if only he learns we’re still alive in Argive ships!” (11.153-57)
So the sons of Antimachus to Agamemnon, and in similar terms Adrestus begs Menelaus for his life and Dolon supplicates Odysseus. In all three cases the ransom is refused—the war has turned savage in its final phase. But in time gone by, Trojan ransom money has been a steady source of wealth for the Achaeans; it is clear from Thersites’ sarcastic questions addressed to Agamemnon, in Book 2, that this was a regular traffic. “Still more gold you’re wanting? More ransom a son / of the stallion-breaking Trojans might just fetch from Troy?” (2.267-68). The repeated appeals to accept ransom are not only indicative of Troy’s immense wealth, they are also a reminder of Trojan attitudes: the belief, typical of rich, civilized cities, that wealth can always buy a solution, and the illusion that civilized ways of warfare—quarter for disarmed men or men who surrender, ransom and exchange of prisoners—are laws as valid and universal as the laws under which their own civilization lives. Inside Troy the manners of civilized life are preserved; there are restraints on anger, there is courtesy to opponents, kindness to the weak—things that have no place in the armed camp on the shore. In the city, those who have most cause to blame, even to hate, Helen, the old men of Troy, members of the council, murmur to each other praise for her beauty as they express their wish that she would go back to the Achaeans; and old Priam, who has lost sons because of her presence in Troy and will lose more—Hector above all, and all Troy with him—Priam too treats her with kindness and generous understanding.
Unfortunately for Troy, the Trojans have the defects of their qualities: they are not so much at home in the grim business of war as their opponents. In Book 3 Priam comes to the battlefield to seal the oaths that fix the terms of the duel between Paris and Menelaus, but he cannot bear to stay and watch the fight: he fears for his son. And Paris, the loser in the duel, is rescued by the goddess Aphrodite and returned to the arms of Helen. He is more at home in his splendid palace than on the battlefield. But he knows his strengths as well as his limitations; he answers Helen’s bitter mockery with equanimity, and accepts his brother’s harsh but just reproaches calmly, with a claim that war is not the whole of life and that preeminence in other spheres has its importance:
“... don’t fling in my face the lovely gifts
of golden Aphrodite. Not to be tossed aside,
the gifts of the gods, those glories ...
whatever the gods give of their own free will—” (3.77-80)
But Troy is not at peace: it is under siege, and by men who mean to raze it from the face of the earth. The arts of peace are useless now. Troy will not be saved by the magnanimity and tender-heartedness of Priam nor by Paris’ brilliance in the courts of love. If it is to survive it will do so because of the devotion, courage and incessant efforts of one man, Priam’s son Hector. On him falls the whole burden of the war. He is a formidable warrior, formidable enough so that in Book 7 no Achaean volunteers to face him in single combat until they are tongue-lashed by Menelaus and then by Nestor. But war is not his native element. Unlike Achilles, he is clearly a man made for peace, for those relationships between man and man, and man and woman, which demand sympathy, persuasion, kindness and, where firmness is necessary, a firmness expressed in forms of law and resting on granted authority. He is a man who appears most himself in his relationships with others. It is significant that our first view of him in action is not in combat but in an attempt to stop it. Announcing Paris’ offer to fight Menelaus and so settle the war, he moves ahead of the Trojan ranks and forces them to a seated position with his spear; meanwhile he is the target of Achaean arrows and stones, until Agamemnon calls a halt. It was a dangerous initiative and one that demanded immense authority, a force of personality recognized by both sides.
But his true quality is seen in his relationship with his fellow countrymen and his family. In Book 6 the seer Helenus sends him back to Troy to organize a sacrifice and procession to Athena. He no sooner appears than the wives and daughters of the Trojans come running, to ask for news of their “brothers, friends and husbands” (6.285); he is their stay and support, the man to whom they turn for comfort. In the palace of Paris, Helen tells him to sit and rest, but he will not: he must visit his own wife and child before he goes back to the fight. He finds Andromache on the wall, with their son. She weeps and begs him to be careful, as wives have begged their husbands all through history.
“Reckless one,
my Hector—your own fiery courage will destroy you!
Have you no pity for him, our helpless son? Or me,
and the destiny that weighs me down, your widow ... (6.482-85)
And she begs him to cease fighting in the forefront of the hand-to-hand battle on the plain, to adopt a defensive strategy and command from the walls. Hector’s sad reply reveals his tragic dilemma. His feeling for her prompts him to accept her suggestion but he cannot do it. He is the leader, the commander, as his name suggests: Hector means “Holder.” He is the one who holds the Trojan defense steady by his example and he must fight in the front ranks. In any case, the standards of martial valor by which he has always lived will not permit it:
“All this weighs on my mind too, dear woman.
But I would die of shame to face the men of Troy
and the Trojan women trailing their long robes
if I would shrink from battle now, a coward. ” (6.522-25)
But deep in his heart he knows that the effort is futile, that Troy is doomed. He realizes what that will mean for her and hopes that he will not live to hear her cries as she is led off to slavery. He is distracted from this dark vision of the future by the terrified cries of his own baby son, who recoils screaming from the bronze-clad man who moves to embrace him. Forebodings of the future, no matter how well-founded, have to be brushed aside if life is to go on, and Hector now speaks in more hopeful terms as he prays that his son will grow up to be a greater man than his father and then comforts his sorrowing wife. This scene reveals the greatness of Hector as a complete man; we see not only the devotion of the warrior who does his duty and fights for his people, even though he knows that they are doomed, but also his greatness as a husband and father—a striking contrast with the atmosphere of the armed camp on the shore.
It is Hector’s misfortune that Troy is not at peace but at war. He must return to the battle, which now, in accordance with the will of Zeus, turns against the Achaeans. Hector fights courageously, stubbornly, at times exultantly in the near madness of victorious slaughter. But even this berserk fury is still the fighting spirit of the man of the polis, the protector of the community, not the individual rage for glory and booty of a Diomedes or an Achilles. When, at the flood-tide of success, with the Achaeans pinned against their ships, an omen is read by the seer Polydamas as a warning to retreat, Hector will have none of it, will not put his trust in birds and the interpreters of their movements. “Fight for your country—” he says, “that is the best, the only omen!” (12.281). It is one of the most famous lines in the poem, respected and admired by the Greeks of later centuries as the epitome of patriotic courage, of the mood that inspired men to defend their own city, great or small, in the face of overwhelming odds, hostile portents and omens of disaster. It is for his country that he is fighting, and he fights well enough so that the will of Zeus is fulfilled: the Achaeans are penned up in their fortifications, the first Achaean ship is fired. Hector is lord of the battlefield; indeed, from what we have seen of champions in combat in the poem so far, he can claim to be the best man, Greek or Trojan. But that is because we have not yet seen Achilles in battle. And when we do, and Homer recreates for us the irresistible violence of the man born and shaped for battle, who values life, his own included, as nothing, the killer in his own domain—lion in the bush, shark in the water—we realize that Hector’s defeat and death are inevitable.