Astyanax belongs to the Trojan royal family in Greek legend. His father Hector was the son of King Priam and Hecuba, and his mother Andromache was the daughter of Eetion, ruler of Cilician Thebe. Homer gives the child two names. Hector calls him Scamandrius, recalling the river Scamander, while the people call him Astyanax because Hector is the city's chief defender. The name expresses their hopes for the father's household as much as any authority possessed by the infant himself. In the Iliad he is still carried by a nurse, dependent on the adults whose world the fighting threatens to destroy.

The helmet scene takes place in Book 6 of the Iliad. Hector has left the fighting briefly and meets Andromache at the Scaean Gates, accompanied by the nurse and their child. Andromache has already lost her father and brothers and fears losing Hector as well. He cannot promise her safety: his obligations to Troy pull him back towards battle even as he recognises the suffering its defeat would bring. When he reaches towards his son, Astyanax shrinks into the nurse's arms. The bronze helmet and moving horsehair crest frighten the baby, who cannot recognise his father beneath the equipment of war. Hector and Andromache laugh, and Hector removes the helmet before taking the child.

Holding Astyanax, Hector prays to Zeus and the other gods that his son will grow strong, rule Troy and surpass his father's reputation. The prayer gives the scene its painful contrast. To the parents, the child represents a future still worth imagining; to an audience familiar with the fall of Troy, that future is already in danger. Hector returns the boy to Andromache, and she smiles through her tears. The tenderness does not stop the war. He takes up his helmet again, she goes home, and the fighting continues. Astyanax has no speech of his own, but his frightened response briefly changes Hector from a public defender into a father comforting his child.

After Achilles kills Hector, Andromache imagines the vulnerability of the son left behind. In Book 22 she fears that an orphan will lose protection, standing and the care he once received at his father's table. In Book 24 her lament also anticipates the possibility that a victorious Greek might throw Astyanax from a wall in revenge for someone Hector killed. Achilles' treatment of Hector's corpse deepens the family's suffering, but the repeated dragging described in Book 24 is around Patroclus's tomb, not twelve days of circuits around Troy's walls. Priam eventually ransoms the body. The Iliad ends with Hector's funeral; it does not narrate the sack of Troy or the actual death of Astyanax.

The child's fate is developed in accounts of the city's capture and in tragedy. In Euripides' The Trojan Women, first performed in 415 BCE, the herald Talthybius tells Andromache that the Greek leaders have decided her son must die. Odysseus has argued against allowing the son of such a formidable father to grow up. Andromache recognises the cruelty of that reasoning: the greatness that should have protected the child is now being used against him. She must surrender him while facing her own removal from Troy as Neoptolemus's captive. The play presents a decision by the victorious army, not an act for which the infant bears any responsibility.

Ancient accounts differ over who performs the killing. Pausanias reports the tradition that Neoptolemus threw Astyanax from the tower, while other accounts associate his death with Odysseus. The epitome of Apollodorus describes the Greeks collectively throwing him from the battlements. These variations should not be collapsed into a single account in which the same named executioner appears in every source. In Euripides, the focus is the announcement, Andromache's farewell and the consequences for the women who survive. The death is not staged before the audience. Its horror is carried by the words of the herald and the return of the child who can no longer answer his family.

Seneca's Roman tragedy Troades adds a different dramatic sequence. Andromache hides Astyanax in Hector's tomb, hoping that his dead father's resting place can protect him. Ulysses, the Roman name used for Odysseus, questions her and threatens the tomb, forcing her to choose between further concealment and immediate destruction. She finally brings the child out. The hiding place turns the father's memory into a last attempted refuge, but it cannot remove the danger attached to the family name. This scene belongs specifically to Seneca's treatment and should not be inserted into the Iliad as though Homer had described it.

The shield gives Euripides' version its final image of the child. After Andromache has been taken away, Talthybius returns with Astyanax's body and Hector's shield. Andromache has asked that the shield serve in her son's burial rather than be carried into her new household. Hecuba prepares the funeral with the few resources still available to the captives, lamenting the life her grandson will never live. The equipment that once protected Troy's defender now accompanies the child it could not save. His burial forms part of the play's closing movement before the women are led away from their burning city.

Later European writers also imagined alternatives in which Hector's son survived and became an ancestor of a new people. Ronsard's Renaissance epic La Franciade, published in 1572, reworked him as Francus or Francion within a legendary Trojan ancestry for the Franks. Such reception belongs to the history of storytelling, not evidence that an identifiable Trojan prince escaped the sack. The contrast with tragedy is revealing: one tradition needs the child to carry a dynasty into the future, while another makes the destruction of that future its central grief. Astyanax remains a legendary literary figure, not an independently documented historical individual.