Astyanax

Also Known As: Greek, “lord of the city”; called Scamandrius, Skamandrios, by his father Hector after the river of Troy
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: An infant prince whose only power is the future he represents, which is exactly why the victors of Troy would not let him live.
Role in Mythos: He is the last heir of Priam’s line through Hector, and his death at the fall of the city closes the royal house of Troy.
Relation to Humans: Homer uses him to show what the war costs a family, from the frightened baby at the gate to the orphan his mother imagines being driven from a feast. In the later epics and tragedies he becomes the war’s most pitiable victim, a small child thrown from the walls by Greeks who feared what he might grow into.

A horsehair plume nods above a bronze helmet, and a baby screams. That is the first thing Astyanax does in literature. Hector has come back from the fighting to the Scaean gate of Troy, his wife Andromache has run down to meet him, and the nurse at her side holds their son against her breast. Hector stretches out his arms, and the child twists away into the nurse’s bosom, terrified by the gleam of his father’s armour and the crest swaying over it. Both parents laugh. Hector takes off the helmet, sets it shining on the ground, and lifts the boy to kiss him.

Book Six of the Iliad gives the child two names. Hector called him Scamandrius, after the river that runs past the city. Everyone else called him Astyanax, lord of the city, because his father alone was holding Troy together. The nickname is a compliment to Hector and a weight on the son, and the poem never lets the second meaning go. Holding the boy, Hector prays to Zeus and all the gods that his son may be as great as he is, rule Ilios by strength, and come home from battle carrying the bloodied spoils of an enemy, so that people say he is far better than his father and his mother is glad. Then he hands the child back. Andromache takes him to her breast, smiling through her tears.

Nothing in the Iliad lets that prayer come true. When Hector dies in Book Twenty-Two, Andromache’s lament turns at once to the boy. She sees him as an orphan going round his father’s old friends, tugging one by the cloak and another by the tunic, given a cup just long enough to wet his lips and never his palate, until a child whose father is still alive shoves him from the table with “Out with you, you have no father here.” He goes crying back to his widowed mother. Before, she says, he sat on his father’s knee and ate only the richest food, and slept soft in his nurse’s arms. In Book Twenty-Four, over Hector’s body, her fear sharpens into something specific. Troy will fall, she says, and some Achaean will take the boy by the arm and hurl him from the wall, to pay back a brother or a son or a father that Hector killed.

The poets who finished the story made her right, and they did not agree on who did it. In the Little Iliad, attributed to Lesches of Pyrrha, it is Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles. A surviving fragment has him tear the child from the bosom of his rich-haired nurse, seize him by the foot and throw him from a tower, before leading Andromache off to the ships as his share of the spoils. Pausanias, describing Polygnotus’s great painting of fallen Troy at Delphi, stops at the image of Andromache with her boy clutching at her breast, and adds Lesches’ point that no vote of the Greeks lay behind the killing: Neoptolemus simply wanted it done. The other epic of the sack, the Iliou Persis attributed to Arctinus, survives only in a prose summary that says Odysseus killed Astyanax, and a scholiast confirms that in that poem too the boy was flung from the city wall.

Athenian vase painters found a third version and made it unforgettable. From the middle of the sixth century BC they show Neoptolemus at the altar where old Priam has taken refuge, holding up a small body. A black-figure amphora by the painter Lydos, made around 540 BC and now in the Louvre, has him raising the boy over the king. The two deaths of the sack collapse into one picture, and the grandson becomes the weapon that kills the grandfather. It is an ugly image. It was also popular for decades.

Euripides staged the death in the Trojan Women in 415 BC, and he made it cold. The herald Talthybius comes to Andromache already ashamed of his news. The army has met, Odysseus has carried the debate, and the son of so dangerous a father must not grow up: he is to be thrown from the battlements. If she curses the ships, the boy will lie unburied. She holds him one last time, smelling his neck, then lets him go. Later the body comes back carried on Hector’s great bronze shield, which Andromache has begged the Greeks to leave in Troy as his coffin. Talthybius has washed the wounds in the Scamander as he passed. His grandmother Hecuba looks at the curls the stones have torn, the white bone showing, and remembers him climbing into her bed at daybreak to promise that when she died he would cut his hair and lead his friends in procession past her tomb. She asks what words a poet could carve on a grave for him, and answers herself: here lies a child the Greeks killed because they were afraid of him.

The mythographer Apollodorus puts the killing right after the Greeks sacrificed to all the gods and right before Polyxena’s throat is cut on Achilles’ grave, and his translator J. G. Frazer read that placing as Apollodorus treating it as one more sacrifice. Seneca’s Troades goes further down that road. There the prophet Calchas demands the boy, Andromache hides him inside Hector’s tomb, and Ulysses only extracts him by threatening to tear the tomb down on top of him. At the end a messenger describes the crowd climbing trees and broken walls to watch, some of them sitting on Hector’s own mound, while Ulysses, standing with him at the top of the tower, recites the prophet’s words and calls the gods to the rite. Before he finishes, the boy jumps.

Not every ancient writer let him die. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in Augustan Rome, preserves an older account in which Scamandrius and other descendants of Hector were allowed by Neoptolemus to go home from Greece, and Aeneas’s son Ascanius restored them to their ancestral kingdom at Troy. Far later, French writers hunting for a Trojan founder for their kings made Astyanax into Francus, and Pierre de Ronsard’s Franciade of 1572 rescued him outright, renamed him, and sent him off to found France.

He has no powers to speak of. What he has is a name and a father, and in every version that is enough to kill him. His only strength is the one the Greeks attribute to him, the chance that a prince of Troy might one day raise the city again. His weakness is that he is a small child in a captured city, and the walls his family’s gods were said to have built are the walls he is thrown from.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Astyanax in Greek mythology?

Astyanax was the infant son of the Trojan prince Hector and his wife Andromache, and the grandson of King Priam. His father named him Scamandrius after the river of Troy, but the Trojans called him Astyanax, meaning lord of the city, because Hector was the city’s chief defender.

How did Astyanax die?

Astyanax was thrown from the walls of Troy after the city fell. The Little Iliad says Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, seized him by the foot and threw him from a tower on his own initiative. The Iliou Persis says Odysseus killed him, and in Euripides’ Trojan Women the Greek army votes for his death on Odysseus’ advice.

Why did the Greeks kill Astyanax?

The Greeks killed Astyanax because they feared that Hector’s son might grow up to avenge his father and rebuild Troy. In Euripides’ Trojan Women the herald says the son of so dangerous a father must not reach manhood, and in Seneca’s Troades the prophet Calchas demands his death before the fleet can sail home.

What happens to Astyanax in the Iliad?

In Iliad book 6 the baby Astyanax is frightened by the horsehair crest on Hector’s helmet, and Hector takes it off, kisses him and prays that he will be greater than his father. Andromache later predicts his miserable life as an orphan in book 22 and, in book 24, fears that a Greek will throw him from the wall.

Did Astyanax survive the fall of Troy in any version?

Some versions let Astyanax live. Dionysius of Halicarnassus records an account in which Scamandrius and other descendants of Hector returned from Greece with Neoptolemus’ permission and were restored to Troy by Ascanius, and Pierre de Ronsard’s Franciade of 1572 saved him from the fall of Troy and renamed him Francus, the legendary founder of France.