I loved this play! It was certainly one of my favourites of Euripides’. It tells the post-Trojan-War story of three women: Andromache, wife of Hector and mother of baby Astynax; Helen, Menelaus’ wife, who was taken by Paris to Troy and who effectively was the cause of the whole Trojan War; and Hecuba, the wife of King Priam and former Queen of Troy before the Greeks captured it.
There is an interesting debate between Hecuba and Helen in the middle of the play. Menelaus is deciding whether or not he should kill Helen for what he perceives as a “crime” – leaving her husband for another man, in this case Paris – and Helen is defending herself; Hecuba, however, enraged at the loss of her city and the enslavement of the Trojans, claims that she is the criminal Menelaus believes she is.
Andromache and Hecuba are being sold into slavery. Andromache, additionally, has to deal with the cruel death of her son which she has just heard about. Hecuba cries:
“Unhappy boy, how pitiably the walls of your father’s city […] have shorn the locks of your head which your mother tended like a garden, smothering them with her kisses! Amid them the blood laughs out where the bone is broken.”
Here are some of my favourite quotes from this beautiful play:
“Dying and living are very different things, my child. The former is nothing, but while there’s life, there’s hope.”
“I see how the gods work, how they raise on high what is nothing, and bring to ruin what seems to be something.”
I feel like this one quote summed up the entire play, though:
“Hecuba faints.“