spear clean through the neck of Hector. He fell in the dust and Achilles
said, "Dogs and birds shall tear your flesh unburied." With his dying
breath Hector prayed him to take gold from Priam, and give back his body
to be burned in Troy. But Achilles said, "Hound! would that I could
bring myself to carve and eat thy raw flesh, but dogs shall devour it,
even if thy father offered me thy weight in gold." With his last words
Hector prophesied and said, "Remember me in the day when Paris shall slay
thee in the Scaean gate." Then his brave soul went to the land of the
Dead, which the Greeks called Hades. To that land Ulysses sailed while
he was still a living man, as the story tells later.

Then Achilles did a dreadful deed; he slit the feet of dead Hector from
heel to ankle, and thrust thongs through, and bound him by the thongs to
his chariot and trailed the body in the dust. All the women of Troy who
were on the walls raised a shriek, and Hector's wife, Andromache, heard
the sound. She had been in an inner room of her house, weaving a purple
web, and embroidering flowers on it, and she was calling her bower
maidens to make ready a bath for Hector when he should come back tired
from battle. But when she heard the cry from the wall she trembled, and
the shuttle with which she was weaving fell from her hands. "Surely I
heard the cry of my husband's mother," she said, and she bade two of her
maidens come with her to see why the people lamented.

She ran swiftly, and reached the battlements, and thence she saw her dear
husband's body being whirled through the dust towards the ships, behind
the chariot of Achilles. Then night came over her eyes and she fainted.
But when she returned to herself she cried out that now none would defend
her little boy, and other children would push him away from feasts,
saying, "Out with you; no father of thine is at our table," and his
father, Hector, would lie naked at the ships, unclad, unburned,
unlamented. To be unburned and unburied was thought the greatest of
misfortunes, because the dead man unburned could not go into the House of
Hades, God of the Dead, but must always wander, alone and comfortless, in
the dark borderland between the dead and the living.

THE CRUELTY OF ACHILLES, AND THE RANSOMING OF HECTOR

When Achilles was asleep that night the ghost of Patroclus came, saying,
"Why dost thou not burn and bury me? for the other shadows of dead men
suffer me not to