Hecuba

Hecuba’s discovery of Polydorus’s body represents a turning point in the play. Here, the first part of the play, a suppliant plot ending in the sacrifice of Polyxena, gives way to the second part, a revenge plot featuring Hecuba’s retribution to Polymestor for his murder of Polydorus. The discovery of the body of Polydorus is also a turning point for Hecuba, whose grief transforms her into an increasingly violent, savage, and animalistic woman over the remainder of the play. Hecuba no longer cares even for her freedom, as she tells Agamemnon when she asks for his help in punishing Polymestor: “No, not freedom. / Revenge. Only give me my revenge / and I’ll gladly stay a slave the rest of my life” (755-57).

Hecuba’s desire for retribution is presented as a desire for justice, which emerges as a central driving force in this part of the play as characters consider the Role of Good and Evil in the Human Experience. For Hecuba, justice is retributive: Her impulse is to make Polymestor suffer as she has. The gods are conspicuously absent from Euripides’s Hecuba, a detail that is all the more noteworthy since Euripides was famous for giving the gods prominent parts in many of his other plays. The absence of the gods means that there is no overarching arbiter of morality. The Greeks can declare the Trojans barbaric because they have won a military victory, but this means that values are relative—that good and evil are not static, but malleable tools in the hands of those with power. This is why Hecuba sees justice as something that is ultimately in human hands. Indeed, when Hecuba resolves to punish Polymestor, she turns not to the gods but to Agamemnon for help—as a Greek leader, he has control over ideas of good and evil. In contrast, the gods are at best deaf to appeals. Hence the Chorus’ lament for the massacre of their husbands during the fall of Troy: “I left the bed of love / And prayed to Artemis. / But the answer was, ‘No’” (934-36).

As something that is in human hands, however, justice is also inevitably flawed. Justice can be impeded, as Hecuba notes, by factors such as popular opinion or the inability of the wronged party to make their case persuasively; justice is also uncomfortably close to revenge in a world where good and evil are relative. This idea that human justice is flawed will return at the end of the play, after Hecuba has exacted her brutal vengeance upon Polymestor, leaving the audience to wonder whether Hecuba’s actions were really just.

The third episode also continues to explore and challenge the distinction between Greeks and those they view as “barbarians.” Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, is able to sympathize with Hecuba, the queen of the Trojans, and even loves her daughter Cassandra. Moreover, despite what Odysseus said to Hecuba in the first episode, the Trojans obviously honor their dead just as much as the Greeks do, as evidenced by Hecuba’s care for the burial of her children. On a deeper level, the distinction between the free Greek and the enslaved “barbarian” begins to crumble. Agamemnon, for instance, tells Hecuba that he cannot openly help her punish Polymestor because he must take into account the attitude of the army, prompting Hecuba to observe that “no man on earth is truly free” (864) and that Agamemnon is ultimately just as enslaved as she is.