Look, You Don't Really Want To Kill My Daughter (A Rhetorical Précis of Hecuba)

Jae Keitamo

Dale Carrico; Rhetoric 103A

GSI: Jerilyn Sambrooke

7 October 2016

Look, You Don't Really Want To Kill My Daughter

A Rhetorical Précis of Hecuba

E. P. Coleridge’s translation of Euripides’ tragedy, “Hecuba” (424 B.C. E.) asserts, in Hecuba’s plea to Odysseus, that Polyxena should not be sacrificed over the grave of Achilles as the Achaeans demand. Hecuba intertwines both rhetorical inquiry and a Socratic-like deduction in illustrating her argument, which also serves to shame Odysseus for his refusal to show to her the same gratitude she exercised when she saved his life.  Within the questioning of Odysseus’ character is the first of Hecuba’s five rhetorical questions.  Her first line is a direct response to his admission that he lives by her grace.  She asks “what cleverness” it was that allowed for the “passing of their bloody vote,” but this question is not one that Odysseus would be able to answer as he was not included in the vote.  Moreover, the cleverness to which Hecuba refers is not the modern concept of someone being quick-witted, rather, it refers to one’s actual learning and wisdom.  She is questioning the collective intelligence of the governing body that decided her daughter should die.  Additionally, she wonders if it was duty that lead to the decision to sacrifice Polyxena, which suggests a motive of obligation and not desire.  Hecuba immediately qualifies the question of duty by pointing out that an oxen would be more appropriate, and it is this declaration that becomes the backbone of her argument: An oxen should be sacrificed, not a human. But if a human must be sacrificed, it should be one more deserving than Polyxena.  Hecuba does not try to subvert the edict to sacrifice a human, instead goes along with it and proposes two alternatives whom she deems far more deserving.  Hecuba asks if Achilles demands the life of someone responsible for his death as his recompense, a subjunctive which she conjured for the sole purpose of offering Helen, who brought him to Troy and is thus clearly responsible.  Her final rhetorical question posits that perhaps the decision to sacrifice a human was based on beauty.  Here again Hecuba does not attempt to undermine the notion, especially since it is an idea she alone posed, but she does immediately refute that Polyxena is the most beautiful of offerings and suggests that “the daughter of Tyndareus was fairer than all womankind,” and a more deserving sacrifice.

Having now offered two alternate sacrificial choices to Polyxena, Hecuba concludes her argument by emphasizing that her daughter does not deserve to die.  She returns to the very start of her speech and recalls that, at her feet and clutching her hand, Odysseus begged for the help that she now feels is due to her.  Likening her current state to his previous, the grieving mother illustrates how low her life has become, highlighting Polyxena as her one modicum of joy in a world mired in death.  In losing her daughter, Hecuba will lose the last comfort of her now downtrodden life - a pain from which Odysseus could spare her.  Equating the salvation she gave Odysseus, that she is the reason he is able to stand before her, with the saving of her daughter’s life, Hecuba does her best to appeal to his sense of empathy and tries to make him see that she is now as he once was.  Hecuba ends her speech by attempting to empower her audience.  She is aware that her station in life voids any weight her plea may have otherwise carried and begs of the men to speak on her behalf.  Appealing to the cleverness and duty which she previously questioned, she urges the “men of mark” to act with the honor that comes with refusing to commit such a hateful act.