κυνὸς σῆμα: Euripides’ Hecuba and the Uses of Revenge

Abstract:This paper reads Euripides’ Hecuba contextually and intertextually, attending both to the play’s historical context of the Athenian transition to democracy in the fifth century (entailing laws regulating mourning and the birth of the democratic court system) and to its intertextual dialogue with Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Against the great majority of scholars of Hecuba, through a close reading of the play, I argue that Hecuba’s transformation into a dog does not signal her moral degeneration and that her revenge is both ethically coherent and deeply human, recognizing the particularity of her lost son Polydorus in a way that democratic justice cannot.