ABSTRACT

Among all the personalities who populate the world of heroic epic, there is only one pure hero, once and for all: Hector, son of Priam, the King of Troy, and the city's last defense against the genocidal tide which the Greeks have set in motion. One of the qualities of the ancient hero isn't to be found in Hector: he has no hybris, or none of the cataclysmic arrogance that deranges the soul of Achilles, of Agamemnon, and even of Ulysses when he gives free reign to his rage against the already blinded and tortured Cyclops. Hector proceeds to the royal palace to see his mother, Hecuba. The Hector who grasps his spear and descends into battle against the Greeks moves through the landscape of our most powerful experiences of nostalgia. Hector is an ancient metaphor of the traditional father, but also of that father's irreparable distance from the world of the mother and the child.