Characters
- Agamemnon — judges the quarrel; soon to sail with Cassandra
- Cadmus — Priam’s youngest son; murdered for gold; ghost and corpse
- Ghost of Polydorus — prologue speaker
- Hecuba — mother of Polydorus and Polyxena; blinds Polymestor
- Odysseus — earlier argued for Polyxena’s sacrifice
- Polymestor’s sons — killed by the Trojan women
- Polyxena — sacrificed earlier in the same play (see 038)
- Trojan assembly — recalled sender of Polydorus
- Trojan captive women — agents of the children’s murder and the blinding
Places
- Achaean camp on the Thracian — setting after the fleet’s stop
- Achilles’ tomb — Polyxena’s sacrifice (cross-ref 038)
- Hecuba’s tent — scene of the revenge
- The deep — washes Polydorus’s body ashore; later Cynossema tradition
- Thracian Chersonese — Polymestor’s realm; Polydorus’s foster refuge
Themes
Narrative
Before Troy fell, Priam had sent his youngest son Polydorus with gold to Polymestor, king of the Thracian Chersonese, for safekeeping. When Troy was destroyed, Polymestor killed the boy for the treasure and cast the body into the sea. Euripides opens with Polydorus’s ghost explaining the crime; the corpse then washes ashore near the Achaean camp where Hecuba, already broken by the vote to sacrifice Polyxena at Achilles’ tomb, recognizes her son.
After Polyxena’s death (038), Hecuba turns her remaining will into vengeance. She lures Polymestor and his sons to her tent with a promise of further Trojan gold hidden for him. Inside, the captive women kill the children; Hecuba and her companions blind Polymestor with brooches. He staggers out prophesying that Hecuba will become a dog (cynossema etiology) and that Agamemnon and Cassandra will die—prophecies Agamemnon dismisses even as he judges the case: he finds Polymestor guilty of betraying a guest-friend and lets Hecuba’s revenge stand.
The play makes Hecuba the hinge between sacrificial victimhood and active avenger, and Polymestor the type of the treacherous *xenos* who murders for gold once the Trojan cause is lost.