susceptible to Hector's alternations of confidence and panic, as to his tender anxieties about his wife and child. The contrast between the two is very remarkable; as strong, though of quite a different kind, as that between the two chief female characters in the poem—Helen, charming even in her frailty, attracting us and compelling our admiration in spite of our moral judgment; Andromache, the blameless wife and mother, whose charm is the beauty of true womanhood, and whose portrait, as drawn by the poet, bears strong witness by its sweetness and purity to the essential soundness of the domestic relations in the age which he depicts.
The poem, as we have seen, ends somewhat abruptly. We learn nothing from it of the fate of Troy, except so far as we have been taught throughout the tale that the fortunes of the city and people depended wholly upon Hector. "Achilles' wrath" was the theme of the song, and now that this has been appeased, we wait for no further catastrophe. Yet, if Achilles has been the hero, it is remarkable that the poet's parting sympathies appear to rest, as those of the reader almost certainly will, with Hector. It would seem that Homer himself felt something of what he makes Jupiter express with regard to the Trojans—"They interest me, though they must needs perish." The Trojan hero must fall, or the glory of the Greek could not be consummated; but the last words of the poem, as they record his funeral honours, so they express the poet's regretful eulogy:—
"Such honours paid they to the good knight Hector."
Virgil, in his Æneid, naturally exalts the glory of Hector, because it was his purpose to trace the origin
