Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians

3. Hecuba

3 Hecuba The Hecuba, out of critical favor for many years, has recently become the object of renewed interest. Studies by Reckford (1985) and Nussbaum (1986) both take as their point of departure Hecuba's soliloquy (592-602) on the consistency of human nature. Hecuba reflects that human beings are innately either good or bad (although she acknowledges that teaching and example also have a role to play) and behave in character throughout their lives. Both critics maintain that Hecuba constitutes the exception to her own rule- a character who degenerates under vicissitude until she resembles a beast more than a human being, the moral equivalent of the howling dog she will actually become in the metamorphosis foretold by Polymestor at the end of the play. Michelini (1987) concurs with this assessment, assimilating Hecuba's characterization to the other aesthetic anomalies she perceives in the play. Kovacs (1987) departs from the other treatments in viewing the play in political terms: "One of the most important contrasts in the play is between Greek and barbarian. . . . It is the contrast between the newer democratic world of the Greek army and the older dynastic world of the barbarian nations."! Kovacs has drawn attention to an important dimension of the play, for political oppositions inform the action and are underscored by repeated allusions to Athenian scenes and institutions: the popular assembly with its noisy tumult, its speakers and demagogues; the Athenian "enactment formula"; the cherished democratic principle of isonomia .2 But his formulation tells only half the story. It is quite true that Euripides makes critical reference to some internal features of Athenian democracy in his account of the Greek assembly and his portrait of the soldiery, whose volatile nature is denounced by Hecuba and exploited by Odysseus the demagogue.3 In the interpretation advanced here, however, the play's main political thrust lies elsewhere: Athenian imperialism is the reference point for the unequal relationship be85 86 Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians tween the Greek commanders and the Trojan captives, between the powerful and the powerless. If we take the Trojan queen as representative of the second group and trace her interchanges with her captors through the play, we shall arrive at a different account of Hecuba's development from that offered by critics of her moral degeneration. We shall also fmd that the play warns against the imperialist mentality that would (if we can believe Thucydides) emerge a decade later as part of the official discourse of Athens. Hecuba and Trojan Women Two surviving plays of Euripides, Hecuba and Trojan Women, take place in the immediate aftermath of the Trojan War. The postwar setting seems to have crystallized for Euripides the moral questions associated with disparities in power-questions that remained in abeyance so long as the outcome of the conflict was undecided. Although Trojan Women was written some nine years later than the Hecuba, its action is chronologically earlier, and the two plays' respective points of departure suggest different stages of the readjustment that follows upon war. At the start of Trojan Women the war has just ended. Troy is still standing, the Greek fleet is still drawn up on the Trojan shore, and the captives have yet to be allotted to their Greek masters. Of the two groups the victors remain in the background, for the most part transmitting their orders through the herald Talthybius. Their primary function in the play is to torment the Trojan women-a role that is at any rate unequivocal and allows their victims to view them without illusions. Throughout the Greeks are treated as an undifferentiated group-all equally guilty of sacrilege in Athena's eyes, of fOlly in Cassandra's.4 The focus of Trojan Women centers on the royal captives, who in contrast to the Greeks are highly individualized. Each of the women interprets her situation distinctively, in accordance with her own history and ethos, and these differences testify to the persistence of individual character even in circumstances that might be expected to mute or suppress it. The women still function as a community, and Hecuba draws sustenance from her encounters with the other royal women: Cassandra , Andromache, even Helen. The opening of the Hecuba gives notice of a different state of affairs. After burning Troy to the ground the Greeks have crossed over to the Hecuba Thracian Chersonese. As the play begins, the fleet has been in Thrace...