Andromache
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Andromache. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an-drom'a-ke, in Greek legend, the wife of Hector of Troy. She is one of the finest female characters in Greek literature . She was a daughter of the king of Thebes, and suffered much at the hands of Achilles. During her childhood he slew her father and seven brothers. During the siege of Troy he slew Hector. After the siege of Troy she passed into the possession of Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, who, however, bestowed her in marriage on Helenus, a brother of her dead husband. As his wife she appears in Virgil's Aeneid. Andromache's grief for her dead husband, Hector, is the theme of one of the finest passages in Homer's Iliad. The following is from the translation by Alexander Pope: First to the corse the weeping consort flew; Around his neck her milk-white arms she threw, "And oh, my Hector! Oh, my lord!" she cries, "Snatch'd in the bloom from these desiring eyes! Thou to the dismal realms forever gone! And I abandon'd, desolate, alone! . . . Why gav'st thou not to me thy dying hand? And why receiv'd not I thy last command? Some word thou would'st have spoke, which, sadly dear, My soul might keep, or utter with a tear; Which never, never could be lost in air, Fix'd in my heart and oft repeated there!" See Euripides ; Aeneid
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a daughter of Ætion, King of Thebes in Cilicia, and wife of Hector. After the conquest of Troy she became the prize of Pyrrhus, son of Achilles. Euripides has made her the chief character of a tragedy.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Nothing in either account has been overturned: Andromache is still Eëtion's daughter, still Hector's widow, still handed to Pyrrhus (Neoptolemus) and then to Helenus, and still the chief figure of Euripides' tragedy. What has shifted is the reading and the reading matter. Aiton's 1910 entry quotes Alexander Pope's rhymed couplets as the natural English Homer; today most readers meet the lament over Hector's body in Richmond Lattimore's 1951 or Robert Fagles's 1990 version, and Emily Wilson's Iliad appeared in 2023. Where Aiton called her "one of the finest female characters in Greek literature," modern criticism dwells less on her nobility than on her status as a war captive and enslaved concubine, and reads Euripides' Andromache and Trojan Women as drama about what war does to women.
Written for this edition, 2026.