Hecuba

Euripides’s Hecuba dramatizes the misfortunes experienced by Hecuba, the wife of Priam and the former queen of Troy, after her city is sacked by the Greeks at the end of the Trojan War. Two myths are combined in the play. The first is the story of Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena, sacrificed to the ghost of the Greek hero Achilles in exchange for wind to blow the Greek fleet back to Greece. In the second myth, Hecuba discovers that her youngest son Polydorus has been killed by the Thracian King Polymestor, to whom Hecuba and her husband Priam entrusted Polydorus before the war began. The play ends with Hecuba avenging Polydorus by blinding Polymestor and killing his sons, after which Polymestor prophesies that she will be transformed into a dog.

Roughly one-third of surviving Greek tragedies, like Hecuba, derived their subjects or plots from the myths of the Trojan War and its aftermath. Euripides himself explored the tale of Troy in many of his other plays, including Andromache and Trojan Women (probably produced a few years before Hecuba). Of course, the saga of the Trojan War and its aftermath were very popular in Ancient Greece.