Hector

Where Achilles fights for glory, Hector fights because the city is behind him. The farewell to Andromache at the Scaean gate — the baby frightened by his horsehair crest, the laugh, the helmet set down — is the most beloved scene in Homer. He kills Patroclus, waits alone outside the wall against his parents’ prayers, breaks and runs, turns and dies; and the poem that began with the wrath of Achilles ends, deliberately, with his funeral: “and so they buried Hector, tamer of horses.”