Euripides' Hekabe and the Somatics of Dionysiac Drama

Abstract

The stage setting of Euripides'Hekabeis a sinister place. Its denizen is an ogre-like king who masquerades as an ally of the Greeks and a friend of the Trojans. He is a host who takes in axenos(‘stranger/guest’) along with his golden hoard, both of which he promises to keep safe within his house. Site of death, site of thesaurization, Polymestor's locale bears an uncanny and parodic resemblance to the house of Hades and he to the form of that death god called Plouton. Paradoxically, the names of the victims who die there, the one he killed (Polydoros) and the one whom others sacrificed (Polyxena), sound like those ironic and euphemistic epithets of that underworld deity, who both gives and receives. This is also a place haunted by ghosts, one of whom appears on stage and speaks the prologue (Polydoros) and the other, Achilleus, who transmits his demand for the sacrificial gift of a ‘bride of death’ (Polyxena). In the end, there is a ‘house of Hades’, but it will be Hekabe's and not Polymestor's, and it is Polymestor and his children who will be lured into her secluded tent, following a path, as the chorus says, that leadsthanasimon pros Haidan(‘to deadly Hades’, 1031f.; cf. 1021f.). He will later call the avengers (Hekabe and her women) Bacchants of Hades (1077).

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