#polyxena

[blended-ice]

Feeling normal about Polyxena in Euripides’s Hecuba

quotes from Lembke and Reckford translation

[homericnerd]

Hecuba Euripides — translated by Kardan and Street

[auroradiation]

The final piece of Troy fell.

[ala-chrisgoods]

Day 15-Polyxena

[theodysseyofhomer]

i love polyxena who looks at odysseus too afraid of a girl who's about to die to even let her supplicate him and sees right through it and tells her mother not to mourn for her because she would rather die than be enslaved. but i also love polyxena who listens to her mother try and fail to save her and knows death is coming for her, no matter how hard her mother tries to save her, and she at least doesn't want to make it harder for her. she lets odysseus be a coward to her, but she won't show her own fear. instead she makes her lament about hecuba. even if she did want to live. even if she wanted to stay right there with her mother as long as she could.

[flaviafulvia]

Thinking again about how the Trojan War ate the slightly younger generation at Troy alive, and the whole thing was bookmarked by the sacrifice of two virginal girls. The older generation has its hard time too, but many of them at least make it home eventually, however happy or unhappy that homecoming was.

[kallistoriae]

[Polyxena’s death] is not placed at the beginning or at the end of the play but muffled in the middle; it does not constitute either cause of culmination of the action; it does not change the plot or other people in any substantial way; and it forces us to no moral conclusion at all except that such sacrifice is irrelevant to the world in which it is staged. Polyxena is a shooting star that wipes itself across the play and disappears.

— Anne Carson, preface to "Hekabe" in Grief Lessons

[fullyconsumedbywhatlovesme]

Now We Both Look Like Brides

Iphigenia and Polyxena in the Underworld

I think this is the most in detail background I’ve ever done.