Hector at Troy

War Is Not His Native Element

"The arts of peace are useless now. Troy will not be saved by the magnanimity and tender-heartedness of Priam nor by Paris' brilliance in the courts of love. If it is to survive it will do so because of the devotion, courage and incessant efforts of one man, Priam's son Hector. On him falls the whole burden of the war. He is a formidable warrior, formidable enough so that in Book 7 no Achaean volunteers to face him in single combat until they are tongue-lashed by Menelaus and then by Nestor. But war is not his native element. Unlike Achilles, he is clearly a man made for peace, for those relationships between man and man, and man and woman, which demand sympathy, persuasion, kindness and, where firmness is necessary, a firmness expressed in forms of law and resting on granted authority. He is a man who appears most himself in his relationships with others." 

- This is from Bernard Knox's introduction to Robert Fagles' translation of Homer's The Iliad (1990), p. 33. 

See also And So the Worm Turned, Little Karl, Wartime Presidents, What the Greeks Knew.