Hecuba

Euripides’s Hecuba dramatizes the misfortunes experienced by Hecuba, the wife of Priam and the former queen of Troy, after her city is sacked by the Greeks at the end of the Trojan War. Two myths are combined in the play. The first is the story of Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena, sacrificed to the ghost of the Greek hero Achilles in exchange for wind to blow the Greek fleet back to Greece. In the second myth, Hecuba discovers that her youngest son Polydorus has been killed by the Thracian King Polymestor, to whom Hecuba and her husband Priam entrusted Polydorus before the war began. The play ends with Hecuba avenging Polydorus by blinding Polymestor and killing his sons, after which Polymestor prophesies that she will be transformed into a dog.

Roughly one-third of surviving Greek tragedies, like Hecuba, derived their subjects or plots from the myths of the Trojan War and its aftermath. Euripides himself explored the tale of Troy in many of his other plays, including Andromache and Trojan Women (probably produced a few years before Hecuba). Of course, the saga of the Trojan War and its aftermath were very popular in Ancient Greece. The earliest surviving work of Greek literature, Homer’s Iliad, is set during the ninth year of the war, while Homer’s Odyssey describes the return of the hero Odysseus from Troy. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey were included in the Epic Cycle, a collection of epic poems by various authors recounting the myth of Troy, from the events leading up to the war to the homecomings of the Greek heroes who fought at Troy. Besides the Iliad and the Odyssey, however, none of the works making up the Epic Cycle have survived. Troy was also taken up by poets of the Archaic and (early) Classical periods, some of whose work survives intact or in fragments.

The story of the sacrifice of Polyxena, which makes up the first part of Euripides’s Hecuba, was known from much earlier sources, including the Sack of Ilium (one of the epics of the Epic Cycle) and the poems of Ibycus. Sophocles, another canonical Attic tragedian and Euripides’s older contemporary, also wrote a tragedy called Polyxena (now lost); it is unknown when this play was produced, and thus it is unknown whether Sophocles’s play influenced Euripides or vice versa. Whatever his sources, Euripides certainly put his own stamp on the myth of Polyxena. Polyxena’s bravery in the face of death and her willingness, even eagerness, to die may well have been an innovation on Euripides’s part. He would go on to dramatize a similar decision in his much later tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis, where Iphigenia is similarly willing to be sacrificed under very similar circumstances.

The story of the murder of Polydorus, on the other hand, seems to have been entirely invented by Euripides. In Homer’s Iliad, Polydorus is the son of Priam and Laothoe, not Hecuba, and he is killed during the Trojan War by Achilles, not Polymestor. Euripides is the earliest known writer to have Polydorus murdered by his Thracian caretaker Polymestor and to make Hecuba avenge her son by blinding Polymestor and killing his sons. But the story does appear in later sources, including Virgil’s Aeneid, which were evidently influenced by Euripides. Hecuba’s transformation into a dog, foretold at the end of the play, is also unattested before Euripides, and may have been his invention as well. Like the murder of Polydorus, this story became part of the standard tradition after the production of Euripides’s play.