HECUBA SUCCUMBS: WORDPLAY IN SENECA'STROADES

Abstract

Hecuba's grief upon learning of Hector's death in Hom.Il. 22.430‒6 and in the presence of his corpse later on inIl. 24.747‒59 seems to foreshadow the queen's miserable fate in the aftermath of the fall of Troy. In the subsequent literary tradition, the character of Hecuba ends up merging with the destiny of her city: as Harrison points out with reference to Seneca'sTroades, Hecuba, the Latin counterpart of Greek Hekabe, functions as a metaphor for the fall of Troy (118), even represents the fallen Troy itself (128). In turning into an exemplar of maternal grief, she also comes to embody the vicissitudes of fortune. In these pages, I am interested in exploring a possible wordplay on the queen's name in Seneca'sTroades, which may have originated, as I suggest, from Hecuba's distinctive posture in Euripides’ diptychHecubaandTrojan Women(for convenience's sake I will employ the Latin form of the name throughout these pages with the exception of a few passages, in which the Greek form ‘Hekabe’ will be used in order to bring to the fore an etymological connection I will discuss below).