Guided Pathway

Coster’s tragedy Polyxena (#17.1) tells the story of the sacrifice of the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy at the end of the Trojan War. The Greeks, who are unable to sail home due to the lack of wind, are visited by the ghost of Achilles who demands the sacrifice of Polyxena in exchange for the necessary winds. Polyxena calmly accepts her fate and dies with dignity. While the obvious pinnacle of the narrative would be the moment of Polyxena’s death, in Coster’s tragedy, as Arjan van Leuvensteijn and Evert Wattel point out, the emotional climax occurs in the moment Ulysses forces Hecuba to let her daughter go to her death. While Polyxena is the picture of grace and stoic virtue in accepting life’s events, her mother Hecuba is seized by her passions and must be forced to comply with fate, which forcing blinds her to reason and allows her to be swept up in acts of revenge (van Leuvensteijn and Wattel, 124). Vondel’s 1626 play about Hecuba (#17.2) drives home the distinction between the daughter’s and the mother’s responses, with Polyxena’s neo-Stoic acceptance allowing her, like Rembrandt’s Proserpina, to ‘control’ herself and her movement by bridling her own emotions.