Andromache

Also Known As: Greek Andromakhe; daughter of Eetion, king of Thebe under Mount Placus; wife of Hector of Troy; Andromaque in Racine’s French tragedy
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: She is the Trojan princess whose whole family fell to Achilles and who then outlived her husband, her son and her city as a captive of the Greeks.
Role in Mythos: Andromache is the wife of Hector in the Iliad, the voice of what the fall of Troy costs a household, and afterwards the ancestress claimed by the royal line of Molossia.
Relation to Humans: She is wholly mortal, a queen who becomes a slave, and every ancient poet who writes about her writes about grief, marriage and captivity. The kings of Molossia in Epirus claimed descent from her son Molossus, and a shrine to her stood in the city of Pergamum in Asia.

She was at her loom when it happened. In the twenty-second book of the Iliad, Andromache sits weaving in the innermost part of the tall house, and she has just told her maids to set a great tripod on the fire so that Hector will have a hot bath when he comes back from the fighting. No messenger has reached her. Then the wailing comes up from the tower, her limbs shake, and the shuttle falls to the floor. She runs through the house to the wall, looks down, and sees her husband being dragged behind Achilles’ chariot toward the Greek ships. Darkness comes over her eyes and she falls backward.

Homer never lets her forget where she came from, and he does not let the audience forget either. She was the daughter of Eetion, king of the Cilicians at Thebe of the lofty gates, under wooded Placus. In the sixth book she tells Hector what the war has already taken. Achilles sacked her city and killed her father. Her seven brothers went down into the house of Hades on a single day, all killed by the same man among their cattle and white-fleeced sheep. Her mother was carried off as plunder, ransomed, and then struck down by Artemis in her father’s halls. That is the whole family. Hector, she tells him, is her father and her mother and her brother as well as her husband.

That speech belongs to the most famous scene she has. Hector comes back from the battle and finds his wife not at home but at the Scaean gate, with a nurse carrying their baby son, whom Hector called Scamandrius and everyone else called Astyanax. She begs him to stay on the wall and to post his men by the wild fig tree, where the wall is weakest. He answers that he would be ashamed before the Trojans if he held back, and says he can see the day coming when some Greek will lead her away weeping into slavery. Then he reaches for the boy, and the boy shrinks screaming into the nurse’s arms, terrified of the bronze and the nodding horsehair crest. His parents laugh. Hector takes off the helmet, sets it gleaming on the ground, kisses his son and prays that the boy will one day be called a better man than his father. Andromache takes the child back to her fragrant breast, smiling through her tears. Hector tells her to go home to her loom and distaff, and when she gets there the women of the house mourn him as though he were already dead.

Small domestic details keep surfacing around her. In the eighth book Hector, calling on his four horses, reminds them that Andromache used to set honey-sweet wheat in front of them and mix them wine to drink, before she ever saw to him. It is a small, rueful glimpse of the household, and it comes from the husband.

When she sees his body, she tears the whole bright headdress from her hair: the frontlet, the cap, the plaited band, and the veil that golden Aphrodite gave her on the day Hector led her as a bride out of Eetion’s house. Her first lament is for the child. With his father gone, she says, other people will push him from their tables. Then she promises to burn Hector’s fine clothes, which are no use to him now, as an honour to him from the Trojans. At the end of the poem, holding his head in her hands as the body lies in Priam’s house, she speaks the lament that closes the Iliad’s grief. She foresees the city falling, herself led off to slavery, and her son thrown from the wall by some Greek whose brother or father Hector had killed. Her last complaint is the most private thing she says. He did not die in his bed, stretching out his hands to her, and he left her no word to remember night and day.

Everything she predicted came true, and the later tellers made it worse. The Library of Apollodorus lists the division of the captive women: Agamemnon took Cassandra, Odysseus took Hecuba, and Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, was given Andromache as his special prize. The Greeks threw Astyanax from the battlements. Euripides put that scene on the stage in the Trojan Women in 415 BC. The herald Talthybius, who hates his errand, tells her the army has voted on the boy, that Odysseus carried the assembly, and that so brave a father’s son must not be allowed to grow up. Her son is to be thrown from the towers of Troy. Before she is taken to the ships she has one more speech, and it is a bitter one. She was a model wife, she says, kept at home and kept her tongue, and the fame of it spread through the Greek camp until Achilles’ son chose her for exactly that reason. Talthybius later carries the boy’s body back to Hecuba on Hector’s own bronze shield, because Andromache begged that he be buried in it rather than have it hang in the room where she would share Neoptolemus’s bed.

Euripides followed her to Greece in another play, Andromache. She is a suppliant clinging to the shrine of the sea goddess Thetis near Phthia, where she has borne her new master a son. His Spartan wife, Hermione, daughter of Menelaus, is childless and accuses the captive of poisoning her womb with Asian drugs. There is no Hector here, Hermione tells her, and no Priam with his gold. Menelaus threatens mother and child with death, and only the old king Peleus saves them. At the end Orestes has murdered Neoptolemus at Delphi, and Thetis herself appears to decree that Andromache will go to Molossia, marry Helenus, and that her son’s descendants will rule there.

The Roman poets gave her one last scene. In the third book of the Aeneid, Aeneas lands at Buthrotum in Epirus and finds her pouring a yearly offering at an empty mound of green turf for Hector, beside a stream the exiles have named after a Trojan river, with twin altars. When she sees him she goes rigid and faints. She calls Polyxena, who was killed on a Greek tomb, the luckiest of Priam’s daughters, because she was never allotted to a master. She herself was handed on by Pyrrhus, another name for Neoptolemus, to Helenus: a slave woman given to a slave. As Aeneas leaves, she loads his son Ascanius with robes woven with gold and a Phrygian cloak, and tells him he has the eyes, the hands and the face of her lost Astyanax.

Pausanias adds the family history the Greeks kept. By Neoptolemus she had three sons, Molossus, Pielus and Pergamus, the youngest. After Neoptolemus died she married Helenus and bore him a son, Cestrinus. Pergamus crossed into Asia, killed a local ruler in Teuthrania and gave the city of Pergamum its name, and Andromache went with him. A shrine to her still stood in the city in Pausanias’s day. The kings of Molossia counted her son among their ancestors until their monarchy ended in the third century BC. Jean Racine made her the heroine of his tragedy Andromaque, first played before the court of Louis XIV in November 1667, and changed the old story in one crucial way: in his version Astyanax is still alive, and Pyrrhus demands her hand as the price of sparing him.

She has no magic and no divine parent, and the gods mostly act on her rather than for her. Her strength is endurance and a clear head. She gives Hector practical military advice on the wall, and she foresees her son’s death from the battlements exactly as it later happens. Her weakness is the plain fact of her position. Every man who might have protected her was killed by Achilles or his son, and after that she belonged to whoever the lots gave her to.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Andromache in Greek mythology?

Andromache was the wife of the Trojan prince Hector and the mother of their son Astyanax. She was the daughter of Eetion, king of Thebe under Mount Placus, whose city was sacked by Achilles. After the fall of Troy she was taken captive by Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles.

What happened to Andromache’s family?

According to the Iliad, Achilles killed Andromache’s father Eetion and her seven brothers on the same day when he sacked Thebe, and her mother was ransomed but later struck down by Artemis. Her husband Hector was then killed by Achilles, and after Troy fell the Greeks threw her young son Astyanax from the walls.

Who did Andromache marry after Hector died?

Andromache was given to Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, as a war prize, and she bore him sons including Molossus. After Neoptolemus was killed at Delphi, she married Hector’s brother Helenus. Pausanias says she bore Helenus a son named Cestrinus.

What happens in Euripides’ play Andromache?

In Euripides’ Andromache, the captive Andromache takes refuge at a shrine of Thetis after Hermione, the childless wife of Neoptolemus, accuses her of using drugs to make her barren. Menelaus threatens to kill Andromache and her son, and the old king Peleus rescues them. The goddess Thetis ends the play by sending Andromache to Molossia to marry Helenus.

Why is the farewell of Hector and Andromache famous?

The farewell in Iliad book 6 is the poem’s most intimate scene. Andromache begs Hector to stay on the wall, their baby Astyanax is frightened by his father’s horsehair crest, and Hector removes the helmet, prays for his son and sends Andromache back to her loom, knowing he may not return.