The Hero 47
other princes together for council? He does not need to do so now.
He has shown himself to be the superior man, the best of the Greeks.
Something else remarkable happens in the fi nal book of the poem:
the Trojans begin to take their farewell of Hector, and we listeners
and readers do so with them. We hear the stunning laments of
Hecuba and Helen and Andromache. With them we recall what
Hector meant to the Trojans. Andromache’s lament comes fi rst: she
cries out about all she has lost with the death of her husband. He
has been her savior; her father and mo ther and bro th ers are gone,
and now her husband is dead. She pictures herself in slavery, serving
another woman; she imagines her son in a life of misery. She recalls
to us Hector the husband, the man who adored his wife and child.
We remember him removing the fl ashing helm with its horse hair
plume to calm crying Astyanax. We hear him again talking to An-
dromache with a fi rm intimacy that no two other people in the poem
demonstrate. Hecuba recalls Hector the fi ghting man who stood
before Achilles and did all he could to save Troy, against even the
will of Fate. This is the warrior we remember, leading the charge
and pushing the prideful Greeks back to their ships, the man full
of daring and hungry to share glory with Achilles. Last, Helen re-
members his amazing kindness, reminding all how generous Hector
could be. He and Priam were the only Trojans who treated her with
dignity, and when others rose against her it was Hector who qui-
eted them.
The great poem ends with the burning of Hector’s corpse and
with the magisterial last line: “And so the Trojans buried Hector,
breaker of horses.” The last book of the poem dramatizes the tri-
umph of Achilles and his momentary transformation into a way of
being that he himself can probably barely comprehend and that is
foreign to almost all the rest of the life of the poem. A man- god feels
compassion— not condescending pity, but compassion for a hated
enemy.