In Greek mythology, Andromache was the wife of Hector, daughter of Eëtion of Cilician Thebe, and mother of Astyanax. Homer's Iliad presents her as the ideal of the faithful wife and grieving widow; after Troy's fall her son was killed and she was given as concubine to Neoptolemus, by whom she bore Molossus and, in some accounts, other sons. She later married Hector's brother Helenus and became queen in Epirus, remaining a lasting emblem of Trojan women's suffering in war.
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I.Family and the Iliad
Andromache was born at Cilician Thebe, where her father Eëtion ruled. Achilles later sacked the city, killing Eëtion and her seven brothers; her mother died of illness. Hector took her as wife with rich wedding gifts. Their son was named Scamandrius by his parents but Astyanax ("lord of the city") by the Trojans; some later accounts add other children such as Oxynios and Laodamas.
In Iliad Book 6 she meets Hector at the Scaean Gate with the infant Astyanax, urges him to fight from the walls rather than the plain, and hears his prayer that their son may one day be greater than his father. In Book 22, weaving a cloak and preparing his bath, she learns of Hector's death, casts away her headdress, and leads the women's lament — the poem's most sustained portrait of a wife's grief. Homer often identifies her simply as Hector's wife (álokhos), underscoring marriage as the core of her identity.
II.Captivity and Epirus
After Troy fell, the herald Talthybius announced the plan to kill Astyanax by casting him from the walls so he could not avenge Hector; Neoptolemus carried out the deed and took Andromache as concubine, with Helenus as a slave. By Neoptolemus she bore Molossus and, according to Pausanias, Pielus, Amphialus and Pergamus. Euripides' Andromache dramatizes Hermione's attempt to kill her out of jealousy; after Neoptolemus dies at Delphi (killed by Orestes in that play), Thetis announces that Andromache will marry Helenus and live among the Molossians, where Molossus will found a line of kings.
Virgil's Aeneid places Andromache and Helenus at Buthrotum in Chaonia, a hollow replica of Troy where she still tends Hector's cenotaph and gives Ascanius robes, seeing in him the image of Astyanax. Pausanias says she later lived with her youngest son Pergamus at Pergamum and died of old age, and that a shrine to her still stood there.
III.Reception
Andromache is the title figure of Euripides' Andromache and a central voice in Trojan Women; she appears in Sappho, Ennius, Seneca, Ovid and Virgil. In modern culture she is the heroine of Racine's Andromaque, a minor character in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and a subject of opera, ballet and film — from Vanessa Redgrave in The Trojan Women (1971) to Saffron Burrows in Troy (2004). Classical and later writers treat her fidelity and virtue as the type of the suffering Trojan woman.