Hecuba of Troy: The Queen Behind the War

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There is a question worth asking about the Trojan War, which is: who actually ran Troy? Not militarily — that was Hector, the eldest son, a competent and serious man who understood that wars are primarily logistical problems decorated with occasional acts of courage. But behind Hector, behind Priam with his sentimental attachments and his tendency to make decisions the way you make a purchase you immediately regret, behind fifty princes and several hundred household servants and the fluctuating population of a palace under a decade-long siege — someone was keeping the water supply functional and the grain stores counted and the chain of authority clear enough that the city did not collapse from within before the Greeks burned it from without. The ancient sources are not particularly forthcoming on this point. They are, however, consistent in their portrait of Hecuba, and if you read that portrait carefully, the answer becomes obvious.

Hecuba was the daughter of Dymas, king of Phrygia — or Cisseus, king of Thrace, depending on which ancient source you trust, which tells you that the mythological tradition was more interested in her as a symbol than as a person with a specific set of parents — and she married Priam when he was already a king and she was young enough that the match was, in the language of the time, entirely appropriate. She gave him children. Nineteen of them by Priam himself, according to the Iliad, and a number of others by earlier unions that the sources treat with varying degrees of discretion. Hector was the eldest, the great one, the one the poets celebrated for centuries. Paris was the beautiful one, who caused the war, which Hecuba had always known he would, since she had dreamed before his birth that she gave birth to a torch that burned Troy to the ground, and a seer had told her what the dream meant, and she had sent the baby to die on Mount Ida.

He did not die. This was perhaps inevitable, given his family.

Ten Years of Losing

The war lasted ten years, which is a long time by any measure, and an extraordinarily long time to watch your sons die in a sequence that had the relentless quality of a creditor working through a list. Hector fell in the tenth year, killed by Achilles, and his body was dragged behind a chariot for twelve days and then ransomed back — an episode the Iliad treats as one of its great moral climaxes, the old king Priam going in secret to Achilles's tent to beg for his son's body. Hecuba is there in that scene. She tries to dissuade Priam from going; she knows, with the precision of a woman who has been calculating odds for a decade, that Achilles is as likely to kill him as not. Priam goes anyway. This is, in miniature, the dynamic of their marriage.

After the fall, the Greeks divided the Trojan women by lot among their commanders, the way you might distribute a particularly large shipment of goods that had arrived in better condition than expected. Hecuba's lot fell to Odysseus — short, wiry, famously clever, whose vanity was the intellectual kind, which is the variety that requires the most careful management because it cannot simply be flattered with compliments about physical appearance. The pairing is deliberately cruel on the myth's part: the most controlled woman in Troy, assigned to the most intellectually self-regarding of the Greeks, with all the power reversed and no mechanism for reversal.

And then, on the shore of Thrace, on the way to Greece, she found the body of her youngest son.

Polydorus, Polymestor, and What Vengeance Actually Costs

Polydorus was the youngest of Hecuba and Priam's sons, sent two years before the fall to the court of Polymestor, king of Thrace, who had married Hecuba's daughter Ilione and was, in the language of the arrangement, a trusted ally. Priam sent the boy with a substantial amount of gold, which was either prudent provision for the family's future or catastrophically naive optimism about the reliability of men who have been given substantial amounts of gold with minimal oversight, depending on your view of human nature. When Troy fell and the gold became the whole point of the transaction rather than the accompanying consideration, Polymestor killed Polydorus and threw his body into the sea.

Hecuba found it washed ashore. She recognized it because the boy was wearing his blue tunic. He was fourteen years old.

What happened next is the center of Euripides's play Hecuba, which was written somewhere around 424 BC and which is, among other things, an extended argument about what grief does to a person's relationship with the concept of justice, and whether the two things are even compatible once grief reaches a certain magnitude. Hecuba requested an audience with Polymestor, ostensibly to discuss hidden treasure. She brought her women. In the tent, they blinded Polymestor with the pins of their brooches and killed his sons. The Greeks, who had been planning to sail home, were obliged to hold a trial instead, which Agamemnon — who had reasons of his own for not being entirely hostile to Hecuba — adjudicated in her favor. Then, according to the myth, she was transformed into a black dog on the headland of Cynossema, the Dog's Tomb, and her howling carried out across the water for as long as the water ran.

This is why Euripides wrote two plays about her — Hecuba and The Trojan Women — rather than one. She is the figure through whom the entirety of the war's human cost runs: every son, every daughter, every city, every certainty, stripped away in a sequence that ends not in death but in something the myth treats as punishment and which reads, on reflection, more like a release. The dog is not a diminishment. The dog has no more to lose and no more to suppress and no more composure to maintain. The dog howls because it can.

Writing The Hound of Troy, what I found most interesting about Hecuba was not her vengeance, spectacular as it is, but the decades before it — the iron control, the filing away of everything unbearable into a place inside herself where it could not interfere with the work of running a palace and keeping fifty people alive in a city under siege. The vengeance is the moment the archive breaks open. Everything she ever folded up and put away in the dark comes out at once, and it comes out through the eyes of a Thracian king. The myth renders this as transformation. It might equally be called honesty. After fifty years of composure, the black dog with fiery eyes is simply what was always there.