Hecuba

Fiction | Play | Adult

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Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 1-215

Lines 216-657

Lines 658-952

Lines 953-1295

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Enduring the Vicissitudes of Fortune

Suffering is central to Euripides’s Hecuba, whose plot follows the misfortunes experienced by Hecuba after the sack of Troy, misfortunes that demonstrate the ups and downs of fate that no person can stand against. Hecuba especially is presented in the play as an exemplar of suffering. Hecuba has seen her city fall, her wealth destroyed, her husband killed, and her freedom taken away: It is not for nothing that she characterizes herself as “the queen of sorrow” (423). Hecuba’s downfall is so hard precisely because Hecuba was previously so privileged, having been a queen and a happy mother. Hecuba illustrates how sharply one’s life can take a turn for the worse, and how unbearable it is for the mighty to fall. Hence, for instance, the exclamation uttered by Talthybius when he sees Hecuba lying in the dust: “Oh horror! I am old, / But I would rather die than sink as low / As this poor woman has fallen now” (497-99).

Hecuba, her daughter Polyxena, and the Chorus of captive Trojan women also exemplify the sufferings experienced by female survivors of war. Cast as passive victims, they have lost their husbands and children, are torn from their devastated homelands, and are enslaved by their conquerors.

Polyxena, who is unwilling to bear this devastation because of her aristocratic pride, decides that she prefers death to slavery, and willingly accepts that she is to be sacrificed. The aristocratic bearing assumed by Polyxena is also adopted by Hecuba, who sees herself as, in a sense, already dead: She tells Polyxena that she has “died of sorrow while I was still alive” (431) and Agamemnon that she “died / Long ago” (783-84). Hecuba, like Polyxena, learns to bear her misfortunes with aristocratic dignity. Hecuba’s situation becomes more and more terrible as the play progresses. When the body of Polydorus is discovered, Hecuba refers to “the mourning endless, / The anguish unending” (692-93). But the worse Hecuba’s situation becomes, the more adeptly she learns to bear her fate. Hecuba vigorously seeks to understand herself and the nature of human experience, finding comfort in the bravery of her daughter and trying to find a similar strength in herself, convinced that “nobility” that stays “good, its nature uncorrupted / By any shock or blow, always the same, / Enduring excellence” (597-99).

In the end, Hecuba’s aristocratic pride inspires her endurance, but it also blinds her to the sympathy of the Greek army when her daughter is killed. More drastically, as Hecuba hardens, she begins to become increasingly animalistic, and her violent revenge on Polymestor is crowned by the prediction, surely symbolic, that she is to be transformed into a dog.

The Degeneration of Character

Euripides is famous for his plays’ exploration of human nature, and Hecuba is a good example of his interest, in particular, in the degeneration of character. Hecuba—who occupies the stage continuously from the end of the Prologue—undergoes significant changes over the course of the play. Hecuba first comes across as helpless and consumed by her grief, presenting her current state as already unbearable. When Polyxena is led away to die, Hecuba even declares that she has “died of sorrow while I was still alive” (431). Despite this, Hecuba learns to endure her suffering as the play goes on, and even grows increasingly philosophical as she meditates on the nature of human experience. But everything changes when Hecuba learns that Polymestor murdered her son Polydorus. When Hecuba sets her heart on revenge, she transforms from her previous casting as a victim to bloodthirsty avenger, claiming that as long as she gets her revenge she will “gladly stay a slave the rest of my life” (757). The brutal retribution that Hecuba does finally carry out, moreover, will make many uneasy: Though Polymestor is hardly a sympathetic figure, Hecuba’s murder of his innocent sons is clearly excessive. Moreover, in claiming eye-for-an-eye rights of vengeance, Hecuba is operating outside the law (the sham trial adjudicated afterward by Agamemnon does little to legitimize her actions). Consequently, Hecuba’s character becomes increasingly animalistic, and it is all the more appropriate that Polymestor finally predicts that she will be transformed into a dog: Having come to figuratively embody the traits of an animal, Hecuba will now literally turn into one—a degeneration that in some ways confirms the Greeks’ prejudiced views of Trojans as “uncivilized barbarians.” The Roman statesman and author Cicero even suggested in the first century BCE that Hecuba’s transformation into a dog should be understood symbolically, as a reference to the bitterness and rage that had overwhelmed her spirit (Tusculan Disputations 3.63.13).

More figuratively, other characters in the play also degenerate, transform, or at least exhibit a dualism that compliments the dualism of Hecuba (not to mention the structural dualism of the play). Polymestor, once the friend of Hecuba and her husband Priam, murders their son Polydorus and steals his gold. Later, Polymestor’s fate turns him into an animalistic figure just like Hecuba: After he is blinded, he likens himself to “a raging beast […] / Running on all fours” (1057-58) as he seeks out the Trojan women who attacked him, “To gorge their blood, / To rip the living flesh, / Feed like a starving beast” (1072-1074).

Even characters who do not transform demonstrate multifaceted natures through duplicity. Odysseus, a more complex case, advocates for the sacrifice of Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena, even though Hecuba once saved his life, while Agamemnon hears out Polymestor’s case even though he conspired with Hecuba to bring about Polymestor’s downfall. Human nature is shown to be essentially changeable, whether the change involved is that of a captive learning to endure their suffering or of an opportunist exercising duplicity to get their way.

The Role of Good and Evil in the Human Experience

Hecuba also interrogates the abstract concepts of good and evil and their corollaries (including justice and revenge).

Throughout the play, Hecuba contemplates the human experience with impressive intellectual vigor and rigor, considering good and evil innate in human nature:

But human nature never seems to change;

Ignoble stays itself, bad to the end;

And nobility good, its nature uncorrupted

By any shock or blow, always the same,

Enduring excellence (595-99).

For Hecuba, human nature is as unchanging as fortune and fate are changeable. Indeed, the first part of the play seems to illustrate the idea that the highborn remain noble even when they suffer misfortune. Hence, notably, the heroism and courage Polyxena displays at her death is interpreted by the Chorus as proof of the inborn nobility of the aristocracy: “noble birth / Is a stamp, conspicuous, awesome, among mortals” (379-80). Polyxena and Hecuba, both of aristocratic birth, are by nature noble and good; Their enslaved state does not reflect this nature, and is therefore, in a sense, only superficial—Polyxena, indeed, is careful to insist that she will die free.

Yet the play problematizes this theory of human nature and innate nobility. First, the democratic Athenians of Euripides’s day would have felt at least a little uneasy about the aristocratic ideals espoused by Hecuba and Polyxena—ideals at odds with the often extreme contemporary democratic ideals of fifth-century Athens. Second, the play does not present human nature as unchanging: Hecuba will undergo a dramatic transformation after discovering her son’s murder, becoming increasingly vindictive and animalistic.

The second part of the play also extends the idea of good and evil in human experience to the practical questions of justice, specifically to the relationship between justice and revenge. These questions arise especially in Hecuba’s revenge on Polymestor. Wishing to punish Polymestor for murdering her son Polydorus, Hecuba uses deceit and brutal violence, tricking him into letting down his guard and then blinding him and killing his sons. Has Hecuba behaved justly? Critics have debated whether Athenian audiences would have approved of Hecuba’s eye-for-an-eye revenge or whether they would have viewed her actions as excessive or uncivilized (since part of the basis of civil society is to displace the job of carrying out justice onto the state and away from victims). Hecuba convinces Agamemnon that her revenge is justified, and the absence of the gods within the world of the play seems to make him—or the play’s human audience—the final arbiter. Hecuba laments the power of rhetoric to persuade and deceive, but proves very adept at using such rhetoric to her own ends. Even her insistence that “not one escapes / His downfall” (1194-95) becomes a double-edged principle: Surely it is possible to see the transformation of Hecuba into a dog, predicted by Polymestor at the end of the play, as Hecuba’s eventually divine punishment for her actions.