet here (his beamy helmet, gleaming on the ground) gilds the image; Lattimore's hexameter (all glaring) sharpens it; Butler's straight prose leaves it alone. For readers new to Homer, Butler's Book 6 is the chapter that proves the case for plain translation: the great moments do not need ornament.

What Hector knows

Watch Hector's two prophecies in this book — to Andromache (the day will come when sacred Ilios shall fall) and to his son (may you be better than your father). He speaks both as if he has already accepted them. Homer's Hector is the only major Iliadic warrior who acts inside the knowledge that he will lose. Achilles knows he will die young; Hector knows he and his city and his line will be erased. The choice he makes — to fight anyway, to be ashamed before the men and the long-robed women of Troy if he hides — is the Iliad's clearest example of pure honour-ethics. It will rhyme structurally with Aeneas's opposite choice in Aeneid 2: where Hector fights to die with the city he cannot save, Aeneas flees to save the line. The cycle holds both responses; Book 6 sets up the first.

What to watch for

Watch the Sidonian robe — it is the cycle's first reminder that Paris's voyage to Sparta was a trading voyage (Sidon was on the return route), and the robes that adorn the goddess's failed intercession are the cargo from the very voyage that started the war. Watch Helen's self-condemnations: she will repeat them, almost verbatim, in Books 3 and 24, and again at Sparta in Odyssey 4. Watch Astyanax: hold his face. Watch Glaucus — he and his uncle Sarpedon will reappear repeatedly, and Glaucus will be the one to mourn Sarpedon's body in Book 16. And watch Hector putting the helmet back on — Homer makes you see the gesture, the moment when the father turns back into the warrior. The Iliad will not let you forget it.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 6 looks back at the Iliad's first five books and supplies what they lacked — the inside of Troy. The Diomedes-Glaucus xenia scene reads as a direct counter-image to the war's founding violation: Paris broke Menelaus's xenia, and Books 1–5 have been the consequence. Here, in the middle of Diomedes's aristeia, Homer pauses to show that the bond Paris broke still holds for everyone else; the framework of guest-friendship is older than the war and survives it on the field. Hector's prophecy the day will come when sacred Ilios shall fall repeats verbatim Agamemnon's curse in Book 4 — but spoken now from inside the city, by the man who will defend it to his death, the line has the opposite emotional charge. The Astyanax-and-helmet scene answers the Aphrodite-rescue of Paris in Book 3: where the goddess swept the husband away from danger, the father here sets danger (the helmet) down so the son will come to him. Homer is building, scene by scene, a moral atlas of the war.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. Andromache will reappear three times — at Book 22's window where she hears the women wailing for Hector and learns of his death; at Book 24's lament; and the helmet that Astyanax shrieks at here is the helmet his father will wear in his final duel. Hector's no man brave or coward escapes his fate is repeated almost verbatim in his own Book-22 monologue and again in Achilles's Book-21 acceptance of his death. The leaf-simile (as is the generation of leaves, so is that of men) recurs at Book 21.464 and is then taken up by Virgil and the Odyssey-Nekyia.

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus's Book 13 dramatises what Book 6 has already prophesied. Astyanax — the baby in Hector's arms here — is thrown from the walls of Troy (the scene Euripides made famous in Trojan Women but Quintus also reports). Andromache is taken as Neoptolemus's slave. Hecuba's failed offering to Athena here is paid off in Quintus by Athena's vengeance during the sack itself (the lesser Ajax dragging Cassandra from Athena's temple). The Sidonian robe Hecuba lays on Athena's knees becomes, in retrospect, the first failure in the long sequence of failed Trojan ritual that culminates in the city's burning.

Into the Aeneid. Virgil reads Book 6 hard. Aeneid 2 dramatises the sack from inside the city — inside Troy is the Aeneid's home territory because Iliad 6 established the room-by-room ethics of the city's interior. Hector appears to Aeneas in Aeneid 2's dream-vision wearing the same gore, holding the same household gods. Astyanax is named explicitly in Aeneid 2.457 and 3.489 (Andromache, now Helenus's wife in Buthrotum, sees Ascanius and weeps because he is the age my Astyanax would be). Andromache's Buthrotum scene in Aeneid 3 is one of Virgil's deepest engagements with Homer: she has built a miniature replica of Troy, with a tiny Scaean Gate, and lives the same scene over again as ritual. The Hector-Andromache farewell at the Scaean Gate is the cycle's emotional template, and every later farewell in the cycle (Dido and Aeneas, Aeneas and Pallas, Odysseus and his unborn life with Calypso) is staged against it.

Into the Odyssey. Helen's self-condemnation here — would that I had been the wife of a better man — is the speech Helen will rewrite at Sparta in Odyssey 4, where she has had ten years to settle into self-presentation and now tells the story differently. The Odyssey's domestic interiors (Penelope's room, Eumaeus's hut, the great hall of Ithaca) all owe their tonal possibility to Book 6's discovery that an epic can pause inside a house. The Astyanax-Hector image is also the model for the Odysseus-Telemachus recognition in Odyssey 16: the father returning to find the son nearly grown, the kiss that breaks the warrior's posture. Andromache's you are father and mother and brother to me, and tender husband will be Penelope's silent thought in Odyssey 23 when she finally embraces the man she has spent twenty years not embracing.

The book is the cycle's interior heart, and everything domestic in the next sixty books is fought across its image.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Hector — leaves the field to organise the women's prayer; rebukes Paris; finds Andromache at the Scaean Gate; the helmet-and-Astyanax scene
• Andromache — runs to the wall when she hears the Trojans give ground; begs Hector to fight defensively; recounts the deaths of her father and seven brothers at Achilles's hands
• Astyanax — the infant son; shrieks at Hector's helmet-plume; the cycle's tenderest single image
• Paris — sulks in his upstairs room polishing armour; comes out only when shamed; bright as a stallion fed at the manger
• Helen — at her loom directing her women; turns to Hector with the poem's deepest self-condemnation; offers him a seat he refuses
• Hecuba — the queen mother; offers wine; takes out the richest Sidonian robe to lay on Athena's knees
• Diomedes — meets Glaucus across the line; recognises the hereditary xenia; trades bronze for gold

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — named through Andromache's lament as the killer of her father Eëtion and her seven brothers at Thebe-under-Plakos
• Athena — receives the robe but nods refusal
• Zeus — invoked in Hector's prayer over Astyanax: grant this child be better than his father
• Priam — at home in the palace, his fall named in Hector's prophecy
• Cassandra — Cassandra, fair as golden Aphrodite, named among Priam's daughters during Hector's passage through the palace
• Aeneas — invoked obliquely by the priest-seer Helenus's command; the Trojan line continues in him

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.