Revenge in Euripides' Hecuba

The mode of Hecuba’s revenge is gruesome, to be sure. Rather than merely kill Polymestor, her son’s murderer, Hecuba slays his two infant sons and puts out his eyes. The play’s audience would have seen Polymestor scrabbling on all fours, hunting and howling like a wild animal, an image likely as shocking to them as it is to more modern critics. Yet these critics never regard Polymestor as inhuman, despite his visually degraded position and his violation of the laws of xenia (“guest-friendship”) in murdering Hecuba’s son. Hecuba’s revenge marks her alone as having abandoned the nomoi (“laws,” “conventions”) of communal human life. Having willingly acted in an inhuman way, Hecuba herself becomes inhuman when according to Polymestor’s prophecy, she becomes a supernatural hound. But to read Hecuba so schematically is to make a number of assumptions: the critical assumption that Hecuba is meant to be understood in isolation from other Greek dramas on the same theme; the moral assumption that revenge is inherently evil and was as incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks as it may be to readers today; and the anthropocentric assumption that it is worse to be a dog, under any circumstances, than to be a human.

Insofar as critics understand Hecuba’s revenge as rendering her inhuman, they also tend not to see it as having anything to do with justice, because justice is a human invention, concerned with human laws and human relations, and Hecuba, since she is not human, can have no part in these. While Hecuba’s revenge is brutal, to linger in moral disgust as most critics do—and to use such disgust as evidence of Hecuba’s inhumanity—is to forget, deliberately or not, that her claim to revenge is valid.Taken on its own terms, Hecuba’s revenge is both ethically coherent and deeply human. With Hecuba, Euripides points us toward a more expansive, if still imperfect, vision of justice. Hecuba’s revenge is also a kind of justice, one that reckons with the particularity of what is lost in human life in a way that the law cannot. Hecuba’s transformation does not mark her loss of humanity but rather her insistence on the value of the very human goods critics accuse her of abandoning: the nomoi of kinship and philia.

Hecuba is at least in part Euripides’ response to the tradition of tragedies dealing with the themes of justice and kinship, perhaps to Aeschylus’s Oresteia in particular. There is sufficient evidence in the text to suggest that even if Euripides wasn’t concerned with responding to the Oresteia in detail, it was certainly on his mind: Hecuba is a revenge play featuring a murderous mother in which the action begins with a virgin daughter’s sacrifice because the winds won’t blow. It also features a courtroom scene and a meditation on peitho (“persuasion”): the mutable kinship rhetoric that allows each murderer in the house of Atreus to reason their way out of their crime by reasoning their way out of the family, and which leads, in the final courtroom scene in Eumenides, to the erasure of the family as a measure of identity at the founding of democratic law.

The Oresteia is widely considered to stage the transition from aristocratic vendetta justice to the democratic justice of the court of law. The trilogy culminates in the first murder trial brought before a jury on the Areopagus during which Orestes’ fate as a mother-killer is decided. What is most provocative about this trilogy is that Orestes’ final acquittal—the symbolic moment of transition from revenge to legal justice—rests on an argument of justification (rather than innocence) that prizes the very kinship tie that the court has been instructed not to take into account but that is nonetheless invoked by Athena herself, reflecting on her own motherlessness in her deciding vote. Orestes is acquitted of homicide (rather than matricide), on the grounds that this homicide was justified by the kinship relation between Orestes and his father Agamemnon, whom Clytemnestra killed.

Euripides unsettles the seemingly clean division between legal justice and violence and, with Hecuba, exposes how the violence at the birth of democratic legal justice persists into his and our present. The commensurability of crimes and punishments and the interchangeability of citizens that yields equality before the law also engage in an erasure of particularity that shifts the register of violence from the physical to the epistemological (with possible physical consequences). Hecuba rejects this interchangeability and, through her revenge, not only insists on the particularity of her own son, but also points to the inadequacy of legal justice to recognize what she has lost in him, and in her daughter as well.

Loss uncovers the ties to others that constitute us, and so when we lose someone we care about, we experience the loss (and mourn the loss) of more than one thing: the loss of the other, the loss of ourselves in the other, and the loss of the relation between the other and ourselves that is constitutive of who we are. To lose that tie is to become undone in the sense that we become inscrutable to ourselves, “We do not know who we are or what to do” (2003.12). Moreover, to experience loss is to submit to a transformation that we do not choose and whose result we cannot know in advance. Who “am” I, without you? What is left of me? These are impossible to know before a loss, or even at the moment of loss, and so the work of mourning is a work of transformation, feeling out not just what is left but what has changed.

Hecuba has lost people to whom she was attached, in whose lives she saw value. They were part of what was good about being in the world. That Polydorus and Polyxena were her children means that Hecuba has also lost the part of herself that was a mother and that moved through the world in such a way as to secure the flourishing of her children. And of course, in Polydorus’s death, Hecuba has lost something else, too: she has lost her trust in Polymestor, the bond of holy xenia she shared with him, because he shattered it when he murdered her son. So, with respect to Polydorus, mourning requires something more than private reckoning with grief. It requires revenge.

It is important to establish here that revenge was not an inherent evil to the ancient Greeks and that they recognized several occasions in which it was necessary—most notably in response to the murder of kin. This is not to say that the Greeks were unaware of the dangers of revenge: as I noted, it is widely accepted that Aeschylus’s Oresteia grapples with precisely that democratic moment of the transition from the settling of personal scores with private retribution to the reckoning of those grievances in a court of law. Even this reading of the Oresteia, however, ignores something about revenge: revenge is a duty to the wrongly dead because it recognizes the value of those lives in their particularity.

Revenge (τιμωρία) is linked etymologically to τιμή, “honor,” and is thus “more than the satisfaction of the avenger’s vindictive feelings; it is a necessary restoration of honor to the victim” (1995.171). Thus, Hecuba’s desire for revenge for the murder of her son should not come as a surprise, either to modern readers or ancient audiences. Indeed, Mossman argues that Hecuba’s revenge would have been anticipated by Greek audiences with some excitement, as they wondered how the old queen, now a captive slave, could possibly take revenge upon a king (1995.180). However, Hecuba plots to carry out her revenge only after her appeal to the impartial arbiter of legal justice, Agamemnon, is denied. This very appeal is contested among critics of the play, who either overlook it altogether in an attempt to impose “unity” onto her character or dismiss it as itself evidence of Hecuba’s moral degeneracy.

At this point, we must also consider Hecuba’s gender as it relates to her status before the law. In Euripidean as in Aeschylean Athens, women were excluded from citizenship and could not represent themselves in court, and even in an aristocratic revenge culture, the duty to avenge kin fell to the nearest male relative, not to females. As Nicole Loraux and other feminist theorists argue, women in tragedy both act more freely than they would have in contemporary Athens and tend to embody the contradictions and excesses of civic life: tragic women are extravagant mourners when such mourning was outlawed, they seek revenge when it has already been replaced with the justice of the courts, and they complicate the relationship between family and polis by prizing or disregarding the kinship tie to the point of violence. The murderous mother would have been a familiar trope to Euripides’ audience, and thus Hecuba’s recourse to revenge rather than human law would, again, not have been unexpected, especially given the tragic plot’s removal to a distant mythological past. But unlike other murderous mothers—most notably Clytemnestra in the Oresteia—Hecuba’s revenge is not condemned within the play, nor is it clear that her twofold transformation constitutes punishment for it.

It becomes especially difficult to consider Hecuba’s revenge damnable when we recall that she does not exact it on her own. She enlists the help of other Trojan women, who aid in the murder of Polymestor’s children and in putting out his eyes. We might consider the communal execution of Hecuba’s revenge to reflect two things: first, a consensus among the chorus regarding the particularity of Polydorus and the rightness of revenge as a way to recognize that particularity in death, and, second, the gendered nature of revenge in this tragedy and others. Since action within the law is not available to Hecuba or her fellow women, and since Hecuba is exemplary of all Trojan loss (intimated by the positioning of the choral ode at 905–54, just after Agamemnon’s refusal and just before the entrance of Polymestor, in which the women recount the fall of Troy), a community of women arises around her that both amplifies Hecuba’s grief and claim to justice, and enacts the recognition of a particular loss that may also serve symbolically as a recognition of all they have lost.

Hecuba lures Polymestor and his two young sons into her tent on the pretext of giving him information about a secret cache of Trojan gold. The slave women compliment Polymestor on his Thracian dress, coo over his babies, and suddenly Polymestor is weaponless and his children are out of reach. The women draw daggers that they had concealed in their robes, stab Polymestor’s sons to death, and proceed to use their brooch pins to put out his eyes. Unlike Clytemnestra’s revenge, Hecuba’s does not posit any formal equivalence, either between Polydorus’s death and Polymestor’s, or between Polydorus’s death and the death of Polymestor’s sons. Instead, the more exacting form of Hecuba’s revenge attempts to transmit to Polymestor the fullness of what she has lost in her son: the particularity of self, other, and relationality that is “lost within the recesses of loss” and knowable only through the process of mourning itself. Hecuba replicates the form of her loss not because her loss and Polymestor’s are equivalent, but because the only way to know what one has lost in another is to lose him. In this sense, revenge acts as the underside of the law, recognizing the particularity of Hecuba’s loss in a way that the law cannot.

Euripides' Hecuba: Polyxena's sacrifice.

To the two actions of the Hecuba, sacrifice and revenge, the Trojan War is background and cause. The brutality of human sacrifice, Polymestor’s betrayal of the ties of xenia, Hecuba’s outburst of vengeance, are all prolongations of the war’s violence in other forms. Connections in the events are attenuated or wholly lacking, there is none whatever between the sacrifice of Polyxena and the murder of Polydoros.   Causes are harder to find, beyond the violence within the human psyche. The gods, about whose possible role in events there are only scattered hints, will not serve as an explanation.  And at the end of the play, only further murder is in sight.

The sacrifice itself is described twice, first in anticipation by the chorus ( 147-52) and then as past by Talthybius (518-82). It is never represented directly. That is unsurprising, in view of the Athenian theater's reluctance to display acts of violence, but it means that the scene of sacrifice comes to us filtered through the different perceptions and feelings of the female chorus and the herald, who gives the perspective of the watching male soldiers. The chorus foresee the sacrifice as follows:

"For either your prayers will prevent you from being bereft of your unhappy daughter or you must look upon her fallen forward on the tomb, a virgin reddened by blood, the dark-gleaming flow from her gold-adorned throat" ( 147-52).

In the last three lines, details are interwoven in a complex word order unusual in Euripides' nonlyric anapaests, so as to give a vivid sense of the terrible contradictions that the sacrifice of a girl entails. The juxtaposition of "blood" and "virgin," three color terms ending successive metra, and the contrast between the dark glint of blood and the gold jewelry at the girl's neck all set this grim ritual off from the decorum of normal life. There is no sacrificer here, no audience, only the female victim, described by an adjective and a participle as the object of her mother's (anticipated) sight. 

Talthybios, by contrast, will set the whole ritual scene, populated by men, and his account of the death blow ( 566-68) will describe Neoptolemos's emotions ("not willing and willing through pity for the girl"), his act in a transitive verb ("he cuts"), his instrument (the iron sword), and the place of the wound with a clinical precision ("the channels of the breath") that depersonalizes the body. "The girl" enters the sentence not as possessor of the throat but as the object of male emotion. Then the blunt statement of the gush of blood, without visual embellishment or any sense of what this flow of virgin blood might mean.

Next: Hecuba’s Revenge

The Voice of the Other in Euripides' Hecuba

 

Any discussion of the representation or “play” of gender in Athenian tragedy begins with the problem of representing the Other. All roles were played by male actors, the audience was primarily male, and the poets participating in the Dionysia were male Athenian citizens. Yet Euripides in particular gave most of his lines to female mythical characters, mortal and immortal, slave and mistress alike.  Playing the Other on the Greek stage permitted an explanation and expansion of male identity: a form of initiation into the mysteries of what the culture defines as the feminine Other - the tensions, complexities, vulnerabilities, irrationalities, and ambiguities that masculine aspiration would prefer to suppress or control – tragedy imagines a fuller model for the masculine self.

Through the female voice, the voice of the Other, the playwright can explore problems that would be too risqué or too difficult to accept by an Athenian audience. In the case of Euripides’ Hecuba, the voice of the barbarian queen explores the problem in the polis with regards to the requirement of free speech for the optimal functioning of the state. According to the democratic ideal all citizens should have equal right of speech; however, those citizens who were from families who traditionally had more power also had more status and therefore had more power in the Assembly and in the law courts. This meant that „weaker‟ citizens, those with less political power, may have had the same rights in theory, but in practice their speech would not have had the same force in the public arena.

While one cannot assume that social commentators like Euripides and Aeschylus did not have an opinion on the role and rights of women in their own society, they rather used these fictional women to create a dialogue with the ruling elite, the male citizens of the polis. Euripides plays devil’s advocate by giving his female characters strident voices, unlike their everyday counterparts. But in doing so he is not so much commenting on the position of women in society as he is using these nontraditional figures to highlight masculine tensions. The female characters give voice to the things that men would not normally say, action to the things citizen men would not normally do. They challenge accepted behavior and bring to light the clashing moralities of pre-democratic manliness and democratic hyper-rationality. Rip’s female characters respond in ways no woman would have the license to, they ask dangerous and difficult questions about what it means to be good and honorable. He writes his plays about issues of morality and honor, but without making any judgments himself. He is not there to judge, only to bring to light difficult issues relating to what it means to be a good citizen in the Athenian polis.

Establishing that speech roles were strictly divided according to gender is necessary in order to illustrate the “unfeminine” behavior of the lead female character in Euripides‟ Hecuba. Her character in this play is twofold, divided by the events that shape her actions and her speech: the sacrifice of her daughter and the murder of her son. At Hecuba’s first appearance she is clearly characterized as an old woman (59-67), bowed by grief for the loss of her home and her freedom. Her fears for her children are foremost in her mind and this establishes the primary focus for Hecuba, the preservation of her family and the importance of her maternal responsibilities, emphasizing her femininity. Hecuba calls on the gods to save her precious children from harm as she is haunted by a terrifying dream that plagued her sleep (70-76). Unfortunately for Hecuba the fears from her dreams become a reality: the Chorus informs her of the army’s decision to sacrifice Polyxena at the request of Achilles ghost, and Hecuba’s words turn to lamentation (as discussed previously this was one of the few sanctioned outlets for female speech in the polis). Her cries anticipate the death and burial of Polyxena, a pre-emptive mourning, as it were, acting as a sign of more death to come. Polyxena joins in her mother’s lamentation, not for herself, but for her mother who will live on alone and enslaved while Polyxena escapes from her enslavement to the house of Hades(211-12).

Female speech by female characters is the expected norm, in this case embodied by the lamentation of the queen, Polyxena and the Trojan women of the Chorus. What would not conform to the socially prescribed speech form for a woman in Athenian society is the way in which Hecuba discards her womanly lamentation and armors herself with a rhetoric that would have been the sole purview of the Athenian male citizen. Hecuba’s shift from a feminine speech form to one associated only with the public speech of citizen men is an important signpost for the audience to indicate her shift from the acceptable gender role of grieving mother to that of a gender-inappropriate knife-wielding logician. This change is not unrealistic in the circumstances; Hecuba is simply taking on the mantle of her own kurios (head of household)  since that position is vacant due to the deaths of her male family members and Agamemnon’s refusal to fulfil that role, even though he has taken her daughter Cassandra into his household as part of his spoils of war.

Self-Referential Choral Projection in Euripides' Hecuba

 

The members of the chorus of Hecuba are Trojan captured women after the city’s defeat. In the first stasimon (444-483) they lament their misfortune and, while thinking about their impending exile, mention by name the places in which they could probably take refuge. Having referred to the Greek regions of Doris and Phthia (450-451), in the first antistrophe (455-465) they wonder if it would be better to arrive on Delos, the sacred island where Apollo and Artemis had been born:

“Or to an island home, sped on my way in grief by an oar plied in the brine, to spend a life of misery in the house, there where the date palm, first of all its line, and the laurel tree sent up their holy shoots as an adornment dear to Leto to grace the birth of her children by Zeus? Shall I with the maidens of Delos sing in praise of the golden headband and bow of the goddess Artemis?”

In particular, they refer to the famous palm of the island, beside which Leto gave birth to her twins (458-461). Strikingly the women refer to the choruses of Delian maidens12 (462-465) who praise Artemis as the goddess of the Bow. To be exact, the Trojan women express their desire to take part in the cultic hymn performed by the virgins for Artemis. But, as the performance would involve songs as well as dances (εὐλογήσω, 465) for the goddess, the wish of the chorus generates an imaginative khoreia, being projected to the chorus of the Delian Maidens; and set in a named place (on sacred Delos), though in an undefined future time. In fact, the desire of the Trojan women is an antidote to their inevitable exile, because the eternity of Artemis’ rituals on Delos, with the peaceful holy atmosphere of the island and the euphoria of the choruses dancing for the goddess, could be the balm for the sufferings of the women. Here, the word ἄγαλμα (461), aptly placed, characterizes the ancient (prōtogonos, 458) laurel of Delos. This word implies a subtle comparison between the sufferings of the Trojan women and the labors of Leto; that is, in the same place where a goddess was granted her desired release, the desperate women of Troy envisage the relief from exile from their beloved homeland. Immediately afterwards, in the second strophe (466-474), the chorus considers the possibility of coming to Athens in order to meet the maidens of Pallas Athena at her festival:

“Or shall I after all in the city of Pallas embroider in Athena’s saffron-colored gown with threads of flowered hue the yoking of her lovely chariot-mares or the race of Titans, which Zeus, Cronus’ son, laid low with his thunderbolts of double flame?”

Obviously, a new choral projection is generated, this time to the Panathenaea; but the Panathenaea were one of the Athenian festivals, as were the Great Dionysia, too. As, then, the space of the new khoreia is transferred from Delos to Athens, the vague future of the dramatic event overlaps with the here and now of the city’s festivity, even as the tragic chorus of Hecuba performs its own khoreia in the orchestra of the State Theater of Dionysus. The poet self-consciously creates alternate images of these off-stage, more or less distant choruses, representing them as desirable reflections of the chorus in the orchestra. The timeless dimension of the worship of other gods (apart from Dionysus), distinguishable by its ritual content, offers the Trojan women an escape from their captivity. In fact, these few moments of happiness last only as long as the orchestra’s khoreia that produces them. In their imagined world, however, time stops and, thus, through the power of eternity, the desired resolution of the catastrophe is accomplished. The dramatic events, of course, will be different. The Trojan women well know that expulsion will only save them from death. Hence, they recall their real condition in the second antistrophe: Troy’s defeat, the destruction of the city and their own captivity (475-483).

 

Dialogue between Odysseus, Hecuba and Polyxena, Euripides, HECUBA 216-443

     This is one of the earliest scenes in Greek tragedy where three actors actually engage in a three-way conversation. This allows the poet to change the “character” of the scene. The first part (216-331)  is similar to a formal debate (agon) a set-piece in tragedy, esp. in Rip. But Hecuba’s mention of agon megas, ‘a great trial’ (229) is an instance of Euripidean misdirection; it falsely suggests that an agon scene is about to occur. However, from a formal point of view the scene lacks  the angry dialogue after the speeches which is the convention. The content of Hecuba’s speech also differs from those in the agon scenes: she abandons arguments on justice (271) and unexpectedly turns her accusation of Odysseus into a passionate supplication speech (275). Odysseus’ rejection (299-331) does not lead to an altercation, but to the introduction of the third speaking actor, playing Polyxena, into the conversation. Hecuba asks her daughter to supplicate herself to Odysseus, but Polyxena’s refusal to supplicate (342-5) and acceptance of her fate lead to the farewell scene (409-43).

    The debate between Hecuba and Odysseus (216-95) introduces some of the play’s crucial themes: human sacrifice, charis and reciprocity, aristocratic and democratic codes of conduct. Hecuba spared Odysseus life in the past when he was caught spying inside the walls of Troy. For Hecuba, philia between aristocrats of different, even opposed communities is a stronger bond than those linking the members of the community itself. Odysseus’ curt speech is devoid of any sympathy for Hecuba’s suffering. The revelation of Odysseus’ indebtedness to Hecuba (239-53) exposes his coolness as self-serving ingratitude.

    Polyxena is to be sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles by the hero’s son, Neoptolemus. Hecuba tries to bargain for the life of her daughter, but Odysseus says he is following protocol. Hecuba then begs Polyxena to supplicate herself to Odysseus. In tragedy and epic suppliants usually made literal contact with the knees chin and right hand of the person they are supplicating. Euripides thus has Polyxena say, “Odysseus, I see you hiding your right hand beneath your cloak and turning away your face, so that I cannot touch your beard.”   If a gesture was too small or subtle to be read in a 17,000-seat theatre, Euripides has characters react to it verbally.

    Polyxena tells Odysseus not to worry about retribution from the god of suppliants, (Zeus himself), because she is going to die willingly, like Iphigenia, except that Priam and Hecuba’s daughter is not going silently. Polyxena explains her preference for death as following logically from her nobility. She would rather go to the afterlife as a princess than as a slave. Euripides is making a sly reference to Achilles’ lines from Hades in the Odyssey, when the hero’s shade says, also to Odysseus, “I’d rather serve as another man’s slave, as a poor peasant without land, and be alive on Earth, than be lord of all the lifeless dead. “