Hecuba's grief upon learning of Hector's death in Hom. Il. 22.430‒6 and in the presence of his corpse later on in Il. 24.747‒59 seems to foreshadow the queen's miserable fate in the aftermath of the fall of Troy. In the subsequent literary tradition, the character of Hecuba ends up merging with the destiny of her city: as Harrison points out with reference to Seneca's Troades, Hecuba, the Latin counterpart of Greek Hekabe, functions as a metaphor for the fall of Troy (118), even represents the fallen Troy itself (128).Footnote ¹ In turning into an exemplar of maternal grief, she also comes to embody the vicissitudes of fortune.Footnote ² In these pages, I am interested in exploring a possible wordplay on the queen's name in Seneca's Troades, which may have originated, as I suggest, from Hecuba's distinctive posture in Euripides’ diptych Hecuba and Trojan Women (for convenience's sake I will employ the Latin form of the name throughout these pages with the exception of a few passages, in which the Greek form ‘Hekabe’ will be used in order to bring to the fore an etymological connection I will discuss below).

In Sen. Tro. 945‒54, a passage to which I will return below, Andromache describes Hecuba's reaction upon discovering that Polyxena is to be sacrificed to Achilles’ cinis (949‒50):

One may certainly agree with Fantham that Hecuba's collapse (succubuit) is spiritual rather than physical.Footnote ³ By contrast, in Euripides’ Hecuba and Trojan Women, arguably the Greek models of Seneca's play,Footnote ⁴ the idea of physical fainting is predominant.

If we turn now to Euripides’ plays and Hecuba's position within that dramatic space, at the outset of the Hecuba we encounter the character entering the stage supported by her attendants (59‒67). However, she abandons her upright posture in the following lines after Odysseus has led Polyxena away: in 438‒43 Hecuba announces that she is about to faint and sinks to the ground (‘Alas! I faint: my limbs sink under me’, Coleridge). When in 486‒7 the messenger Talthybius, bringing the news of Polyxena's death, looks for Hecuba, the chorus draws his attention to the queen lying supine on the ground:

Shortly afterwards, picking up on the chorus’ words, Talthybius himself refers to the queen's horizontal posture, also underlining her deplorable state (495‒6):

In the Trojan Women, Euripides assigns the prologue to Poseidon, who introduces the character of Hecuba to the public, which has likely already caught sight of her on stage. She appears as a silent body lying on the ground and pouring many tears, the presence of which is verbally revealed by the godFootnote ⁶ (36‒8):

Only after the prologue does Hecuba start to talk, exhorting herself to raise her head from the ground (98‒9) and pointing to the physical pain she suffers from lying (112‒14; cf. also 115‒19):

Later on, after Cassandra bids farewell and leaves, Hecuba, replaying a gesture with which Euripides’ public was already familiar,Footnote ⁷ sinks again to the ground (462‒5), denying her servants’ help to lift her up (466‒7):

Hecuba's horizontal posture is highly suggestive, in that it evokes a dead body.Footnote ⁸ It may also, especially in Euripides’ Hecuba, hint at the queen's imminent metamorphosis into a dog, adumbrated in the close of the play (1265‒73), in which the process of her notorious spiritual and physical ‘animalization’ reaches its end.Footnote ⁹

As exemplified by the Euripidean passages above, Hecuba's lying is always expressed by the verb keimai (or one of its compound forms as in diakeimai) signifying ‘to lie down’. This verb can be used to point to various kinds of lying down, such as resting, lying sick or wounded, lying dead or buriedFootnote ¹⁰ or, simply, being situated.Footnote ¹¹ Hecuba's scenic position, recurrent as it is, almost winds up being part of her grammar of tragic gestures.Footnote ¹² Hecuba, in fact, makes expressive use of her body as an alternative to word and action on stage.Footnote ¹³ As Di Benedetto points out with regard to Euripides’ Trojan Women, Hecuba's gestures, often endowed with realism as in 112‒19, are specifically functional to the production of pathos, to such a point that the queen also embodies, by means of her physical suffering, the image of a dying city losing its freedom.Footnote ¹⁴ In Eur. Tro. 37 the participle of the verb keimai is directly referred to the queen, whose name is explicitly mentioned: Ἑκάβη κειμένη. In Greek there is no connection at all, not even slight assonance, between the verb keimai and the anthroponym Hekabe, which, according to Chantraine,Footnote ¹⁵ is related to the form *Ἑκαβόλος corresponding to Artemis’ and Apollo's epithet ἑκηβόλος.Footnote ¹⁶ However, I believe that such a recurrent association of the Greek version of Hecuba's name with the verb keimai did not go unnoticed to Seneca, an attentive reader of his Greek models. As Stevens argues,Footnote ¹⁷ Seneca was operating in a bilingual environment, in which translation between Latin and Greek and correlation on stems were common practice. He also shows that etymological plays on the characters’ names deeply permeate the Senecan tragic corpus and are strictly connected with the plot itself: names often have the potential to reveal, by means of etymological or, rather, paretymological moments, the characters’ actions.

If we go back to the Latin form of the name, Hecuba, nothing is to be found either in the Ernout‒Meillet dictionary or in Maltby's lexicon,Footnote ¹⁸ as far as the name's derivation is concerned. Ovid's text offers a famous example of etymologizing derived from the episode of Hecuba's metamorphosis in Met. 13.565‒71, in which wordplay is also visibly signalled by an etymological marker:Footnote ¹⁹ after the queen has been metamorphosed into a dog, the place of her tomb is consequently named Cynosema (13.569‒70 locus exstat et ex re | nomen habet). To my knowledge, however, considering also that Roman tragedy has mostly come down to us in fragments, there seems to be no direct etymological wordplay on Hecuba's proper name in the Latin world.Footnote ²⁰ None the less, despite the apparent lack of evidence elsewhere, Seneca, as I shall argue, may have retrieved the association underlined above between the Greek name Hekabe and the verb keimai to bring about original wordplay on the queen's Latin anthroponym.

The prologue to Seneca's Troades is delivered in person by Hecuba, who begins with a lengthy lament over the fall of Troy, with which she immediately links herself (me uideat et te, Troia […], 4). This tragic incipit clearly gestures towards the close of Euripides’ Trojan Women (1320‒6), which is analogously dominated by the image of the burning of Troy (for fumat at 17, cf. Eur. Tro. 1320 κόνις δ᾽ ἴσα καπνῷ, and also Verg. Aen. 3.3 … fumat Neptunia Troia). In particular, lines 14‒17 of Seneca's play, containing some of Hecuba's utterances, read thus:

Whereas the Euripidean model opens with a divine prologue and the image of the suffering of the queen lying on the ground, in Seneca's play, Hecuba, giving voice to her grief, draws attention in the first person to the destruction of Troy: she evokes the image of a city that, after tumbling down (incubuit), now lies in ruins (iacent).Footnote ²¹ In applying to Troy the same horizontal posture previously encountered in the Euripidean plays as Hecuba's distinctive feature, Seneca thus reinforces the connection between the shattered city and her queen.Footnote ²²

Later on in the play, upon hearing the news about Polyxena's imminent death, Hecuba falls in a faint, as shown in the passage quoted at the beginning of these pages, which is now worth citing at fuller length. Seneca has the character of Andromache comment on the impending events and her mother‒in‒law's reaction (945‒54):

Andromache announces that Polyxena's animus … laetus has learned about her death (945), since for her keeping on living would have been the real death (948). She then beholds Hecuba collapse under the weight of such woeful news (stupet, 949). As Andromache observes in the next line, the queen shows signs of an exhaustion that is both physical and spiritual: her mens too sinks together with her body (labefacta, succubuit).Footnote ²³ Interestingly, labefacta … succubuit looks like an amplified rendition into Latin of Eur. Tro. 467 (κεῖσθαι πεσοῦσαν). Just as in Euripides’ Hecuba Talthybius encourages the queen to rise (499‒507), in the Troades Seneca has Andromache inviting Hecuba to reanimate and strengthen her animus and spiritus (assurge, alleua, firma). Shortly afterwards, noticing that the queen remains breathing, although death would be better for her as well, Andromache mentions her proper name, Hecubam (953).

The conspicuous presence of compound forms of the verb *cumbo/cubo (incubuit, succubuit) in association with the queen's name appears worth noticing. It recalls the Greek combination of keimai with the character or name of Hekabe, but the pun in Latin may reactivate also a paretymological connection.Footnote ²⁴ The idea underlying such a link is that the queen's very name in the Latin form alludes to the character's prostrate posture and state of mind. Although there seems to be no direct etymological connection between keimai and cubo (the form without nasal infix),Footnote ²⁵ they share a very close meaning, which also corresponds to Latin iaceo. Moreover, the radical cub- is especially noteworthy, for it gestures towards the homophonic syllable -cub- in Hecuba's name, providing a sort of aural etymology from unrelated words.Footnote ²⁶

One should always be wary of pressing analogies as such too far,Footnote ²⁷ but I believe that this play on the radical cub- and the name of Hecuba may also have been prompted by a Virgilian passage. In Aeneid 2, Aeneas recounts the events that occurred inside Priam's palace upon his death (501‒5):

The verb procubuere (505), referring to the palace's doors collapsing under the fury of the Greeks,Footnote ²⁸ is to be found not too far from the proper name Hecubam (501). procubuere clearly points to the falling down of an object (thalami, postes), but it does not seem completely incongruous to extend it to the overall exhaustion of Priam's familyFootnote ²⁹ (cf. 503 spes tanta nepotum, which grafts a sympathetic, almost ‘sentimental’ element onto the descriptive objectivity of Homer's model, Il. 6.244).Footnote ³⁰ Besides, just a few lines below, Hecuba is mentioned again near a compound of cubo (514‒15): incumbens [sc. laurus] arae atque umbra complexa penatis. | hic Hecuba et natae nequiquam altaria circum.Footnote ³¹

Therefore, what in Virgil appears to be an accidental homophonic moment in Aen. 2.501‒5 (Hecubam | procubuere)Footnote ³² and 2.514‒15 (incumbens | Hecuba) becomes semantically meaningful in Seneca's Troades. Seneca's wordplay, injecting new life into the association between the queen's proper name and the verb keimai found in the Euripidean models, seems thus to conjure up, by means of sound correspondences (-cub-), the idea of Hecuba's physical and mental exhaustion, which also lies at the heart of her tragic portrayal in Euripides’ plays.Footnote ³³ Hecuba succumbs in Seneca's play as in his models, but now her succumbing is a moral and physical condition directly conveyed by her own name.