tidings that the Greeks have decided that her son will be thrown to the rocks from the walls of Troy. Finally, in the play that bears her name, Andromache is the mother of Molossus and their lives are threatened by her husband's new wife, Hermione, daughter of Helen. By the end of the play she is a widow again, but her marriage to Helenus has been foretold and the safety of Molossus' line has been ensured by the promise of Thetis.
Although the three works under consideration have the appearance of a planned, connected program of presenting different stages in Andromache's life this is not the case. Euripides, of course, based his character of Andromache on Homer's version in The Iliad. But The Trojan Women was the third play in a trilogy that has not survived and he wrote the Andromache on another occasion. This is clearly, however, the same character in all three cases and this consistency is due to the fact that it was, after all, one writer developing a view of the character on the basis of Homer's work. Very little is changed about her behavior and her circumstances are consistent from one work to the next. But she is also subtly different as, increasingly, her role in the gods' desire to avenge Troy becomes clear. In The Iliad Andromache has been orphaned by the war. Both her parents are dead and, significantly, it was "brilliant Achilles who slew [her] father, Edtion" (Il. 6.414). It was also Achilles who killed her seven brothers on the battlefield. All of these deaths, Andromache says to her husband, meant that Hector was "father to me, and my honored mother, / you are my brother, and it is you who are my young husband" (Il. 6.429-30). Andromache has no family but her husband and child and, as she is in this strange way 'adopted' by her husband, she is the continuator of his line--even
...