Hecuba Caught between
Life and Death

Daniel W. Turkeltaub (Millsaps College)

The setting of Euripides’ Hecuba, haunted by ghosts and devoid of Olympian gods, has troubled critics such as David Kovacs, Charles Segal, and Froma Zeitlin.[1] Polydorus builds this dramatic space in vv. 1-44 by superposing the Chersonese on the underworld so as to produce an uneasily bi-layered world that collapses the distance between life and death. Within the semiotic framework this space provides, many of Hecuba’s words and gestures characterize her plight as a “living death.” Her revenge against Polymestor reproduces and reifies key images that describe her own condition throughout the tragedy.

Polydorus begins to construct the setting with his first two verses, which create a syntactic paraprosdokian that overlays the Chersonese on the underworld. When heard, the first verse seems to be a self-contained clause that locates the play in the underworld: “I have come to the hiding places of the dead and the gates of darkness.” Soon afterwards, the audience deduces that the participle “leaving” in v. 2 must govern the accusatives in v. 1 instead and that the dramatic action therefore does not occur in the underworld. They must wait until v. 33 before Polydorus tells them where the play is actually set. Hermann’s now widely accepted emendation of the article tên (Hec. 8), which occurs in all manuscripts and fits the passage, to the deictic tênd’, which only specifies the setting earlier, reveals the discomfort such a prolonged period of spatial uncertainty produces. Polydorus has spent the intervening period depicting the Chersonese as a “hiding place of the dead.”[2] He was sent there to hide in secret, but that very secrecy emboldened Polymestor to kill him and cast his corpse into the surf. The eventual identification of the Chersonese as the setting recalls the audience to their initial interpretation of the first verse. The paraprosdokian has united the Chersonese and the underworld as two referents of the “hiding place of the dead.” Together they form the tragedy’s single dramatic space, the former as its vehicle, the latter as its tenor. Trojan Women and Sophocles’ Polyxena testify to this effect. The three plays depict the same myth and are widely thought to respond to one another deliberately. The opening verses of Trojan Women and Polyxena mirror those of Hecuba except that their word-order prevents the very paraprosdokian that Hecuba produces.

Hecuba’s setting not only justifies and is developed by the presence of ghosts and the absence of gods, it reinvigorates the traditional associations that many of the play’s themes and images have with death. In this environment Hecuba’s laments, for instance, become more than mere “hyperbole we know well from the traditional idiom of suffering and lament”[3]; they reveal that she, deprived of her home, her family, her xenoi, and her liberty, of everything that sustained her life, must suffer the pain of persisting as someone already dead. The prevalence of blindness, exile, and loss of family as indices of death in her laments enhances the horror of her revenge against Polymestor. She forces upon him the same state of living death that she herself has endured throughout the play, but, whereas her escape is foretold, the indices of his condition are both physically manifested and permanent. He will be trapped in this state forever, blind and alone on his own deserted island.