Hector did not find Andromache at home. A housekeeper said she had gone to the great tower after hearing the Trojans were hard pressed; the nurse carried the child. Hector hurried back through the city toward the Scaean gates.
Andromache met him there with the child Scamandrius, whom the people called Astyanax because Hector alone defended Ilios. Weeping, she took Hector’s hand: his own courage would destroy him; he did not pity his infant child or her, who soon would be his widow. Better for her to go under the earth if she lost him. Achilles had killed her father Eetion and sacked Thebe, yet did not strip him — he burned him in his war-gear and heaped a mound, and the nymphs planted elms about it. In one day Achilles killed her seven brothers among the cattle and sheep. Her mother he led here then freed for ransom, and Artemis struck her down in her father’s halls. Hector was now father, mother, brother, and strong husband to her. She begged him to stay on the tower and station the army by the fig tree, where the wall was most open — three times the best men had come at that point under the Aiantes, Idomeneus, the sons of Atreus, and Tydeus’s son.
Hector answered that all this was a care to him too, but he would feel terrible shame before Trojan men and trailing-robed Trojan women if he shrank like a coward. His spirit would not let him; he had learned to be brave always and fight among the foremost, winning glory for his father and himself. He knew sacred Ilios would fall, with Priam and Priam’s people, but no grief pained him like the thought of Andromache dragged away weeping, weaving at another woman’s loom and carrying water from Messeis or Hypereia under harsh necessity, while someone said: that is the wife of Hector, who was best at fighting among the horse-taming Trojans. Fresh pain would be hers from the lack of such a man to ward off slavery. May a heaped mound cover him dead before he heard her cry as they dragged her away.
He reached for his son, but the child shrank crying from the bronze and nodding horsehair crest. Hector and Andromache laughed. Hector took off the helmet, kissed the child, danced him in his arms, and prayed that Zeus and the gods make him strong, ruling Ilios and bringing bloody spoils home so his mother would rejoice.
He placed the child in Andromache’s arms. She smiled through tears. Hector told her not to grieve too much; no man would send him to Hades before his fate, and fate no man escaped, coward or brave. She must go home to loom and distaff; war would be the concern of the men of Ilios, and his most of all.