Until the war, Troy had been the wealthiest and most powerful city in Asia Minor. As Priam’s chief wife and the mother of many of his children, most of them sons, Hecuba’s status and happiness seemed assured. Yet the decade of the Trojan War stripped her of everything: her family, her home, her social status, and her personal freedom. During the conflict she sent her youngest son, Polydorus, to Polymestor, king of Thrace, for safety. When Troy fell to the Greeks, Hecuba was handed over to Odysseus as a slave. While accompanying Odysseus on his homeward journey to Greece, she discovered the corpse of Polydorus and avenged his murder by Polymestor by killing two of the latter’s children and tearing out his eyes. Hecuba was eventually turned into a fiery-eyed dog.
Left: The Dream of Hecuba
Is one of the panels in Pippi de’ Gianuzzi’s Scenes from the Trojan War fresco, painted in the late 1530s.
Those are the bare bones of the legend of Hecuba. The story became popular with later writers, who did much to embellish her biography and character. Some of the details they appended are contradictory, however.
According to most Greek sources, the Trojan War began after the Trojan prince Paris, Hecuba’s second son by Priam, eloped with the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta.
In response to this outrage, the Greeks mounted an expedition to rescue Helen from the enemy. According to Pindar (c. 522—c. 438 BCE), a poet from the city of Thebes in Boeotia (northwestern Greece), while Hecuba was pregnant with Paris she had a vivid dream that the son born to her was a firebrand that set fire to the city. The soothsayer Cassandra interpreted the dream to mean that Paris would bring destruction to the whole state. (In Homer’s Iliad, Cassandra had been merely a daughter of Hecuba and Priam; her role as a prophetess was added by later authors.) Alarmed by this prophecy, King Priam gave orders that his child be left out to die on Mount Ida. Paris was rescued by a shepherd, however, and as a young man he was accepted back into the city, where he inevitably came to fulfill the seer’s prediction.
All but one of Hecuba’s children died during the Trojan War. Of the sons whose names were recorded by the author Apollodorus (fl. 140 BCE), a collector and probably an embellisher of myths, Antiphus, Deiphobus, Hector, Hipponous, Pammon, Polites, Troilus, and Paris himself were killed in combat. Polydorus, her youngest son, and her infant grandchild Astyanax (the only son of Hector) were murdered shortly after the end of the war. Her daughters Cassandra, Creusa, Laodice, and Polyxena all died during the fall of the city or shortly afterward. Hecuba’s sole surviving offspring was Helenus, who spent some time after the war as a slave but later became king of Epirus.
World History
