nded friend, and drove his spear through head
and helmet of a Trojan prince, and everywhere men were falling beneath
spears and arrows and heavy stones which the warriors threw. Here
Menelaus speared the man who built the ships with which Paris had sailed
to Greece; and the dust rose like a cloud, and a mist went up from the
fighting men, while Diomede stormed across the plain like a river in
flood, leaving dead bodies behind him as the river leaves boughs of
trees and grass to mark its course. Pandarus wounded Diomede with an
arrow, but Diomede slew him, and the Trojans were being driven in
flight, when Sarpedon and Hector turned and hurled themselves on the
Greeks; and even Diomede shuddered when Hector came on, and charged at
Ulysses, who was slaying Trojans as he went, and the battle swayed this
way and that, and the arrows fell like rain.

But Hector was sent into the city to bid the women pray to the goddess
Athene for help, and he went to the house of Paris, whom Helen was
imploring to go and fight like a man, saying: 'Would that the winds had
wafted me away, and the tides drowned me, shameless that I am, before
these things came to pass!'

Then Hector went to see his dear wife, Andromache, whose father had been
slain by Achilles early in the siege, and he found her and her nurse
carrying her little boy, Hector's son, and like a star upon her bosom
lay his beautiful and shining golden head. Now, while Helen urged Paris
to go into the fight, Andromache prayed Hector to stay with her in the
town, and fight no more lest he should be slain and leave her a widow,
and the boy an orphan, with none to protect him. The army, she said,
should come back within the walls, where they had so long been safe, not
fight in the open plain. But Hector answered that he would never shrink
from battle, 'yet I know this in my heart, the day shall come for holy
Troy to be laid low, and Priam and the people of Priam. But this and my
own death do not trouble me so much as the thought of you, when you
shall be carried as a slave to Greece, to spin at another woman's
bidding, and bear water from a Grecian well. May the heaped up earth of
my tomb cover me ere I hear thy cries and the tale of thy captivity.'

Then Hector stretched out his hands to his little boy, but the child was
afraid when he saw the great glittering helmet of his father and the
nodding horsehair crest. So Hector laid his helmet on the ground and
dandled the child in his