With faltering footsteps, even as she tore
her white hair, Hecuba moved toward the shore.
“My Trojan women, let me have an urn,”
the wretched woman said, wanting to draw
clean water from the sea. But then she saw
the corpse of Polydorus on the shore;
the waves had cast it up—a corpse that bore
such savage wounds, the work of Thracian spears.
The Trojan women wail, but any tears
and words of Hecuba are checked by grief:
she cannot speak. As mute as stone, as stiff,
she’s stunned; she stares at what lies at her feet,
and now lifts up her grim gaze heavenward,
and now stares at his face, now at the wounds
Latin [518–43]
of her dead son as he lies there, outstretched.
But it’s the wounds on which she’s most intent;
it’s these that fuel her anger, arm her wrath.
And once she is inflamed, she plots revenge
as if she still were queen: she images
harsh punishment. Just as a lioness,
stripped of a suckling cub, fanatically
will track her stealthy enemy, just so,
forgetful of her years but not her grandeur,
fierce Hecuba goes straight to Polymestor,
the author of that execrable murder.
She seeks a private colloquy with him:
she says that she has brought another treasure,
a hidden hoard of gold that she would like
the Thracian to consign to her dear son.
The king is caught; his customary greed
is stirred; and at a secret place, they meet—
and here he urges her with lying words:
“Come, Hecuba, be quick! Give me that hoard
you want your son to have. By all the gods,
I swear that anything you give to me,
your son will get, just as he has received
the gold you gave to me before.” His speech,
his promises are false: ferociously,
she stares at him; the anger in her seethes.
Then—suddenly—she grips him; and she calls
upon the other Trojan women—all
her fellow captives—as she digs her nails
into his lying eyes; and she rips out
his eyeballs from their sockets (it is rage
that gives her strength). And then into the place
that once contained his eyes, she drives her hands,
soaked with his guilty blood: she plucks his flesh.
The Thracians, at the sight of his distress,
began—with stones and lances—to attack
the Trojan women. But she tried to catch
those stones: with a hoarse howl, she snapped her teeth.
Latin [544–68]
Her jaws could only bark, though set for speech.
And one can still find in the Cherronesus
this place: the She-hound’s Mound or Kynos sema,
the name it gained from Hecuba’s sad change.
And then, for long, through all the fields of Thrace,
remembering her many griefs, she howled.
Her Trojan friends and Grecian enemies
alike were moved; all of the gods took pity—
and even great Jove’s wife and sister, Juno,
was ready to concede that such great sorrow
was something Hecuba had not deserved.