Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Recovering in the arms of her husband’s sisters, Andromache lifts her voice in formal lament. She addresses Hector: they were born to one fate—she in Thebe under Placus, he in Troy—and now she is left a widow in the halls, and the child an infant, still a baby, whom they called Astyanax because Hector alone gated the city. She foresees the boy’s bitter future: orphaned, shoved from the feast, cheeks wet with tears, begging among his father’s friends, enough for a day then struck and expelled by a child with both parents living. Or—worse Homeric foreshadow—the Achaeans may hurl him from a tower in hatred for Hector who killed so many. She turns to the body’s shame: worms will eat him naked far from her, by the beaked ships, while in the house lie clothing woven by women’s hands that she will burn in the fire to no use for him, because he will not lie in them, but only for the Trojan women’s honor in his memory. The lament binds private love to civic loss: husband, father of the city’s hope, stripped of burial cloth by the enemy’s dragging. It is the first full widow-speech over Hector; Hecuba and Helen will speak later at the bier when the body is home.