LAW AND SPECTACLE IN EURIPIDES’ HECUBA Judith Fletcher It must have been a disturbing facsimile of their own lawmaking practices that confronted the Athenian audience who gathered to watch Euripides’ Hecuba sometime in the late 420s. e Greek army, now encamped in race, forms a democratic assembly that votes to sacriﬁce an innocent Trojan girl, Polyxena, to the ghost of Achilles. Hecuba calls the sacriﬁce of her daughter murder, but by the end of the play she will orchestrate an act of infanticide, and then be acquitted in a trial. What laws are operating in this bleak universe? Or are there any laws at all? Crafted with references to familiar legal and judicial processes and vocabulary, Hecuba asks questions about the nature of law that reveal the potential fallibilities of the Athenian legislative apparatus. Perhaps not every tragedy functioned as ‘the critical conscience that accompanies the absolutely new and risky experience of power being exercised by the demos’, as one critic puts it, but this particular text raises important issues about the legal authority of the communal voice that was essential to the political and civic life of Athens. 1 e following discussion oﬀers a reading of Hecuba that places it in the context of Athenian legal praxis, but one that also understands the play more broadly as a meditation on the question of what gives law its authority. Hecuba, I shall argue, presents these ideas in a way that implicates the audience (or at least the intended audience) both as law-making citizens and as spectators of tragedy. A terrible act of retribution, the blinding of Polymestor after the murder of his sons, is the culmination of a series of references to spectatorship, spectacle, and sight throughout the play. My analysis connects this motif to the theme of law and justice in Hecuba. I argue that the conﬂation of vision and law contributes to and is enhanced by a textual strategy that embeds a version of the citizen spectators of this production within its ﬁctive universe. Hecuba, in other words, exploits the often-noted kinship between the law and the theatre of classical Athens, and both represents a version 1 e quotation is from Ost (1996) 11. e debate about the civic speciﬁcity of Greek tragedy is ongoing. In general I agree with Goldhill (1990) 115 and Seaford (2000) 35, who argue that tragedy should be read as a product of Athenian ideology. e opposing camp includes Griﬃn (1998) 47–48, who argues instead for a more universal meaning, and Rhodes (2003) 104–19, who suggests that tragedy is not so much concerned with Athenian democracy as with the concerns of all ancient Greek cities. For the relation between drama and democratic political culture at Athens, see Rosenbloom, this volume.