Hecuba

Queen of Troy, wife of old Priam, mother of Hector and Paris and Cassandra and (by Homer's count) nineteen sons born in her own bed. From the high walls she begged her son Hector not to meet Achilles in single combat, baring her breast to him as she wept (*Iliad* 22.79-89), and when he was slain her lament over the body joined Andromache's and Helen's in the final grief of the poem (*Iliad* 24.747-760). After the sack she was given to Odysseus as a slave, and in the Attic tragic tradition lived long enough to take a terrible revenge on the Thracian king who murdered her last son (Euripides *Hecuba*).

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