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Margaret Kammerer

Semple 2016-2017 Academic Year

The Character of Andromache

The Trojan War, that ancient, mythical epic held quite a lot of interest for ancient authors.

There was even an Epic Cycle which told the saga from beginning to end and is now

unfortunately lost to us. The characters of the Trojan War provided a basis for later authors to

explore. One of the less famous characters is Andromache, wife of Hector. She is perhaps, one of

the most tragic characters of the saga, for she endures the murder of her parents and brothers, the

indignity of her husbands death, and her sons senseless murder and then she is taken into

slavery by the son of her husbands murderer. Her story is told in most especially in Homers

Iliad, revisited twice by Euripides, and also mentioned by Sappho, Seneca, Ovid, and Vergil.

Andromache was born in the city of Cilician Thebe. Her early life is not a subject of focus, but

she is a princess of Thebe, the daughter of Eetion. She marries Hector, the golden son of Troy

and they have one son, named Scamandrius, or Astyanax. After Hectors death and the

subsequent destruction of Troy, she is taken as a war-prize for Neoptolemus (Pyrrhus), the son of

Achilles and eventually founds a New Troy with Helenus. These are the so-called facts of the

myth, but this is not laid out, nice and neatly in one story. Each author, who has written on

Andromache, particularly Homer and Euripides, take this character and decide to move her story

forward.

The treatment of Andromache by ancient authors is quite different than many other

characters of the Trojan War Saga. The majority of these characters are portrayed as polar

opposites of themselves. For example, Helen is portrayed as the accursed downfall of Troy and

the sole cause of the war or as someone who was forced by the will of the gods and thus utterly
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blameless or somewhere in between. Similarly, Agamemnon is often the villain of the war,

who impugns Achilles dignity. But Euripides in Iphigenia at Aulis tells the story of a man who

wants to spare his daughters life and is compelled by Menelaus to sacrifice her anyway. But

Andromaches portrayal is quite different than this. Rather than trying to set forth the authors

idea of the character or put a different spin on it, it is as if each author took the Andromache of

Homer and continued the story. By this I mean, Andromaches character is mostly constant in

every representation of her, as if each successive author thought that they would like to continue

the tale of Andromache and see how she would react in the situations foreshadowed in Homer.

Andromaches character stays constant in terms of two traits: she is logical and smart,

and loves very deeply, even to the point of sacrifice. Throughout the course of her story,

Andromache is shown as a smart woman who can see the courses of action. In The Iliad,

Andromache is very focused on the result if Hector is killed. She is smart enough to recognize

that the Trojans might very well lose, and can even recognize the weaknesses of the Trojans. She

points out a spot to Hector, saying there, where the city lies most open to assault, the walls

lower, more easily overrun...Three times they have tried that pointhoping to storm Troy.

Andromache knows that this would be the smartest place to lead the Trojan armies and tells him

so. This same ability to see the truth is shown in The Trojan Women when Andromache and

Hecuba are mourning the slaughter of Polyxena. Hecuba tells Andromache, death and life are

not the same, my child. Death is nothingness, life means hope. Yet Andromache, remembering

her beautiful life with Hector and faced with her coming life as a slave and concubine, tells

Hecuba her take on things, that It is better to die than to live a life of pain. The dead feel no

sorrow. But a man who was once happy, when sorrow comes, longs for the joy he once knew. In

the Andromache, her logic serves another purpose, to set her as the rational antithesis to raging
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Hermione. Hermione accuses Andromache of poisoning her to make her barren and Andromache

fires back with, Your husband loathes you not because of any drugs of mine but because you are

not a pleasant person to live with.

Andromaches love is most clearly seen in her unceasing devotion to Hector, which is a

constant through every version, laid out first by Homer who describes her as a loving wife. Her

dilemma, to act as a good wife ought, is seen in The Trojan Women, where she says I will be a

slave in the house of the man who murdered my husband. If I forget Hector, the man I loved, if I

open my heart to a new master, I will be seen as a traitor to the dead. But if I remain faithful to

my husbands love, I will be hated by the man whose slave I amI despise the woman who gets

remarried whoforgets the love of her first man. Hecuba tells her to move on, that crying

wont do any use, and that since she lives, she might be able to someday find happiness if she

lets go of Hector. This is against everything that Andromache believes and we find out that she

keeps her belief, disregarding Hecubas advice in the Andromache. Faced with her approaching

murder by Menelaus, she cries out for help, Husband, husband, if only I could get the help of

your hand and spear, son of Priam! Even though he has been dead and gone for a long time

now, she still invokes Hectors name to protect her. Andromaches deep love is not only seen for

Hector, but also for her children, Astyanax, and even Molossus, the child she bears to

Neoptolemus. She is willing to do whatever she can to make their lives better. When the Greek

herald comes to

The potential differences in Andromache come from the different focus and goals of each

incarnation which drive her to make the decisions she does while still staying true to the basic

elements of her characterization. Andromaches focus in the Iliad is the prospect of losing her

only family and the potential effects of that. Even so, it is the only time we ever see her happy,
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even laughing, when Astyanax does not recognize Hector at first. Mostly, however, she is

worried that, the war is going to end badly for her and Astyanax, even though Hector tells her it

will be fine.

Euripides gives this weeping woman who is scared for her future time to grieve but then

also agency in a story of her own. In The Trojan Women, Euripides gives her this time to grieve

but then also gives her the right to be angry. When coming to Hecuba, she yells at her, saying,

Your son, Paris, should have died at birth. But he escaped, and for the love of an evil woman,

destroyed our city. She feels robbed of the life she should have led and is very focused on the

fact that because she was such a good wife to Hector, shes being punished for it now. This

explores Andromaches reactions to everything coming true that, in Homer, she had feared would

happenand so much worse. This is the play that features the death of Astyanax, something that

even the Greek herald Talthybius believes is morally wrong. And in that scene, she sets aside her

anger and grief is once again at the forefront of her mind. It is really impossible for her to say

anything; she latches onto just a few words and continues to repeat them, like kiss me, my

baby and I love you and the idea that she raised her son in vain. She does not have any higher

thinking and there is really nothing else for her to say.

Andromache has a very similar focus that The Trojan Women does, but while The Trojan

Women deals with the immediate effects of the end of the war, the Andromache has had more

time to reflect and perhaps cope. The biggest difference in Andromaches characterization from

The Iliad to the Andromache is her insistence on taking action. During Menelauss hunt for her

son, rather than keeping quiet, she tries, with all her power, to prevent this child to be taken away

from her and murderedeven willing to sacrifice her own life for him. She has been through this

before with another child and she is not willing to let it happen again. She also is now also
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unwilling to keep her mouth shut when faced with the absurd claims by Hermione and Menelaus.

She tells Hermione, I am afraid that my enslavement to you may debar me from speech

nevertheless I will not be convicted of surrendering myself and then leads into telling her, Do

not try to surpass your mother in man-loving, Hermione, for children with sense ought to avoid

the ways of wicked mothers. She also dares to speak against Menelaus, attempting to get him to

see reason, that she means no harm to The House of Atreus, even though the Chorus is telling her

you have said too much for a woman speaking to men.

Later authors often return to the characters of the Trojan War, when their own cities are

besieged by war or other comparable hardships. Therefore, it would be impossible to look at

Andromache as just a character that the author was interested in; we must also take into account

why the author in particular chose her and her story as one worth telling and exploring. For, in

Homer, she is mostly used to advance Hectors character. She and Astyanax give Hector

something to fight for, but her real use comes across in her role as Hectors wife. She is

described by Homer as a warm, generous, loving, and loyal wife. This depiction of her as

a loyal wife is present throughout her characterization in all the stories, but here in particular, it

emphasizes the contrast between Hector and Andromache and their very antithesis: Paris and

Helen. This depiction also paints Hector as the amazing ideal for Greek men.

Euripides in The Trojan Woman uses Andromache, along with the other Trojan women, as

a commentary on the horrors of unnecessary war/slaughter. She is the mother of a little boy,

whom the Greeks decide to senselessly murder because of his father and she is denied the right

to even bury him. She and Hecuba are the rational Trojan women. In the introduction to his

translation of The Trojan Women, Nicholas Rudall describes the circumstances surrounding the

performance, notably that one year before the production, Athens had invaded the island of
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Melos, a Greek island, neutral in the Peloponnesian War. Rudall goes on to say that Athenian

forces captured the island, put its men to death and enslaved its women and children. Having

this play, focused on the plight of the Trojan survivors by the hands of the horrible Greeks is very

telling of Euripides thoughts of the invasion.

Euripides Andromache, does not have such a clear influence, in part because scholars are

unsure of the exact date it was performed. However, the most agreed-upon date is ca. 425 BC,

putting this near the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. Such atrocities to spur on production

of The Trojan Women have not yet happened but Euripides does still seem to make a point about

Sparta, using Andromache as a jumping off point. Michael Walton, a classicist with a focus on

ancient drama, believes that this is a sort of subtextual political commentary on Athenian beliefs

of Sparta at the time. For, Menelaus is depicted as arrogant and his daughter greedy. Both are

willing to kill because of the threat an illegitimate child has posed to them and it takes a

foreigner, a slave and a concubine to call these behaviors into light and break them down as

unacceptable.

That ancient authors developed more about Andromache, this character who only appears

in less than 200 lines of Homers 24-book epic is interesting to us today, because it means they

must have had some interest in her. Unlike so many of the other Trojan characters, she is not

moralized and her character is not reinterpreted for the sake of making the authors point. They

were compelled to just tell the rest of her story, her life after the atrocities at Troy and how she

would deal with new hardships and maybe even make a point about their own times as well.