Once again, Euripides has surprised me with the way his plays upset traditional gender roles. His female characters are consistently stronger and more courageous than the men, who often come across as wimps. The play Hecuba portrays this contrast especially artfully, with the two halves of the story forming a kind of mirror image.
Hecuba, the former queen of Troy, has been deposed by the conquering Greeks, her city destroyed, and her husband and nearly all of her children killed. Euripides’ play focuses on the deaths of her two remaining children. In the first half, the Greek army sacrifices Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena to the ghost of Achilles. While honoring their dead compatriot does play a role in this decision, the Greek army is also influenced by some decidedly less heroic motivations: political concerns over how best to preserve their society, as well as the practical consideration of getting the gods to give them a favorable wind. One could argue that fear is their primary motive. From the speech of Odysseus (the main proponent of this dreadful human sacrifice), it seems that the Greeks are afraid of not being able to sail home, and of what their society will devolve into if they do not give proper honor to the men who deserve it. By contrast, Polyxena goes fearless to her death. She walks to her execution with the regal bearing of a queen, and she herself bares her breast to the executioner’s sword. In fact, the Greek soldiers are so impressed by her courage that they take special care to give her the honorable funeral she deserves.
The second half of the play also depicts an army performing a horrific human sacrifice, but this time the gender roles are reversed. Immediately after the death of her daughter, Hecuba learns that her only living son, Polydorus, has been slain by Polymnester, the man who took him in since he was too young to fight in the Trojan War. And Polymnestor has broken the sacred guest-host relationship for no baser a motivation than greed for gold. Hecuba demands that her son’s death be avenged. Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek army, privately reveals that he sympathizes with Hecuba, but cannot be openly seen helping Greece’s Trojan enemies. (Once again, the Greek man comes off as an unheroic coward.) So Hecuba takes matters into her own hands. Gathering her women together, she tricks Polymnestor into visiting her with his two young sons. Her army of women then slaughters Polymnestor’s sons and blinds Polymnestor himself. In this scene, however, though the executioners are women, they are the ones who act with manly strength and fearlessness, while Polymnestor is reduced to bestial behavior, entirely lacking in the dignified resolution of Polyxena.
I will not argue that Hecuba’s revenge does not take a barbarically cruel form. The image of mothers turning into child-killers, murdering young boys even as they coo over them, is chillingly disturbing. Yet at the same time, the symmetry between the two halves of the play pushes a comparison between the Greek army and the army of Hecuba, in both scenes portraying the female characters as more courageous, more manly than the men. Moreover, it seems to me that there is at least a question of whether Hecuba has a more righteous motive than her enemies. While the Greeks are motivated by political pragmatism, Hecuba is trying to make some kind of sense of her extreme suffering. Throughout the play, Hecuba keeps bringing up good and evil, how good and evil are immutable and will ultimately come to light, and it often feels as though she is trying to convince herself. Revenge may be a wild justice, but it is still a kind of justice, and Hecuba seems to feel that only such cruel revenge, such wild justice, will justify the wild injustice of her own life.
Upon This Hither Shore 