Hecuba’s Appeal to Emotion: Love and Pity

While Priam’s attempt to persuade Hector was split between emotional and logical appeals, the appeal to pity is the primary thrust of Hecuba’s plea to her son:

Hecuba’s plea is that of a mother for her child. Indeed, her “wailing, sobbing,” and bearing out her breasts is reminiscent of Achilles’ reaction, and that of his slave women, to Patroclus’ death. Like Priam before her, Hecuba begs Hector to retreat out of pity for the suffering his death will bring to her – not to the community. Also like Priam, she draws the distinction between Achilles and Hector as one would a man from a beast: Achilles is a “madman.” He is savage, unreasonable, and in his savagery, he will deny his vanquished foe even the smallest modicum of respect, a proper burial. We know this is true and have already seen it in Achilles’ treatment of Lycaon as well as his promise for similar treatment to other princes of Troy.

Hector refuses his mother’s entreaties just as he does his father’s. Hector’s rationale in coming to that decision that is both beautiful and tragic. It underscores the fundamental difference between Aeneas as the champion of Virgil’s Aeneid, and Hector as an ideal warrior in the Iliad.

Hector's Deliberation

Hector heard the pleas of his parents, and they gave him pause:

Hector’s concern, as he expresses it thus far, is that of personal honor. He was advised to retreat when Achilles first rejoined the Greek army, but he mistakenly chose to keep his armies on the battlefield, and that decision has proved disastrous. Should he now retreat, he fears being shamed by a lesser man (Polydamas or another Trojan). That is to say, it would be better for Hector’s personal honor or his self-image to fight and die against Achilles, proving his courage and earning a beautiful death.

The middle third of Hector’s deliberation considers the other possibility, suing for peace, bargaining with Achilles, retreating, in a sense, from a more powerful opponent:

It’s unclear if Hector’s ruminations on returning Helen are out of self-preservation alone or a larger interest in restoring order and justice. After all, Paris violated xenia in the first place with the rape of Helen that ignited the war, and again, he was guaranteed to lose his duel with Menalaus in Book 3, which would have resulted in the same acts of restitution that Hector mulls over here. Hector’s considerations are plausible from both points of view: self-preservation and concern for justice. However, there is a greater structural purpose in Hector’s expression of such a reasoned path to peace between Greeks and Trojan, and that is to highlight the implacable savagery of Achilles in juxtaposition to reason:

There will be no reasoning with Achilles. The example of Lycaon definitively proved this point in Book 21. Casting off his weapons and pleading with Achilles for mercy, to feel pity, was a lost cause for Hector’s half-brother, and Lycaon had a far stronger claim for mercy than Hector, for Lycaon could claim the bonds of xenia with Achilles. No. There can be no reasoned negotiations with Achilles. No white flags or suing for peace. Such things are the idle fancies of young lovers and children. Hector is a chivalrous warrior. He will fight and die with honor.

The core elements of Hector’s decision to face Achilles can be found in his reply to Andromache in Book 6, when she too begs him not to return to the battlefield: “My shame before the Trojans and their wives…would be too terrible if I hung back from battle like a coward. And my heart won’t let me. I have learned to be one of the best, to fight in Troy’s first ranks, defending my father’s honor and my own” (6.463-9). Hector has been raised his entire life to pursue honor through martial prowess on the battlefield and to avoid the shame of running away. If he were to retreat now, he would put himself in the loathed position of Paris in Book 3, a man whose very proximity was anathema to the rank and file Trojans: “[Paris] could barely stand as disdainful Trojans made room for him in the ranks, and Hector, seeing his brother tremble at [the sight of Menelaus], started in on him with abusive epithets” (3.41-44).

Hector is compelled by duty to lead Troy’s armies, but that duty is linked to the community through the proxy of individual honor, the same individual honor that both bound Achilles to fight for Agamemnon and then drove a rift between them. Achilles was shamed by Agamemnon. Worse, he was shamed inappropriately, having been stripped unjustly of his war prize. This blow to Achilles’ individual honor led him to remove himself from his position as bulwark of the army, champion of the community. His individual honor was more important than the health of his community (the army). Achilles is not unique in this regard. Honor, as we have previously discussed, is the cultural coinage that binds warriors to their respective communities. The fissure in this system is that honor is inherently focused on the individual rather than the community, and that is why Priam’s appeal to Hector fails.

The proposition Priam makes to Hector is clear: sacrifice your individual honor for the greater good of the community. It’s a perfectly logical line of reasoning, as we discussed above. Yet it asks Hector to forego everything he is, everything he thinks himself to be. His “heart won’t let” him retreat, he tells Andromache in Book 6. Hector has wholly internalized the values of a timorous Homeric society, and those values demand he pursue honor and avoid shame. Sarpedon’s speech in Book 12 crystalizes this point: standing to fight so at the risk of one’s own life only makes the honor greater; it offers the opportunity to immortalize himself in a beautiful death.

Hector is dutiful, but he is very much a product of his environment. Hector’s action in the Iliad is fundamentally different from Aeneas of Virgil’s Aeneid in regard to the egocentric nature of Homeric honor. The piety or “duty” to which Aeneas is bound throughout the Aeneid is always in service to 1) the gods, 2) family, 3) community, generally in that order. The family, in this schema, is a microcosm of the community; thus they can be viewed as one and the same. The implication of this is that honor is only honorable for Aeneas when it is bound to his duty to the community (filial piety). Aeneas’s greatest glory in the Aeneid comes as an extension of his familial and communal success, something for which he sacrifices the opportunities both a beautiful death in the sack of Troy (Aeneid Book 2) and individual happiness in his romance with Dido (Aeneid Book 4). The Homeric ideal, as we have seen, is different. Achilles is willing to throw the entire Greek expedition into chaos for the sake of his individual honor. This is Ajax’s true criticism of Achilles in Book 9. It is no surprise, then, that Hector is willing to weaken the Trojan community for the sake of his individual honor as well. The very nature of Homeric honor demands that they do so.

Hector’s plea to Achilles is an appeal to civilized values, including the one emotion that unerringly works toward civilized values in the poem, pity. First, Hector invokes the soul of Achilles and his parents. These ideas are tied to pity and will recur in Priam’s interaction with Achilles in Book 24. The invocation of Achilles’ soul is straightforward: Hector calls on Achilles to pity his fallen enemy because he, too, will die, and when he does so, he will want to be buried. Thus, Hector asks Achilles to feel the most basic kind of human pity, that for the mortality of the human condition and the fact that, if nothing else, they share the promise of death in common.

The invocation of Achilles’ parents is another appeal to pity, but rather than for Hector, it is intended for Priam and Hecuba. The idea that Achilles would care about the king and queen of the enemy city is, from a removed perspective, absurd. But it hits closer to home than one might initially think, and it’s the same argument Priam will use successfully in Book 24. Hector asks Achilles to think of the pain that his own death will bring to his parents and their inability to properly mourn him when he dies, as he knows he will die far away from home. We noted Achilles’ hyper-awareness of the human condition when he refused to spare (feel pity for!) Lycaon in Book 21. In this way, Achilles and Hector are, or should be, linked: Peleus will be as helpless to burn and bury the body of Achilles as Priam will of Hector, if Achilles refuses to ransom his vanquished foe’s body. Thus, Hector appeals to Achilles’ sense of pity twice over and is rebuffed on both accounts.

Achilles refuses Hector’s request. The request for ransom is not unusual. To ransom a living son would undoubtedly yield a greater reward than a dead one, but either way, the gold that Achilles would receive by ransoming Hector would serve as timē, a trophy to honor him and announce the greatness of his warrior prowess by the largess of the ransom he receives. However, Achilles cares little for timē since Agamemnon stripped him of his prize in Book 1. He cares even less since Hector killed Patroclus and donned Achilles’ armor in Book 16. The enticement of ransom should move Achilles, just as the appeals to pity should move him, but this scene has played out numerous times before in the poem, most notably in Book 9 with the embassy to Achilles, and in Book 21 with Lycaon’s claim of xenia. Achilles is simply not moved by ties to the community, by civilized values. The rage that seeped into his bones and made his eyes glow like white-hot flame in Book 19 still rules his heart, and there is no room for such things as pity.

Achilles’ reply to Hector is the pinnacle of savagery in the Iliad: “I wish my stomach would let me cut off your flesh in strips and eat it raw for what you’ve done to me.” Achilles would gladly cannibalize Hector, eating him raw like a lion hunting his prey on the savannah. That is, after all, what Achilles likened himself to at the beginning of their confrontation, a lion who does not make treaties with men. Achilles is determined to deny Hector burial, and he expresses this fact, again, in language eerily similar to his rejection of Agamemnon’s offer in Book 9: there is no sum of money in the world that can turn Achilles from his savage purpose. As was the case before, he swells with rage, and that rage, alone, guides his actions.

Hector confirms this analysis for us:

The confrontation between Achilles and Hector in Book 22 is a tragic inversion of the meeting between Diomedes and Glaucus in Book 5. Two warriors meet on the battlefield to test the mettle of their opponents and, thus, themselves. They seek to “know” each other. Hector learns the measure of Achilles. He knows who he is, and that is a man driven mad, a man who, as Ajax said in Book 9, “has made his great heart savage. He is a cruel man…. [Achilles is] pitiless.” (9.647-52). Achilles cannot be reasoned with: “There was no way to persuade you”; persuasion requires reason, a logical appeal. Achilles lacks the basic human capacity to feel pity: “Your heart is a lump of iron”; emotional appeals to civilized action fall on deaf ears – or a closed heart! – as well.