Andromache
mythological figure · 10 works · 16 mentions · 33 anchored passages
she · Hector's wife · Hektor's wife · daughter of great Eetion · his captive · his wife · once Hector's 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.
’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;
E’en now is he within, arrived from Sparta for this very purpose, while I in terror am come to take up a position here in the shrine of Thetis adjoining the house, if haply it may save me from death;
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.
Eudemian Ethics
Legendary widow, invoked as a literary example from a tragedy attributed to Antiphon.
A sign of this is that a friend, if both things were not possible, would choose to know the other person rather than to be known by him, as for example women do when they allow others to adopt their children, and Andromache in the tragedy of Antiphon.
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.
Ion
Homeric figure whose 'sad story' is cited as an example of Ion's affecting recitations.
when you give a good recitation and specially thrill your audience, either with the lay of Odysseus leaping forth on to the threshold, revealing himself to the suitors and pouring out the arrows before his feet, or of Achilles dashing at Hector, or some part of the sad story of Andromache or of Hecuba, or of Priam, are you then in your senses, or are you carried out of yourself, and does your soul …
Pelopidas
Tragic widow whose sorrows are wept over by the audience in the performance Alexander flees.
Once when he was seeing a tragedian act the Trojan Women of Euripides, he left the theatre abruptly, and sent a message to the actor bidding him be of good courage and not put forth any less effort because of his departure, for it was not out of contempt for his acting that he had gone away, but because he was ashamed to have the citizens see him, who had never taken pity on any man that he had mu …
De Pudicitia
Trojan figure invoked via a tragic stage role as an analogy for misreading.
it is nothing to the point of "Andromache.
Aeneid
Widow of Hector, taken captive and later wife of Helenus, mourning her lost family.
“Accept these gifts, sweet youth, memorials of me and my poor handicraft, to prove th' undying friendship of Andromache, once Hector's wife.
That self-same hour outside the city walls, within a grove where flowed the mimic stream of a new Simois, Andromache, with offerings to the dead, and gifts of woe, poured forth libation, and invoked the shade of Hector, at a tomb which her fond grief had consecrated to perpetual tears, though void;
I, the slave-wife, to Helenus was given, and slave was wed with slave.