Homer · Iliad 6.466–481
Hector, Andromache and the Shield of Troy
Astyanax
A sorrowful progressive-metal composition inspired by Hector, Andromache, and their infant son in Homer’s Iliad — and by the terrible distance between the future a father imagines for his child and the future the epic’s audience knows is coming.
Astyanax is sung in Hector’s voice.
The song takes as its emotional center one of the most intimate scenes in the Iliad: Hector’s meeting with Andromache and their infant son in Book 6. But it does not simply retell that scene. It transforms Hector’s brief Homeric prayer into a long private meditation on fatherhood, duty, fear, memory, and the possibility that he may be fighting for a future he will never live to see.
The music video expands that idea still further.
Rather than beginning with Hector already at war, it imagines the life that came before: his first meeting with Andromache, their betrothal and marriage, the birth of their son, and a domestic world not narrated by Homer in this sequence. The arrival of the Greek fleet then breaks into that reconstructed past. From there the video moves through Hector’s role as defender of Troy, the death of Patroclus, Achilles’ return, Hector’s own death, and Achilles dragging his body away.
The result is not a scene from the Iliad enlarged to six minutes.
It is a portrait of the man whose death means that the world of Andromache and Astyanax can no longer be protected.
The Child Called Astyanax
Homer gives Hector’s son two names.
His father calls him Scamandrius. The Trojans call him Astyanax.
The second name is especially important to the song and video. Homer explains it through Hector’s position in the city: the child is called Astyanax because Hector stood foremost in the defense of Ilion.
The name therefore binds father, child, and city together.
Astyanax is not only Hector’s son.
He is the son of the man on whom Troy depends.
That connection becomes the central architecture of the video. The domestic scenes are not separate from the war scenes. They explain what Hector believes he is defending when he returns to battle.
The child in his arms and the city behind its walls belong to the same future.
Hector, Andromache, and the Life Before the War
The Iliad does not narrate Hector and Andromache’s first meeting, courtship, wedding, and the birth of Astyanax as the chronological sequence shown in the music video.
Those scenes are artistic reconstruction.
Homer gives us the family after war has already transformed their lives. Andromache is Hector’s wife; Astyanax is already an infant; and the possibility of widowhood, orphanhood, enslavement, and the destruction of Troy hangs over their meeting in Book 6.
The video works backward from that threatened family.
It asks what Hector and Andromache had before the war demanded everything from them.
Their first meeting, betrothal, marriage, and the birth of Astyanax therefore do not claim to reproduce lost Homeric episodes. They provide a dramatic past for the relationship that Homer presents under extreme strain.
That distinction matters.
**Ancient text tells us who they are to one another. Artistic reconstruction imagines the ordinary human history that made those bonds possible.**
When the Greeks arrive in the video, the audience already knows what can now be lost.
The Helmet and the Child
The most famous image behind the song occurs in Iliad 6.466–481.
Hector reaches toward his son.
Astyanax recoils in terror.
The child does not recognize the father inside the gleaming bronze and horsehair-crested helmet. Hector and Andromache laugh, and Hector immediately removes the helmet and lays it shining on the ground.
For a few moments the great defender of Troy has to stop looking like the man Troy needs him to be.
Only then can he hold his child.
The scene compresses the central conflict of Hector’s life into one visual gesture.
The armor that protects his family also frightens his son.
The warrior whom the city needs is not the form in which the child can recognize his father.
The helmet scene remains one of the most important Homeric images behind the song, but the finished video does something different with the whispered opening.
The Opening Whisper and Andromache
The words
**Hush now... Don’t be scared... You’re not alone... I’m right here...**
were originally conceived as words to the baby. In the finished video, however, they were repurposed to console Andromache, who is anxious before meeting Hector for the first time and entering a betrothal arranged by their parents — plausibly imagined as part of a political pact between their cities.
That opening sequence is therefore artistic reconstruction rather than a lost Homeric episode. The words function as emotional accompaniment to Andromache’s uncertainty as she enters a marriage whose personal future she cannot yet know.
The later family scenes then return the song fully to its central father-and-child relationship. Homer’s Book 6 helmet episode remains the ancient anchor for the larger contrast between Hector as terrifying warrior and Hector as husband and father.
The Wide-Wayed City
The lyric calls Troy “the wide-wayed city.”
That language belongs naturally to the Homeric world. The Iliad repeatedly describes Troy with the epithet εὐρυάγυια, “wide-wayed” or “with broad streets.”
The phrase therefore does more than create an ancient atmosphere.
It enlarges Hector’s dilemma.
His responsibility is not limited to a palace, household, wife, or child. The city itself makes a claim on him:
The wide-wayed city needs me, needs my spear and name.
That is the song’s language, but the idea behind it is for Zeus to deliver Astyanax from the current fight — for the child to survive — even though Hector carries a dark foreboding that he will not.
In Book 6 Hector tells Andromache that he cannot withdraw from battle. He fears shame before the Trojan men and women, and he says that he has learned to fight among the foremost Trojans.
He also knows that Troy will fall.
This combination is essential.
Hector does not fight because he believes victory is guaranteed.
He fights while already knowing that sacred Ilion is doomed.
The Tamer of Horses
The song calls Hector “the tamer of horses.”
This is not an ornamental modern title.
Horse-taming language is one of the defining Homeric associations of Troy and Hector, and the Iliad itself closes with Hector identified by the epithet ἱππόδαμος — tamer of horses.
In the song, the phrase becomes almost painfully double-edged:
Without the tamer of horses she would fall to flame.
The lyric turns an epic epithet into a statement of civic dependence.
Hector’s heroic name has become a burden.
If he is the man who protects Troy, then remaining safely at home with his wife and son becomes almost impossible to imagine.
“I Go Because I Must Go”
One of the song’s central claims is:
I go because I must go, not because I’m brave.
That is not a quotation from Homer, but it is closely related to Hector’s dilemma in Book 6.
Andromache begs him to remain near the walls. Hector tells her that her fears concern him too. He knows the future catastrophe. He knows what may happen to her if Troy falls. Yet he cannot accept the shame of withdrawing from the fighting.
The song shifts the emphasis.
Homer’s Hector speaks openly about courage, shame, glory, and fighting in the front ranks.
The song’s Hector looks inward and describes the same compulsion as necessity.
This is one of the project’s interpretive choices: heroic duty is experienced from inside not as triumph, but as something that takes a man away from everything he wants to protect.
“I Go to Keep You Living”
The line I go to keep you living, though I walk to my grave is the hinge between the song and the larger music video.
Homer’s Hector does foresee destruction. He tells Andromache that Troy will fall, and he imagines with horror the possibility that she will be carried away into slavery. He even says he would rather be dead and buried before hearing her cries as she is dragged away.
The song concentrates that foreknowledge into the relationship with Astyanax.
Hector fights so that his son may live.
Yet the audience knows the terrible irony: Hector’s death is one of the clearest signs that the protection surrounding Astyanax has failed.
The video therefore treats Hector himself as the shield of Troy.
Once the shield falls, the future he has been trying to preserve becomes exposed.
Hector’s Prayer — and the Song’s Reversal of It
This is the most important transformation in Astyanax.
In Homer, Hector takes his son into his arms and prays to Zeus and the other gods.
He does not ask them to keep Astyanax away from war.
He asks for almost the opposite.
Hector prays that his son will become pre-eminent among the Trojans, strong, ruler of Ilion, and even greater than his father. He imagines Astyanax returning from battle after killing an enemy and carrying bloody spoils, to the joy of his mother.
That is the heroic future Hector knows how to imagine.
The song deliberately rewrites the prayer.
Its Hector asks:
**Shield him from the bronze-clash, shield him from the fight. Let not the dark ones find him, let not sorrow near, Guide my little darling to live without fear.**
The change is fundamental.
The father in Homer asks that the heroic world continue successfully through his son.
The father in the song is not necessarily rejecting the warrior world for Astyanax’s entire future. His immediate plea is more specific and more desperate: let this child be delivered from the war now consuming Troy. Let him survive the bronze-clash that Hector himself must enter.
That is why Shield him from the bronze-clash, shield him from the fight. Let not the dark ones find him, let not sorrow near, Guide my little darling to live without fear is heard first as a prayer for preservation through the present catastrophe. Hector wants Astyanax to live, even as he carries a dark foreboding that the gods may not grant it.
This is not presented as a correction to Homer. It is the composition’s central act of interpretation: the Homeric prayer for future heroic greatness is transformed into a father’s fear that his child may not survive long enough to have any future at all.
Zeus the Cloud-Gatherer
Several phrases in the choruses draw from traditional Homeric language surrounding Zeus.
He is father of gods and men, and cloud-gatherer is one of his familiar epic epithets.
The song uses that Homeric Zeus but does not attempt to reproduce one particular Homeric prayer word for word.
The laughter itself has a direct Homeric precedent. In Iliad 21.388–390, the gods collide in battle, the wide earth rings beneath the tumult, and Zeus hears it from Olympus; Homer says that the heart within him laughs with joy as he watches the gods join in strife.
The song’s phrase “shaking the earth with laughter” compresses those neighboring images into one line. “Earth-shaker” remains characteristically Poseidon’s epithet, but Zeus laughing above a divine battle while the earth resounds below is unmistakably Homeric. The lyric fuses the earth’s violent response and Zeus’ laughter into a single image of divine distance from mortal suffering.
The Fates and the Thread
The song says:
The grey ones spin their thread out, short or long I don’t know.
This draws on the wider Greek image of the Moirai, the Fates, as powers who allot and eventually spin the course of human life.
The Iliad itself speaks constantly of moira, aisa, allotted fate, and the limits mortals cannot escape. Hector later tells Andromache that no man will send him to Hades beyond his appointed fate, and that no one, coward or brave, escapes fate once born.
The song turns that Homeric fatalism into the more visually familiar image of the spinning Fates.
The inevitability of allotted death is Homeric; the “grey ones” visibly spinning Hector’s thread is the song’s mythic visualization of it.
Father, Husband, and Defender
The song repeatedly refuses to let Hector become only a battlefield figure.
He imagines the ordinary acts of fatherhood he may never perform:
**I may not teach your hands the reins, nor lift you to the sun, Nor stand beside your first proud steps when boyhood has begun.**
None of those specific scenes is narrated by Homer.
Their purpose is precisely to evoke the unwritten future between epic events.
The warrior’s death is therefore measured not only in glory or defeat but in missing years.
“You May Not Know My Face Then”
The song allows Hector to imagine becoming a story:
**One day you’ll search for stories in another’s grieving eyes, And ask what kind of man I was beneath these Trojan skies.**
This is artistic invention, but it fits the poem’s intense concern with memory and reputation.
Hector is one of the great names of Troy.
But the song asks what such fame means to a child who may lose the actual person before memory has formed.
You may not know my face then, nor remember how I smiled.
The world may remember Hector perfectly as a warrior. His son may not remember him as a father.
The Video: Before Hector Was the Shield
The music video begins earlier than Homer’s principal Hector-Andromache scene because it needs the audience to see what “Troy” means to Hector before the city becomes only walls, armies, and fire.
The reconstructed opening therefore shows:
- Hector’s first meeting with Andromache;
- their developing bond and betrothal;
- marriage;
- the birth of Astyanax;
- and a family world existing before the Greek expedition reaches Troy.
These are not offered as undocumented episodes recovered from antiquity.
They are visual prologue.
The video creates a peaceful past so that Hector’s later choices carry a visible cost.
When the Greek fleet arrives, war does not simply threaten a city on a map.
It enters a marriage and a nursery.
Patroclus and the Turning of the War
The video eventually moves far beyond Book 6 to the death of Patroclus.
That episode matters because it is the point at which Hector’s apparent battlefield triumph begins to become his death sentence.
Homer carefully complicates Patroclus’ death.
Apollo first overwhelms and disarms him. Euphorbus wounds him. Hector then sees the wounded Patroclus withdrawing, closes with him, and delivers the fatal mortal blow.
The dying Patroclus refuses to let Hector claim the victory simply. He names Fate and Apollo, names Euphorbus, and tells Hector that he himself will soon die at Achilles’ hands.
The video therefore treats the killing of Patroclus not simply as Hector’s greatest triumph.
It is the moment the road to Achilles closes behind him.
Achilles
Once Achilles returns to battle, the visual story moves toward the outcome Hector has feared from the beginning.
Hector faces him outside Troy.
He dies.
The man who has functioned throughout the video as the city’s living shield is now physically removed from the space he protected.
Within the architecture of Astyanax, it is the collapse of a protective relationship:
Hector cannot guard the city.
Hector cannot guard Andromache.
Hector cannot guard his son.
The repeated prayer “keep him through the night” has reached the limit of a father’s power.
The Body Dragged Away
After killing Hector in Book 22, Achilles pierces the tendons of Hector’s feet, fastens the body to his chariot, and drags it toward the Greek ships.
The video includes this because Hector’s tragedy does not end at the instant of death.
The man who has spent the song trying to protect his family from humiliation, enslavement, violence, and grief is himself publicly subjected to outrage before the eyes of Troy.
The image also gives the song’s language of helplessness its final physical form.
Hector can no longer act. His family can no longer reach him. The shield has become the body being dragged away from the walls.
The Shield of Troy
The music video was ultimately framed under the larger title The Shield of Troy because that phrase captures Hector’s structural role in the story.
It is not a literal Homeric title attached to Hector in those words.
It is the video’s metaphor.
Homer does, however, give the metaphor strong foundations.
The Trojans call Hector’s son Astyanax because of Hector’s pre-eminent defense of Ilion. Andromache imagines Hector as the man whose loss will leave her exposed to captivity. The poem repeatedly places him at the front of Troy’s resistance.
The video turns those relationships into one image:
Hector is the shield between his family and the future the audience already knows.
A Prayer the Audience Knows Cannot Be Granted
The central tragedy of the song is dramatic irony.
Hector asks that Astyanax be kept safe.
The ancient audience knows that Troy is doomed.
Later traditions make Astyanax’s death after the sack especially explicit, but even within the Iliad, Andromache’s lament after Hector’s death already imagines the child’s future as one of terrible vulnerability.
The song therefore does not need to show Astyanax’s ultimate fate directly to make the prayer painful.
Every repetition of Keep him, cloud-gatherer, keep him through the night becomes more fragile because the listener knows that Hector himself cannot guarantee morning.
The Sound of the Song
Musically, Astyanax is deliberately restrained for much of its length.
A sorrowful acoustic figure and low drone create the feeling of a private space insulated only temporarily from war. Metallic echoes arrive from a distance rather than dominating the arrangement.
The song is about one of the greatest warriors in the Iliad, yet it spends much of its time refusing the sound of heroic spectacle.
The father speaks more softly than the warrior.
The choruses function as prayer rather than battle cry.
Even when the larger video expands into armies, Patroclus, Achilles, and Hector’s death, the recurring acoustic material reminds us what the battlefield scenes mean.
They are happening to the man who once held a child and asked the gods to let him live without fear.
Historical, Literary, and Artistic Layers
38th Scroll distinguishes three layers in Astyanax and its video:
Ancient text — Hector, Andromache, Astyanax, the Book 6 encounter, Hector’s prayer, Troy’s foretold destruction, Patroclus’ death, Hector’s death, and the treatment of his body as narrated by Homer.
Literary and mythic context — Homeric epithets, the broader Greek language of fate, later traditions concerning the fall of Troy, and the reception of Hector’s family story.
Artistic reconstruction — Hector and Andromache’s first meeting, betrothal, wedding, Astyanax’s birth as sequential scenes, the nighttime lullaby, Hector’s extended private monologue, and the song’s rewritten prayer that asks the gods to preserve Astyanax from war rather than make him a greater warrior.
Those layers are intentionally interwoven in the finished work, but they are not identical.
Explore the Ancient Texts
Three Homeric passages form the primary textual backbone of the finished song-and-video project.
Book 6 — the family and the prayer Astyanax recoils from Hector’s helmet; Hector removes it, embraces his son, and prays for the child’s future.
Book 16 — the turning point Patroclus, already struck by Apollo and wounded by Euphorbus, receives the fatal mortal blow from Hector and predicts Hector’s approaching death at Achilles’ hands.
Book 22 — the fall of Troy’s defender Hector dies outside Troy; Achilles remembers Patroclus, strips Hector, binds the corpse to his chariot, and drags it toward the Achaean ships.
Together the three passages trace the same arc as the video:
what Hector wants to protect → the victory that summons Achilles → the fall of the shield.
Selected Sources and Further Reading
- Homer. Iliad 6.390–502, especially 6.440–481. Greek text: Monro and Allen, Homeri Opera; Perseus / Scaife.
- Homer. Iliad 16.786–867. Patroclus’ wounding and death, Hector’s fatal blow, and Patroclus’ prophecy.
- Homer. Iliad 22.367–404. Hector’s death and Achilles’ treatment of the body.
- Homer. Iliad 22.437–515. Andromache discovers Hector’s death and laments the future of Astyanax.
- Homer. Iliad 24.723–804. Andromache’s lament and Hector’s funeral.
- Dickinson College Commentaries. Commentary on Homer’s Iliad, especially Books 6 and 24.
- Perseus Digital Library / Scaife Viewer. Greek text and translations of the Iliad.
Primary Sources
Ancient Texts Behind This Composition
Read the Ancient Texts linked directly to Astyanax, with original-language passages, translations, and commentary.
Homer · Iliad 16.818–857
Patroclus, Hector and the Prophecy
Read the text →Homer · Iliad 22.361–404
Hector’s Death and the Dragging
Read the text →Continue Exploring
More from 38th Scroll
Browse the full composition archive or the Ancient Texts library for translations, primary sources, and commentary behind the music.