Andromache
mythological figure · 6 works · 12 mentions · 27 anchored passages
she · Hector's wife · Hektor's wife · daughter of great Eetion · his captive · his wife · the Trojan captive · wife of Hector · yon captive
in the texts
Iliad
Hektor's wife, daughter of Eetion, whose entire birth family was destroyed by Achilles, and who begs Hektor not to leave her and their son fatherless before he returns to battle.
His good housekeeper answered, "Hektor, since you bid me tell you truly [ alêthea], she did not go to your sisters nor to your brothers' wives, nor yet to the temple of Athena, where the other women are propitiating the awful goddess, but she is on the high wall of Ilion, for she had heard the Trojans were being hard pressed, and that the Achaeans were in great force:
Hektor smiled as he looked upon the boy, but he did not speak, and Andromache stood by him weeping and taking his hand in her own.
With this he laid the child again in the arms of his wife, who took him to her own soft bosom, smiling through her tears.
Andromache
Trojan widow of Hector, now a war-captive and concubine of Neoptolemus, the play's protagonist and suppliant at the shrine of Thetis.
and I myself am come to Hellas as a slave, though I was esteemed a daughter of a race most free, given to Neoptolemus that island-prince, and set apart for him as his special prize from the spoils of Troy.
’Tis not my sorcery that makes thy husband hate thee, nay, but thy own failure to prove thyself his help-meet.
Now aforetime for all my misery I ever had a hope to lead me on, that, if my child were safe, I might find some help and protection from my woes;
The Trojan Women
Widow of Hector, now assigned as a captive to Achilles' son, whose grief over her husband, her virtue as a wife, and the loss of her son Astyanax form a major thread of the window.
For all that stamps the wife a woman chaste, I strove to do in Hector’s home.
Where are you being carried, unhappy wife, mounted on that chariot, side by side with Hector’s brazen arms and Phrygian spoils of war, with which Achilles’ son will deck the shrines of Phthia on his return from Troy?
while you took from my father’s house a spotless bride, yourself the first to make this maiden wife.
Tusculan Disputations
Unnamed mourner (implicitly Hector's wife) who grieves at seeing his body dragged.
"I saw — what I most grievously endured to see — Hector dragged by the four-horse chariot.
Orations
Trojan heroine whose laments are known even to the Indians through Homer.
So that, though the Indians are without sight of many of the stars among us — for they say the Bears do not appear with them — they are not unacquainted with the sufferings of Priam, and the laments and wailings of Andromache and Hecuba, and the valour of Achilles and Hector.
De Pudicitia
Trojan figure invoked via a tragic stage role as an analogy for misreading.
it is nothing to the point of "Andromache.