Later, with Apollo's help, Hector killed Patroclus, the best friend of the great Greek warrior Achilles, and stole his armor, which actually belonged to Achilles. Enraged by the death of his friend, Achilles reconciled with Agamemnon and joined the other Greeks in fighting against the Trojans in order to pursue Hector.
As the Greeks stormed the Trojan castle, Hector came out to meet Achilles in single combat—wearing the fateful armor of Achilles taken off the body of Patroclus.
Achilles aimed and shot his spear into a small gap in the neck area of that armor, killing Hector. Afterward, the Greeks desecrated Hector's corpse by dragging it around the grave of Patroclus three times. King Priam, Hector's father, then went to Achilles to beg for his son's body so he could give it a proper burial.
Despite the abuse of the corpse at the hands of the Greeks, Hector's body had been kept intact due to the intervention of the gods.
The Iliad ends with the funeral of Hector, held during a day truce granted by Achilles. The mourners include Andromache, Hecabe, and Helen, all of whom perform individual laments for his death.
After Hector's death, his wife Andromache was enslaved by the son of Achilles, and his son Astyanax was killed. Modern historians consider Hector the moral hero of the Iliad, who is doomed by Zeus who has selected Hector to bring about Patroclus' death in order to force Achilles back into battle.
As a result, Achilles was invulnerable everywhere but there. When he was 9 years old, a seer predicted that Achilles would die heroically in battle against the Trojans. When she heard about this, Thetis disguised him as a girl and sent him to live on the Aegean island of Skyros. When Homer wrote the Iliad in about BCE, however, readers and listeners would not have known any of this. They only knew that Achilles was a great hero, that he had superhuman strength and courage and that he was supremely handsome.
Homer painted a more nuanced picture: In addition to these qualities, his Achilles was vengeful and quick to anger and could be petulant when he did not get his way. He was also deeply loyal and would sacrifice anything for his friends and family. He did this by meddling in their political and emotional affairs. Each of the goddesses offered Paris a bribe in exchange for his vote. Unfortunately, the wife in question—Helen, the daughter of Zeus—was already married to someone else: Menelaus, the king of Sparta.
Menelaus vowed revenge. When the Iliad begins, the Trojan War has been going on for nine years. He has met with great success—in fact, he is undefeated in battle—but the war itself has reached a stalemate. In a battle that took place before the poem begins, Agamemnon had taken as a concubine a young Trojan woman named Chryseis.
Enraged, Apollo punished the Greek armies by sending a plague to kill the soldiers one by one. As his ranks thinned, Agamemnon finally agreed to allow Chryseis to return to her father. Achilles did as his commander asked and relinquished his bride. He gathered his belonging and refused to come out of his tent. The Greeks lost one battle after another. He adds that Athena will kill Hector in just a moment. Achilles hurls his spear, but Hector ducks and it flies past.
Hector does not see Athena retrieve the spear and return it to Achilles. Hector taunts Achilles that he didn't know the future after all. Then Hector says it's his turn. He throws his spear, which hits, but glances off the shield. He calls to Deiphobus to bring his lance, but, of course, there is no Deiphobus.
Hector realizes he has been tricked by Athena and that his end is near. Hector wants a glorious death, so he draws his sword and swoops down on Achilles, who charges with his spear.
Achilles knows the armor Hector is wearing and puts that knowledge to use, finding the weak point at the collarbone. He pierces Hector's neck, but not his windpipe. Hector falls down while Achilles taunts him with the fact that his body will be mutilated by dogs and birds.
Hector begs him not to, but to let Priam ransom him. Achilles tells him to stop begging, that if he could, he would eat the corpse himself, but since he can't, he'll let the dogs do it, instead. Hector curses him, telling him Paris will kill him at the Scaean Gates with the help of Apollo. Then Hector dies. Achilles pokes holes in Hector's ankles, ties a strap through them and attaches them to the chariot so he can drag the body in the dust.
Near death, Hector pleads with Achilles to return his body to the Trojans for burial, but Achilles resolves to let the dogs and scavenger birds maul the Trojan hero. Andromache hears them from her chamber and runs outside. In this section of the epic, the feuds of the gods continue to echo the battles of the mortals. As the human battles become ever more grave, however, the divine conflicts in these episodes seem ever more superfluous. In their internal fighting, the gods do not affect or even try to affect the underlying issues of the human conflict.
Two of them explicitly swear off fighting over the mortals, though one of these, Hera, ends up doing just that. It seems that the gods are not actually fighting over the mortals but rather expressing the animosities that the mortal conflict has stirred in them.
Homer uses several devices, including prophecy and irony, to build a heavy sense of pathos. When Andromache bewails the miserable life that Astyanax will have to endure without a father, a sharp sense of irony enhances the tragic effect of her words: Astyanax will suffer this fatherless life only briefly, as he dies shortly after the fall of Troy.
This section of the poem reveals a particularly skillful control of plot. Events interweave with one another in elaborate patterns. Hector must fight to the death in these episodes in order to redeem the honor that he loses earlier; after he recklessly orders his troops to camp outside the city walls, the men have to flee, causing Hector great shame.
The final duel between Achilles and Hector becomes not only a duel of heroes but also of heroic values. While Achilles proves superior to Hector in terms of strength and endurance, he emerges as inferior in terms of integrity.
As we have seen, Achilles engages in such indignities quite routinely and does so not out of any real principle but out of uncontrollable rage.
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