If Achilles is the poem's fire, Hector is its heart. Prince of Troy, its greatest fighter, a husband and a father defending the city where everyone he loves is waiting — he is the man with the most to lose, and he loses it. Homer, a poet of the Greeks, gives their enemy the tenderest scenes in the poem and the death that breaks it open.
Hector is the eldest son of King Priam of Troy, husband of Andromache and father of the infant Astyanax, and the Trojans' greatest warrior. He kills Patroclus in Book 16, which brings Achilles back to the war; in Book 22 Achilles kills him beneath the walls of Troy and defiles his body. The poem ends in Book 24 with the ransom of that body and Hector's funeral — the last note of the entire Iliad.
Hector's greatness is not that he is the strongest — Achilles is stronger, and Hector knows it — but that he fights anyway, because Troy is his to defend. His most famous scene, in Book 6, has no fighting in it at all. He comes in from the battlefield to find his wife Andromache on the wall with their baby son, and she begs him not to go back out, because she has already lost her father and brothers and he is now father, mother, brother, and husband to her all at once. Hector answers that he cannot hide from the war and keep his honor — but as he reaches for the child, the baby shrieks in terror at the great horsehair crest of his helmet, and Hector laughs and takes the helmet off and holds his son, and prays only that the boy will grow up better than his father. It is one of the most human moments in all of literature, and it is given to the enemy.
When Hector kills Patroclus, he seals his own fate, because he draws Achilles' grief-maddened rage down onto himself. In Book 22 the two meet at last. Hector's nerve fails and he runs; Achilles chases him three times around the walls of Troy while the whole city watches from above. Then Athena, in disguise, tricks Hector into believing his brother has come to fight beside him — and he turns, alone, to face Achilles, and dies on his spear. With his last breath he asks that his body be given back to his family. Achilles refuses, and drags the corpse behind his chariot in the dust.
In Jungian terms, Hector is the ego that lives for the collective — for the city, the family, the wall that must be held — set against Achilles, the towering individual who lives for his own glory and his own grief. The tragedy of the Iliad is that these two needs, both real, both honorable, cannot both survive. The defender of the whole must fall to the fury of the one.
Homer does not let the poem end on Achilles' rage. In Book 24 the aged King Priam crosses into the Greek camp alone, at night, and kneels to kiss the hands of the man who killed his son, begging for the body. Achilles, seeing his own father in the old man's grief, weeps with him and gives Hector back. The Iliad — a poem about the wrath of Achilles — closes on the funeral of his enemy, and its very last line lays Hector to rest: "Such was the burial of Hector, tamer of horses." That Homer gives the final word to the fallen defender rather than to the victor is, for many readers, the deepest thing the poem knows.
Who is Hector in the Iliad?
The prince of Troy and its greatest defender, eldest son of King Priam and husband of Andromache. Brave, dutiful, and devoted to his city and family, he is the poem's tragic counterweight to Achilles.
How does Hector die?
In Book 22, Achilles pursues him around the walls of Troy. The goddess Athena tricks Hector into standing his ground, and Achilles kills him with a spear-thrust to the throat, then drags his body behind his chariot.
Why does the Iliad end with Hector's funeral?
Homer chooses to close not on Greek triumph but on Trojan grief. Priam ransoms his son's body; Achilles relents. The poem's final line mourns Hector, tamer of horses — mercy and grief, not victory, have the last word.