Hecuba

Mother of nineteen of Priam’s sons, Hecuba pleads with Hector from the walls, mourns him past consolation, and survives the fall to become the tragedians’ great figure of ruined majesty — enslaved, bereaved of every child, in the plays of Euripides transformed at last into the dog of Cynossema. In the Iliad her grief is still queenly: it is she who bares the breast that nursed him, begging her son not to face Achilles alone.