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.