Hecuba

Polyxena is the daughter of Hecuba and Priam, taken captive by the Greeks after the sack of Troy. Her character would have been played by either the Deuteragonist or Tritagonist—one of the actors who was not playing the main role of Hecuba. Polyxena, until recently a princess of Troy, embodies ancient aristocratic ideals such as dignity, bravery, and duty. When she learns, at the beginning of the play, that she is to be sacrificed to the ghost of Achilles, her first thought is her mother rather than herself: Polyxena is sorry that her mother must bear the loss of her death. She herself, however, is willing, and almost eager, to die: Reduced to slavery, she has no desire to live a life “whose suffering is such / I do not care to live, / But call is happiness to die” (213-15).

Polyxena’s aristocratic dignity, moreover, does not permit her to show fear in the face of death. Above all, Polyxena expresses disgust at the thought of Enduring the Vicissitudes of Fortune. In her view, it is much preferable to die than to live with “that name of slave, so ugly, so strange” (358). In this way, she is similar to the Iphigenia of Euripides’s later play, Iphigenia in Aulis, who like Polyxena decides to embrace the chance to die with dignity and honor. Even in her last moments, when she is brought before the Greek army and faces Neoptolemus, Achilles’s son, with the sacrificial knife, Polyxena maintains her dignity—a dignity that moves the Greeks to tears, according to the herald Talthybius. Polyxena remains a picture of aristocratic nobility and courage to the very end, and even the way she dies, falling “with grace, modestly hiding what should be hidden / From men’s eyes” (570-71), is seen as dignified and beautiful (even erotic, to some readers).

Agamemnon is the king of Mycenae, a powerful city of Greece, and the leader of the Greek army during the Trojan War. He would have been played by either the Deuteragonist or the Tritagonist. Agamemnon, in contrast to Odysseus, is sympathetic to Hecuba, even if he is motivated primarily by his desire for Hecuba’s daughter Cassandra, whom he has made his captive and concubine after taking Troy. Agamemnon thus attempts to prevent the sacrifice of Polyxena and later even gives Hecuba limited assistance in carrying out her revenge against Polymestor. Despite his power, Agamemnon is cautious in how he exercises his authority, preferring to keep the army content when possible. Agamemnon’s cautious politics prompt Hecuba’s observation that nobody, not even the conquering Agamemnon, is truly free.

At the end of the play, Agamemnon presides over the trial, or contest, scene (agon in Greek) between Hecuba and Polymestor. Agamemnon ultimately decides in favor of Hecuba on the grounds that her cause is just and that Polymestor was punished as he deserved for murdering Polydorus. But Agamemnon’s probity is called into question by the fact that he already agreed beforehand to buy Hecuba time to take revenge on Polymestor. The reader or audience might thus question whether either Agamemnon or Hecuba have behaved justly, a concern that feeds into the play’s exploration of moral relativism and the marked absence of the gods in determining what constitutes Good and Evil in the Human Experience. Despite his sympathy towards Hecuba, Agamemnon comes across as a deeply immoral character. Polymestor correctly predicts that Agamemnon—along with Cassandra—will be violently murdered by Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra upon their return to Greece, which could be interpreted as just punishment for Agamemnon’s behavior here.

Polymestor is the king of Thrace, to whom Hecuba and Priam entrusted their son Polydorus before the Trojan War began, and who eventually murdered Polydorus to steal his gold. He would have been played by either the Deuteragonist or Tritagonist.

Polymestor is not a sympathetic character. His murder of Polydorus attests to his greed, and also shows him violating the laws of hospitality (xenia in ancient Greek), a concept regarded in antiquity as sacred. The case he makes before Agamemnon—that he killed Polydorus to ingratiate himself with the Greeks and to prevent a second Trojan War from ravaging the region—is tendentious at best, and, at any rate, does little to elevate his character. Polymestor is thoroughly opportunistic and duplicitous. His suffering does not make him more sympathetic. At the end of the play, he becomes nearly as animalistic as Hecuba, raging at the Trojan women and longing to devour their flesh and bones. The prophecies he makes in his blindness reflect not the wisdom conventionally associated with blind prophets and poets in mythology, but rather the incorrigibility of his spitefulness and cruelty.

Polydorus is the youngest son of Hecuba and her husband Priam, the king of Troy (in other sources, though, he is the son of Priam and Laothoe). His ghost, who delivers the Prologue, would have been played by the Deuteragonist or Tritagonist. Entrusted to the Thracian king Polymestor, his parents’ friend, just before the beginning of the Trojan War, Polydorus was murdered by his host before the play opens for the gold he brought with him after the Greeks sacked Troy. Polydorus is not a developed character. Rather, his role is expository: He describes the backstory and introduces the plot of the play, predicting some of its central events: the sacrifice of Polyxena and Hecuba’s discovery of his body on the shore. But Polydorus’s speech is also misleading in certain respects: Notably, Polydorus neither predicts nor requests Hecuba’s revenge on his killer Polymestor.

Odysseus is the king of Ithaca and one of the Greek heroes who fought at Troy. Famously, he devised the trick of the Wooden Horse that the Greeks used to infiltrate and conquer the city. He would have been played by either the Deuteragonist or the Tritagonist.

Euripides’s presentation of the character of Odysseus is in line with the traditional treatment of this figure, going back as early as Homer. Odysseus comes across as cold and calculating in his interaction with Hecuba in the first episode, but while Odysseus is a pragmatic realist, he is not unnecessarily cruel. He views the sacrifice of Polyxena as inescapable—indeed, this is the only way for the Greeks to secure the wind to blow their fleet back to Greece. Because of this, Odysseus cannot grant Hecuba’s plea that he spare her daughter, even though Hecuba once saved his life. In Odysseus’s opportunistic calculus, Hecuba sees the stamp of low politicians, “who do not care what harm they do their friends, / Providing they can please a crowd” (257-58), while the Chorus sees a “hypocrite with honeyed tongue” (1132) and a “demagogue” (1133). But the audience or reader must remember that these words are spoken by Odysseus’s enemies, and thus they are not necessarily completely fair. While Odysseus may be blunt and self-serving, he is also honest (in contrast to the rather amoral Agamemnon): He admits that he would have said anything to save his life when he was in Troy and concedes that he is indebted to Hecuba. In the end, however, Odysseus argues that he must prioritize his debt to the dead Achilles, rebuking Hecuba for trying to convince him to imitate what he describes as the Trojans’ “barbaric” disregard for the dead.

Talthybius is the elderly herald of the Greek army who is sent in the second episode to report Polyxena’s death to Hecuba. He would have been played by either the Deuteragonist or the Tritagonist. Talthybius sympathizes with Hecuba when he sees how much she has suffered and how sharply her fortunes have turned. He expresses admiration for Polyxena, especially for the way she comports herself when she dies—Talthybius urges Hecuba to take at least some small comfort in her daughter’s noble death. Unlike the cold and calculating Odysseus, Talthybius pities Hecuba and the Trojans, and even claims to have wept when he saw Polyxena die. His compassion highlights that the differences between the Greeks and the “barbarian” Trojans may not be as pronounced as some of the other characters of the play make them out to be.

The handmaid is Hecuba’s attendant, played by either the Deuteragonist or Tritagonist. She finds Polydorus’s body washed up on the shore while drawing water to prepare the dead Polyxena for burial and announces the terrible discovery to Hecuba.