Hecuba

“O Mother,

Fallen from a royal palace to a slave’s life,

As wretched now as formerly you were blessed!

It must be that some god destroys you now,

Making you pay for having once been happy.”

With these words the ghost of Polydorus expresses his pity for his mother Hecuba as he exits the stage, introducing the theme of Enduring the Vicissitudes of Fortune. Hecuba, once so “blessed” and “happy,” has seen her city destroyed and most of her children killed, and is now going to bury two more children, as the ghost has just predicted.

“O grief!

What can I say?

What are the words for loss?

O bitterness of age,

Slavery not to be borne,

Unendurable!

To whom can I turn?

Childless and homeless,

My husband murdered,

My city stained with fire …

Where can I go?

Where shall I find safety?

What god, what power

Will help me now?

[…]

Why should I live? How live in the light

When its goodness is gone,

When all I have is grief?”

Upon discovering that her daughter Polyxena is to be killed, Hecuba sings a lyric lament for the terrible things she has suffered on account of her declining fortunes: She has lost her home, her husband, her children, her freedom, and must now lose yet another child. Already Hecuba views her situation as “not to be borne, / Unendurable”—yet the worse her situation becomes, the more Hecuba does learn to endure it, though her endurance ultimately transforms her character into something more animal than human.

“But now I die,

And you must see my death—

Butchered like a calf,

Like a wild mountain beast’s young,

Ripped from your arms,

Throat cut, and sinking

Downward into dark

With the unconsolable dead.

It is you I pity,

Mother.

For you I cry.

Not for myself,

Not for this life

Whose suffering is such

I do not care to live,

But call it happiness to die.”

When Polyxena learns that she is to die, she grieves for her mother rather than for herself, for she herself would rather die than be enslaved. These lines address the plight of the female victims displaced by warfare, a theme central to the play.