“In the extreme conditions of the fall of Troy, the community of women gathered before Agamemnon’s tents seems initially to be a sign of the end of community. Caught in an unbearable contradiction between past and present, the women repeatedly articulate exactly their efforts to come to terms with what cannot be managed. Thus, Hecuba veers between invocations of the gods and rejection of them, and the only comfort on offer is the songs that enumerate the horrors. In this impossible context, familiar rituals are distorted, but the women strive nonetheless to render them acceptable and appropriate. The rituals that the play offers for consideration are those of marriage and death. Marriage is very prevalent in the play, albeit mostly in perverted or detrimental form, as when Andromache, and with her the chorus some, laments the possibility not only of rape by the new Greek masters, but of the subversion of their previous affections for their husbands, now dead. The most impressive version of marriage on offer is, of course, that celebrated by Cassandra; and in her wedding dances and songs, Cassandra presents a compelling example of a woman using ritual forms to manage the abject situation into which she is thrust. Unlike some critics who hold that her mind has snapped under the hideous pressure of Troy’s downfall and her own sacrilegious rape, I do not accept that she is mad and raving when she dances in, waving her torch, performing a hymenaios to celebrate her impending “wedding” to Agamemnon. As priestess and prophetess, she discerns correctly that her enslavement to Agamemnon is indeed a matter of celebration, if ironically so […] Audiences both internal and external who are unable to believe her cheerful account of the matter should reflect the they are by definition unable to believe anything she says. Her wedding songs challengee us like her novel definitions of defeat and victory, as she extends the typical formula of blessing for the bridal couple ironically and unexpectedly to include the city of Troy.”
— Barbara Goff, “Improvising on the Athenian Stage: Women’s Ritual Practice in Drama” in Finding Persephone: Women’s Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean, Maryline Parca and Angeliki Tzanetou, eds. (via chthonic-cassandra)
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