Page:Euripides and his age.djvu/93

Rh The note of the Medea was struck again some two years later (426 ?) in a play almost equally powerful and more horrible, the Hecuba. The heroine is the famous Queen of Troy, a barbarian woman like Medea, majestic and beautiful at the beginning of the action and afterwards transformed by intolerable wrongs into a kind of devil. Her "evils" are partly the ordinary evils that come to the conquered in war, but they are made worse by the callousness of her Greek conquerors. The play strikes many notes of special bitterness. For instance, the one champion whom Hecuba finds among her conquerors is the general, Agamemnon. He pleads her cause in the camp, because, God help him! he has taken her daughter Cassandra, the mad prophetess vowed to eternal virginity, to be his concubine, and consequently feels good-natured. There is another note, remarkable in an Athenian. The mob of the Greek army, in a frenzy of superstition, clamour to have a Trojan princess sacrificed at Achilles' tomb. In the debate on this subject we are told that several princes spoke; among them the two sons of Theseus, the legendary kings of Athens. They would surely, as enlightened Athenians, prevent such atrocities? On the contrary,