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As, hand clasped in hand, Andromache and Hector stood, Hector looked silently at the beautiful babe in his nurse's arms, and smiled. Astyanax, "The City King," those of Troy called the child, because it was Hector his father who saved the city. Then said Andromache: "Dear lord, thy courage will bring thee death. Hast thou no pity for this babe nor for thy wife, who so soon shall be thy widow?
Hector's heart foreboded that it was the last time he would speak with her. She had with her their little son Astyanax. Weeping she besought him to spare himself for her sake. "For me there will be no other comfort if thou meetest thy doom, but sorrow. Father and mother have I none, for Achilles hath slain them and my seven brothers.
He stopped before his glass, which was lighted by the lamp only at one side, and saw one half of his face reflected with the silk handkerchief wound around his head, while the other half was in shadow, and the two ends of the knot stuck up over his forehead. "Truly," he laughed, "between us we should have a beautiful Astyanax!"
His daughter had married Hector, and now came to meet him with a nurse who carried his little child in her bosom a mere babe. Hector's darling son, and lovely as a star. Hector had named him Scamandrius, but the people called him Astyanax, for his father stood alone as chief guardian of Ilius.
Immediately before his return to the field of battle, he has his last interview with Andromache, whom he meets with his infant son Astyanax, carried by a nurse. There occurs, upon this occasion, one of the most beautiful scenes in the Iliad, where Hector dandles the boy in his arms, and pours forth a prayer, that he may one day be superior in fame to his father.
It was a Greek subject, Hector parting from Andromache when he went to engage the Greeks, giving his young son Astyanax into her arms, and she fixing her eyes upon him. When she looked at this piece, the resemblance it bore to her own condition made her burst into tears, and several times a day she went to see the picture, and wept before it.
He told her that Astyanax, the son of Hector of Troy, established the kingdom of Messina in Sicily. From him were derived two branches, which gave origin to two families of renown. From one sprang the royal race of Pepin and Charlemagne, and from the other, that of Reggio, in Italy. "From that of Reggio am I derived," he continued.
But when so little concern is shown, as is here the case with Astyanax, for the speech of Talthybius prevents even the slightest attempt to save him, the spectator soon acquiesces in the result. In this way Euripides frequently fails.
'Happy, thrice happy! they who once have dared, even though breathless, blinded with tears of awful joy, struck down upon their knees in utter helplessness, as they feel themselves but dead leaves in the wind which sweeps the universe happy they who have dared to gaze, if but for an instant, on the terror of that glorious pageant; who have not, like the young Astyanax, clung shrieking to the breast of mother Nature, scared by the heaven-wide flash of Hector's arms, and the glitter of his rainbow crest!
'Out with you, he will say, 'you have no father here, and the child will go crying back to his widowed mother he, Astyanax, who erewhile would sit upon his father's knees, and have none but the daintiest and choicest morsels set before him.
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