Alcmene, with the ferocity which Euripides generally paints old women, demands his instant death. The chorus insist that by the laws of Hellenic warfare an adversary not killed in battle cannot be afterwards slain without impiety. Eurystheus, however, seems to facilitate in some strange way the removal of these scruples by prophesying that his tomb will yet serve Athens against her enemies, a prophecy similar to that in the Œdipus at Colonus of Sophocles, with which the present play has many features in common, The actual decision of the dispute is lost.
53. The Hecuba.—Very much the same plan is I followed in the Hecuba, which consists of a series of the sorrows of the Trojan queen, and in which the opening subject, the sacrifice of Polyxena, concludes in the middle of the play, artfully introducing a new catastrophe—the finding of the body of Polydorus, and Hecuba's vengeance upon his false Thracian host Except that the ghost of Polydorus foretells this combination of subjects in the prologue, they have no connection, save as common sorrows of Hecuba.
The Hecuba seems to have been brought out about 425 B.C., and is an earlier treatment of the sorrows of the Trojan queen than the Troades, which came out eight or nine years later, and is conceived in a different style. The former has always been a favourite play, has been often imitated, and since Erasmus' time, used as a schoolbook. It is by no means so full of political allusion as the plays we have just noticed, but is perhaps for that very reason a better tragedy. It treats of the climax of Hecuba's misfortunes—the sacrifice of Polyxena at the grave of Achilles, and the murder of Polydorus, her brother, by Polymestor, his Thracian host. The chorus of Trojan women sing odes of great beauty, especially that describing the capture of Ilium (vv. 905 sqq.). The pleading of Hecuba with Odysseus, who comes to carry off her daughter, is full of pathos, and the conduct of Polyxena places her among Euripides' leading heroines. But in this
