Euripides: Hecuba

Chosen as one of the ten canonical plays by Euripides during the Hellenistic period in Greece, 'Hecuba' was popular throughout Antiquity.

The play also became part of the so-called 'Byzantine triad' of three plays of Euripides (along with 'Phoenician Women' and 'Orestes') selected for study in school curricula, above all for the brilliance of its rhetorical speeches and quotable traditional wisdom.

Translations into Latin and vernacular languages, as well as stage performances emerged early in the sixteenth century.

The Renaissance admired the play for its representation of the extraordinary suffering and misfortunes of its newly-enslaved heroine, the former queen of Troy Hecuba, for the courageous sacrificial death of her daughter Polyxena, and for the beleaguered queen's surprisingly successful revenge against the unscrupulous killer of her son Polydorus.