Bloomsbury (2015) p/b 146pp £16.99 (ISBN 9781472569066)
Throughout antiquity Hecuba enjoyed great renown. Included among Euripides’ ten canonical plays in the Hellenistic era, it became part of the ‘Byzantine Triad’ of Euripidean tragedies studied in schools for their rhetorical brilliance and pithy aperçus. It was the first Greek drama to be staged in the renaissance and influenced later Revenge tragedies (including, perhaps, Hamlet), before falling out of favour in the 19th C and regaining popularity in the late 20th C. In this concise, elegant and well-written study, F. examines the context of Hecuba’s first performance, analyzes its content and considers its reception from 5th C BC Greece to the 21st C AD. The opening chapters place Hecuba within the context of the first decade of the Peloponnesian War and the shift, traced by Thucydides, from an earlier morality, where ‘unwritten laws’ influenced attitudes to (for example) burial and xenia (guest-friendship), towards the hard-nosed ‘might is right’ expediency exemplified in the Melian Dialogue. This transition may be mirrored in the play itself. Suggesting that Euripides may have been the first dramatist to combine the stories of Polydorus and Polyxena, and addressing the question of the play’s unity, F. shows how Hecuba apparently learns to argue with increasing sophistry in order to take vengeance on Polymestor, entrapping him by flouting the very laws of xenia that she is punishing him for breaking. At the heart of the book is a scene-by-scene survey of the play. For this fully to make sense, the reader would need to be familiar with the text, either in Greek or in translation. Including useful considerations of themes such as ghosts in Greek drama and Euripides’ attitude towards sacrifice and self-sacrifice, the analysis concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of the trial scene, the content and rhetorical style of whose speeches reveal much about the characters delivering them. Wisely, a separate chapter is devoted to the choral odes, which, F. writes, ‘can bear a tangential relation to the stage events’.
Arguing that ‘it is important to examine how the play’s earlier reception can help to interpret it’, F. gives a brief yet intriguing overview of Hecuba’s reception from Aristophanes to the early C20th, before discussing recent influential (if not always successful) productions and adaptations. Eminently readable and admirably accessible, the book assumes some classical knowledge. It includes helpful maps, a glossary of ancient and technical terms, a reading list, an exhaustive chronology and notes.
David Stuttard