Fathers and sons, husbands and wives

From its beginnings the epic's central subject may be construed as the continuity or discontinuity of social and political structures. The Iliad tells of a struggle to destroy the large-scale structure of the city as a means to the restoration of order within the small-scale structure of the family of Menelaus; the Odyssey tells of a journey towards the restoration of a family and household ruptured by the absence of the husband and father, Odysseus. In the patriarchal society of antiquity the crucial relationship for the family (and ultimately for the city) is that of father to son. Here the two Homeric epics diverge, the one having a tragic, the other a comic, plot. In the Iliad our attention dwells not on the future reunion of Menelaus and Helen, but on family lines extinguished: in Troy the death of Hector, sole stay of the city, before his father's eyes, entailing also the annihilation of the prospects for Hector's own son, Astyanax, the ‘lord of the city’ who will never grow up to fill the role for which his name marks him out. On the Greek side Achilles' decision to fulfil his role as ‘best of the Achaeans’ by returning to the battle at Troy simultaneously removes the possibility of his homecoming to a reunion with his aged father Peleus. Achilles mentions his own son Neoptolemus once only, in a speech preoccupied with grief for the dead Patroclus, who has come to represent for him all close personal relationships (Iliad 19.326–33).