Hecuba

The interconnected motifs of sight and prophecy also feature in the play, albeit in a more subtle way. The play begins with Polydorus’s monologue in which he introduces the backstory and predicts much of what will happen in the play—though his predictions, which notably omit any reference to the play’s bloody conclusion, are significantly misleading (like many ancient oracles’ prophecies).

Similarly, Hecuba is sent a premonition of the doom of her children Polyxena and Polydorus in the form of dreams whose meanings she is afraid to see. Sight itself—a symbol for life—becomes a curse for Hecuba, who regards herself as dead in every way except that she still lives “in the light” (168).

But the marriage of sight and prophecy becomes most explicit at the very end of the play, when Polymestor, having been blinded by Hecuba and the Trojan women, prophesies the doom that awaits his assailants: Hecuba will be transformed into a dog and Agamemnon will be murdered, together with his oracular captive and concubine Cassandra, as soon as he reaches home. The image of the blind prophet who sees things that others human beings cannot was a familiar one in antiquity: Compare the blind prophet Tiresias, who plays such an important role in the Theban myths (see, for instance, Sophocles’s Antigone and Oedipus). But it was also a familiar trope for the blind prophet to be ignored. So Euripides’s Hecuba begins and ends with two different prophets, one an unseen ghost and the other a blind king, who speak their prophecies before an audience that cannot grasp their significance.