8 The Chersonese is the tongue of land across the Hellespont (modern Dardanelles).

23 The manner of Priam's death varies in the poets.  This is the version that he was murdered by Neoptolemus (Achilles' son) at the altar of Zeus.

37 In Euripides' version Achilles is buried, or has a memorial mound, in Thrace, not Troy where he was killed before the city fell.  Homer has his bones buried with those of Patroclus by the Hellespont.

59  Euripides introduces his principal character before the Chorus makes its formal lyric entry (parodos at 98ff) and gives her a monody (solo song).  Compare the monody of the prostrate Hecuba at Trojan Women 98ff.

87-88 Helenus is the son of Priam and Hecuba, both warrior and seer.  Although the play rests on the premiss that Polydorus is the only surviving son, Hecuba's appeal to Helenus may echo versions of the myth in which he escaped Troy's fall.

98-152  Parodos.  The captive Trojan women sing individually.

100 Although the anonymous captives have been assigned by lot, Hecuba has fallen to Agamemnon because he took Cassandra as his prize (120-22, 826ff.).  At Trojan Women 277 Euripides assigns her to Odysseus.

122 "Mad Cassandra": the Greek word is "Bacchic."

123-24  The two sons of Theseus, Acamas and Demophon, are not mentioned in the Iliad.  On a vase in the Louvre they lead Polyxena away for sacrifice.

154-215  Monodies and lyric dialogue of Hecuba and Polyxena.  The phrasing of the two monodies is intensely emotional.  The metre is appropriate for lamentation.  The lyric dialogue has an agitated metre.

216-443  First Episode: Odysseus, Hecuba, and Polyxena. All three persons in their behavior and words illustrate differing conceptions of loyalty to family (Hecuba to her children, and Polyxena's loyalty to her high birth), to friends or fellows (Odysseus to Achilles), or to obligations incurred (Odysseus to Hecuba).  These are major themes in the play.  Euripides blends two favorite types of scene: a supplication and a character's determination to die as a voluntary rather than compulsory sacrifice.  These scenes include many features of the agon or formal debate of which Euripides was especially fond (and so was his public).

237 Literally: "we who ask (masculine participle)": a woman generalizing about herself or other women normally uses the masculine plural.

287-88 Hecuba reminds Odysseus of his successful supplication at Troy.

342-440 Odysseus moves to avoid physical contact by a suppliant, which would oblige response and curtail independence.

368 Literally "make my body over to Hades," with the common identification of a virgin's death and marriage.

379-70  The literal meaning is that of a "relief" stamped or engraved.

392-93  The dead and their gods "drink" the blood of sacrifices made at funeral or tomb.

398 The simile reverses nature, for Hecuba is the (young) ivy, Polyxena the (old) tree.

421 "Fifty children" is a mythical commonplace.  Priam is said to have had fifty sons.

422 The newly dead were invoked to carry messages to the long-dead.

432 Covering the head is a ritual act of mourning.

444-83  First Stasimon.  Just as the other two choral odes (629-56, 905-52), this one voices a collective grief for Troy.  Besides the anxieties of the slave women, the three stasima are linked by the pervasive imagery of sea-voyages.

444ff Hymnic style, double appellation with adjectives, followed by praise of attributes.

450-52  "Dorian land": the Peloponnese is meant, Argos and Sparta as the homes of Agamemnon and Menelaus, while Phthian land suggests the home of Achilles.

458-61  Reference to the birth of the twin gods Apollo and Artemis when their mother Leto, after long wandering, was allowed by the island of Delos to rest and give birth, under a palm tree.

466-74  At the great festival of Athena, the Panathenaia, a major ritual was the presentation to the goddess's statue of a magnificent robe, woven and embroidered each year by privileged Athenian girls.  The robe bore scenes of the gods' victory over the Giants in which Athena was prominent.  Later Zeus's victory over the Titans was substituted to that over the Giants.  Writers often interchange the names.

484-628 Second Episode: Talthybius and Hecuba.  It consists of two long speeches.

488-92  The notion that fortune maybe different from Fate, and more powerful even than the gods.

496 Self-disfigurement was part of ritual grief.

611-12  Once again the identification of a virgin's death and marriage.

629-57  Second Stasimon: a lament on the fall of Troy that links causative past with present misery.  This ode is intensely pictorial and its arrangement striking.  The first two stanzas begin with a two-verse general comment on fated suffering which is then illustrated.  The first pictures Paris' voyage to abduct Helen, the second the earlier Judgment.  The third stanza offers a vignette of a mourning girl at Sparta, a widowed bride.

658-904 Third Episode: Serving Woman, Hecuba, and Agamemnon.  In this episode Hecuba is transformed from passivity to vengeance.  The long sequence 726-904 is a "supplication scene."

677 "Mad" again is the translation of "Bacchic."

684-87 The "awful dirge" = Dionysiac melody.

734-35  Notice how the costume is a mark of nationality.

750 "My children" is a stylistic plural: she means Polydorus.

787-845 Hecuba's long speech of supplication is a model of calculated pleading, but acquires a natural flow from deliberately interruptive and varied emotion.  It shifts from appeal to law, then to persuasion.

798-801 The ambiguity of these lines reflects the supremacy of man-made "law" in the thinking of the Sophists, and the debate about the relationship between nomos (law) and phusis (Nature).

810-11  "· and now a slave": the implication is that he has a duty to help her, according to Athenian law.

814-19  Notice the place given to persuasion, accorded a tribute conventional to gods in prayers and hymns.

864-75  In the face of Agamemnon's prevarication, Hecuba lowers her demand from help to complicity, then to his stopping any intervention.

887 All but one of the fifty sons of Aegyptus were murdered by their brides on the wedding night on the command of the girls' father, Danaus.  They had pursued his fifty daughters to force them to marry them against his wish.   Aphrodite afflicted all the women of the island of Lemnos with a foul odor when they neglected her worship.  Their husbands therefore imported Thracian concubines, and the women killed all the men in retaliation÷except for Hypsipyle, who spared her own father Thoas.

889 The female servant has been present and silent since 701.

905-52  Third Stasimon.  The first stasimon was the Chorus's presentiment of slavery: in this third and last, as in the second, the women link present pain with past as the outcome of Paris' abduction of Helen.  This ode, which includes many deliberate echoes of Homeric language and subject matter, continues to illustrate Hecuba's own agony, but indirectly, from the experience of others of the disaster she shared, and all is traced to a common cause.  There is a shift from happy celebration to sudden, invasive shouting and violence.

910-11  "Your crown of towers shorn away": compressed and mixed imagery, literal in the razing of the encircling battlements, metaphorical in their visual suggestion of a wreath or diadem which is cropped in ruin like a mourner's hair.

921-22  Compare Vergil, Aeneid 2.21ff and 254ff.  Reference is to the fleet which sailed back by night from Tenedos to rejoin the Greeks inside Troy in the Wooden Horse (Trojan Women 519ff).

944-49  Echoes of Aeschylus' Agamemnon.

953-1295 Fourth Episode (to 1022) and Exodos (1035-1295) with intervening brief lyrics by the Chorus.

953-1022: Polymestor and Hecuba.  Polymestor begins with a hypocritical lamentation.  At 968 Hecuba begins her cruelly ironic deception of Polymestor by simulating shame for her misfortune.

1003 Doubly ironic, for Polymestor is made to speak as if about to die himself, to carry word to the dead Polydorus.

1008 Athena protects the citadel of Troy, as of any city.  Euripides apparently credits the Trojans with structures like the great Mycenean circle of tombs for royal burials, and treasuries similar to the Treasury of Atreus.

1035-1295: Polymestor, Hecuba, and Agamemnon.

1035-55 The blinding of Polymestor takes place off-stage, with shrieking heard by persons on-stage.

1056-1108 Polymestor's monody.  His crippling physical pain is conveyed by theatrical entry on all fours.  These are broken, illogically ordered thoughts.

1067-68 The verb "heal" may suggest that Helios, the Sun, may stand here for Apollo, the Healer.  The identities of the two gods began to merge in the fifth century BCE.

1075-78 The Greek text does not say "Furies" but "hellish Bacchants."

1100-06 Polymestor appears to wish for suicide in the face of unbearable suffering or dishonor.  Suicide in tragedy is a woman's behavior.

1109-1295 Trial of Polymestor and Hecuba in front of Agamemnon.  From 1129 the scene is styled as an agon in which Agamemnon acts as judge.  It dramatizes an enmity which is to last beyond the action now completed.  Trial and verdict help the illusion of justice for Hecuba, but her triumph quickly becomes ashes when Polymestor foretells her own and Cassandra's death.  At 1129 "inhuman savagery" is a translation of the Greek "Barbarian temper."  Compare 1199.

1261 "Masthead" or "truck," an inverted triangular structure receiving the sail-ropes, named from its partial resemblance to a narrow-waisted drinking cup.

1265 Hecuba becomes a bitch, the archetypal Greek metaphor of shamelessness.