Hecuba | Greek Queen

Hecuba, in Greek and Roman mythology, is the wife of Priam and the mother of nineteen children, including Hector, Paris, and Cassandra. She witnessed the death of almost all of them in Troy and saw her husband, her daughter Polycenae, and her grandson Ashtianax slaughtered.

Taken to Thrace as a slave, there, according to one version, she blinded King Polymestor, who had his son Polydorus killed, and killed two of the Thracian king's sons, with the help of other Trojan slaves.

Stoned by the people, she bit those who struck her, and was thus turned into a bitch, whose howls impressed everyone.

In Shakespeare's work

In Shakespeare's Hamlet is a well-known line spoken by the Prince of Denmark when he contemplates the passion with which an actor reacts in a monologue in which Hecuba reacts to the death of her husband, Priam. "And all for nothing - For Hecuba! What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba / That he should weep for her?".