Euripides: “Hecuba”- Nobility Outs Itself

{Note: Just remembered I’ve previously discussed the idea of a moral order reasserting itself in Hecuba here last year.}

I’m not sure if Oscar Wilde’s line about losing one parent being a misfortune but losing both looking like carelessness applies to losing children as well; by this standard, Hecuba would look like a complete dope: her sons Hector, Trolius, and Polydorus, and daughters Polyxena and Cassandra were all killed, although through no fault of her own. Dante claimed this drove her mad with sorrow and left her barking like a dog, and it certainly would have been justified. It cushions the blow somewhat to remember that she had a total of 19 children, but not much.

Hecuba was the Queen of Troy at one time, the fall of the city leaving her a slave- her story was often cited as an illustration of the vicissitudes of fate. In The Iliad, she had already lost much, mourning the loss of her son Hector in a lovely speech in Book 24: “dearest to me of all my sons, you were dear to the gods too while in this world; and even now that you have met your destiny and died, it turns out they still care for you”. The war, of course, was caused by her lesser son Paris and Hecuba and Priam sent a third son, Polydorus, away to family friend and the King of Thrace Polymestor with gold and jewels for safekeeping until the war was over. Even if all was lost in Troy, Polydorus could rebuild the kingdom. Unfortunately, Polymestor’s greed overcame his loyalty and he pushed the boy into the sea, keeping the treasure for himself, thinking that Priam and Hecuba were lost in the war.

Euripides’s play begins with the eerie image of the dead boy’s ghost washed up on the shore of Thrace and addressing the audience. “My body rides each breath of the surf, a few inches up, a few inches back, unprayed for, unburied.” By chance, Hecuba’s daughter will be killed on the same day she will discover his body; he trembles at her misfortune. But there’s nothing that can be done, this being Greek tragedy- Polynexa is soon taken as a sacrifice to the ghost of Achilles, forming a nice parallel between the two ghosts with their own miseries, as well as between the two daughters who Agamemnon has now had sacrificed.

When Polynexa is taken to be killed, she stuns the Greek soldiers by her behavior- refusing to beg or lower herself as a princess, she gladly offers her neck to Neoptolemus (Achilles’s son), relieved to die as a sacrifice rather than live as a slave. Her chastity is important here: a virgin, she adjusts her clothing so as not to be shamefully exposed in death. However, another theme seems to be her innate nobility- something that reveals itself in her behavior as opposed to being just a title. In an interesting essay on moral education (and museums), Raymond Geuss talks about “a certain aristocratic Greek view of moral knowledge, which Plato is keen to consign to the rubbish bin of oblivion.” By this aristocratic view, a person picks up ethical norms from those around them, thus “one could not exactly be said to have been ‘taught’.” For Socrates, being good is more a matter of being instructed in the right propositional knowledge. There’s a direct transmission of the right knowledge of good behavior from instructor to student. In contrast, inheriting morality by a sort of osmosis, and nearly unconsciously, requires us to be born in the right community; which is a somewhat more plausible vision of aristocratic nobility than the theories of blood that Plato sends up in the Republic. And, having thus sublimated morality, it becomes, if not biological, a second nature. Polynexus’s nobility outs itself- the soldiers are awestruck by her exemplary behavior on the way to her death (interestingly, not so different from Socrates) and cheer her as she’s slaughtered before them.

Polydorus’s death was ignoble in comparison. Polymestor, family friend, has violated all the laws of guardianship for a supplicant, described in many works as the most important of Zeus’s laws and arguably at the center of Greek ethics (even more arguably, I’d say hospitality is central to Islamic ethics as well). If there’s a moral to the Odyssey, for instance, it’s to be good to wanderers in need and, in fact, Paris’s seduction of Helen, which launched the Trojan War, could also be seen as a violation of a host’s duty. Polymestor’s defense for his actions is unsatisfyingly flimsy- he claims loyalty to the Greeks motivated him: if he had left the boy alive, Polydorus would have eventually mounted an attack on the Greek destroyers of Troy. Ultimately, though, the moral obligations to protect a guest in need and defend the defenseless outweigh state interests- Hecuba claims a higher authority. An interesting distinction arises here: Polymestor’s claims to aid the Greeks are finally rejected as a ‘barbarian’ could make no alliances with Greeks; another reason moral obligations should have won out, perhaps less recognizable today.

Since it’s nearly impossible to side with Polymestor, it’s just as hard to think he didn’t get what he deserved: Hecuba, claiming to know the location of her dead husband’s buried gold lures him to a tent where the Trojan slave women hold him down, kill his sons, and gouge his eyes out. Anyone whose read the other surviving works of Euripides is familiar with his depictions of women enacting shocking violence on men and children; he likes to turn this gendered world upside down. It’s less troubling here than it was in Medea or the Bacchae as our natural sympathy for Hecuba makes us more willing to forgive her; but, in the end, she slaughters children as easily as Medea. It’s hard to think of another author who details the violence in the hearts of women as thoroughly and obsessively as Euripides.

Hecuba gets away with it- the play ends with a trial in which Agamemnon declares Polymestor’s punishment just. In angered response, he predicts Hecuba’s death by drowning and Agamemnon’s murder by his wife Clytemnestra. There is a suggestion that a seer has revealed this to him, but I prefer to think his blindness has given him mystical sight, as in other Greek stories. Interestingly, he is now telling the truth- has the realization of his ultimate mutilation and humiliation ended his sophistries, or was he just quicker to tell the truth to hurt his new found foes?