Hecuba

Homer gives Hecuba a Phrygian family. In Iliad Book 16, Apollo takes the likeness of Asius, Hecuba's own brother. Asius is a son of Dymas, who lived in Phrygia by the streams of the Sangarius. Euripides names a different father. In the opening lines of his Hecuba, the ghost of her son Polydorus calls her the daughter of Cisseus. Apollodorus's Library records both answers and adds a third, the river Sangarius and Metope.

Apollodorus says Hecuba was the second wife of Priam, who had given his first wife Arisbe to Hyrtacus. Her first son was Hector. Before her second child was born, she dreamed she gave birth to a firebrand whose fire spread over the whole city. The seer Aesacus said the child would ruin his country, so the baby was exposed on Mount Ida. He survived and grew up to be Paris. Apollodorus lists her daughters as Creusa, Laodice, Polyxena and Cassandra.

In Iliad Book 6, Hector comes back from the fighting and meets his mother at the palace. She offers him wine for a libation. He refuses and asks her to take her finest robe to the temple of Athena instead. Hecuba picks a robe woven by Sidonian women, one Paris had brought home on the voyage that also brought Helen. The priestess Theano lays it on the goddess's knees and prays for Troy. Homer says Athena denied the prayer.

In Book 22, Achilles is racing toward the walls and Hector waits outside the gate. After Priam's plea fails, Hecuba loosens her robe and shows Hector her breast. She asks him to pity the mother who nursed him and to fight from inside the wall. If Achilles kills him, she warns, she will never lay him on a bier. Hector stays. When he falls, she tears her hair, flings away her veil, and leads the Trojan women's lament.

In Book 24, Priam tells Hecuba that Zeus wants him to ransom Hector's body. She cries out that his heart must be made of iron to face the man who killed his sons. She wishes she could fix her teeth in Achilles's heart and feed on it. Still, she brings Priam wine in a golden cup and tells him to pray to Zeus for a bird of omen. At Hector's funeral she leads the second lament. Achilles sold her other sons overseas, she says, but dragged Hector around the tomb of Patroclus.

The Iliad ends before Troy falls, so Hecuba's later life comes from the tragedians and mythographers. In Euripides's Hecuba, the Greeks vote to sacrifice her daughter Polyxena at Achilles's grave. Odysseus comes to take the girl. Hecuba reminds him that he once came to spy on Troy in rags, that Helen recognized him, and that Hecuba herself let him go. He admits it and takes Polyxena anyway. The herald later reports that Achilles's son cut her throat on the mound.

Then the body of her youngest son, Polydorus, washes up on the shore. Priam had sent him with gold to their Thracian guest-friend Polymestor, who killed him once Troy fell. Hecuba lures Polymestor and his sons into the captives' tent with a tale of hidden Trojan gold. With her Trojan women she kills his two sons and blinds him. The blinded king then prophesies her end: she will become a dog with bloodshot eyes, and her tomb will be called the hound's grave, a mark for sailors. He adds that Agamemnon and Cassandra will die by Clytemnestra's hand.

Euripides's Trojan Women tells the aftermath differently. Its prologue says Polyxena has already died at Achilles's tomb without her mother's knowledge. The herald tells Hecuba she is allotted to Odysseus, and she mourns falling to a man with a double tongue. Her daughter Cassandra objects that Apollo's words say Hecuba will die at Troy. Later in the play, Helen answers the charges against her by blaming Hecuba for bearing Paris and Priam for not killing him.

Ovid retells the whole sequence in Metamorphoses Book 13. Ulysses drags Hecuba from her sons' tombs, and she carries Hector's ashes onto his ship. When she finds Polydorus's body, she tricks Polymestor with a promise of hidden gold and tears out his eyes. The Thracians stone her. She snarls, snaps at the stones, and barks when she tries to speak. Ovid says even Juno denied that Hecuba deserved such a fate.

Apollodorus's Epitome says that when the Greeks shared out the captive women, Agamemnon got Cassandra, Neoptolemus got Andromache, and Odysseus got Hecuba. It then gives a second version. Some say Helenus got her and crossed with her to the Chersonese. There she turned into a bitch, and he buried her at the place still called the Bitch's Tomb.