Hecuba's Appeal: A Precis

In E.P. Coleridge’s translation of Euripides’ Hecuba, the first agon provides a glimpse into the desperation and despair of the former Queen of Troy as she is held captive by Agamemnon. When she is informed that her daughter, Polyxena, will be sacrificed over the tomb of Achilles as tribute for the pains of war, Hecuba begins a series of rhetorical appeals in an attempt to save her. Immediately, as she’s confronted with Odysseus and his demands to take Polyxena, Hecuba begins her plea. She implores Odysseus to remember the grace and mercy she employed when she saved his life; Odysseus, acknowledging her kindness, does not budge. In a lengthy speech, Hecuba then begins to appeal to the logic of the decree. She demands to know the “cleverness” the deciding group used to come to this decision, and whether or not their personal opinions (she may believe that Odysseus, individually, doesn’t believe Polyxena should die) were overridden by “duty” to “slay a human victim.”

She continues by asserting that the “sacrifice of oxen more befits” the situation than the murder of her daughter. Extrapolating from that original point (with the understanding that the sacrifice of a human will most likely be necessary), she then begins to situate her daughter amongst other women she deems more fitting for death. If the qualification of the sacrifice is she who has caused the most pain, Hecuba asserts that Helen, then, must be the one to die; Helen, in many ways, was much more directly correlated to the death of Achilles than Polyxena ever was. If we are to follow this logic, according to Hecuba, then Helen should suffer, “for she it was that proved his ruin.” If the qualification of the sacrifice, however, is based on beauty, then Hecuba provides another logical alternative. Polyxena, according to Hecuba, is not the most beautiful, by any means, “for the daughter of Tyndareus was fairer than all womankind.”

Hecuba then returns to her original argument: that Odysseus, essentially, owes her for the mercy she had once displayed to him. She explains her sadness, her despair, and her destitution: Polyxena “is my only joy,” she says, and “in her I forget my sorrows.” She implores Odysseus to understand the love of a mother, especially in the context of the devastation she and her people have just endured. She requests that Odysseus return to his camp and speak with his comrades, “saying how hateful a thing it is to slay women who at first ye spared out of pity” – again, this time more subtly, reminding Odysseus of her previous actions. One of the final lines of her speech, however, applies the theme of common law to her rhetorical argument: “For amongst you,” Hecuba says, “the self-same law holds good for bond and free alike respecting bloodshed.” After previously using her status as a downtrodden captive to her advantage and arguing that Odysseus and his camp should spare her daughter, Hecuba now invokes a higher moral law to try to assert that status matters none when it comes to human bloodshed. Realizing that her previous rhetorical efforts may not prove to be fruitful, she “levels the playing field,” so to speak, by imploring her captors to see her humanity above all else.