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