Words and Order

The Greeks definitely understood the power of language to represent tragedy in life. Euripides carefully wrote a script for his play, Hecuba. I imagine that he chose the words and the order for them because he knew that those things, words placed at certain points, are powerful and he wanted to represent tragedy in a powerful way.

For me, the play was tragic because of how Euripides used language in the script. I felt the tragedy

Here are some Greek words
placed at a certain point in this path.

the most right at the beginning, when Polydorus’ ghost opened and announced his murder, his sister’s doom, and the fact that his mother did not yet know. She was to “see two children dead at once” that day. For me, the most tragic part was that I knew that a lot of bad things were going to happen and neither I nor any other audience member or character could do anything to prepare or cope, not that I watched or heard the characters experience tragic events. Euripides used the powerful language of Polydorus’ ghost at a crucial time (the beginning) and to a crucial audience (just the audience, no other characters on stage) to create the tragedy.

From previous works we have studied, as well as Hecuba, we know that the Greeks also understood and used the power of language to persuade. Socrates used his language in his discourse with Gorgias to persuade him to keep discussing rhetoric and arts and break them down for further understanding. Additionally, at the end of the play, Euripides’ character Hecuba used her language to persuade the character Agamemnon to judge a murderer as guilty, even though Agamemnon was a friend to him.