Hektor, prince and foremost defender of Troy, occupies within the depth-psychology-inflected classical corpus a position of extraordinary symbolic density. Unlike Achilles, whose heroic identity is inseparable from personal kleos and destructive menis, Hektor functions as the paradigmatic city-guardian: his very name, as Gregory Nagy demonstrates, derives etymologically from the verb echô in its protective sense, binding him ontologically to the polis he shields. The Iliad consistently frames Hektor as a figure whose greatness is inseparable from his doom—he receives divine glory from Zeus precisely because his death is imminent, a structural irony that the epic never permits the audience to forget. Nagy argues further that Hektor’s aristeia and death exist not for his own kleos but to constitute the kleos of Achilles; Hektor is, in this reading, instrumentalized by the Iliadic tradition itself. The battlefield scenes render him simultaneously as a force of nature—rolling boulder, whirlwind, raging fire—and as a husband, father, and son who understands his fate with tragic lucidity. His farewell to Andromache at the Skaian Gates, his taunt of the dying Patroklos, and the posthumous degradation of his body by Achilles each mark distinct psychological registers: duty, aggression, and the limit of heroic rage. The gods’ compassion for his corpse signals a moral horizon that even the poem’s violence cannot extinguish.