In Greek mythology, Polyxena (Ancient Greek: Πολυξένη) was the youngest daughter of King Priam of Troy and Queen Hecuba. She does not appear in Homer, but later classical authors make her central to Troy's aftermath: after the city's fall the Greeks sacrifice her on the tomb of Achilles, to whom she had been linked — and in whose death she was sometimes said to be complicit — in varying traditions.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Polyxena" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Role in the Trojan saga
Polyxena is often treated as a Trojan counterpart to Iphigenia: a royal maiden whose death opens or closes a war. She is absent from the Iliad and enters the tradition through later epic and tragedy. One strand links her to Troilus at a fountain where Achilles ambushes them; another has Achilles seek her consolation after Patroclus's death and trust her enough to reveal his vulnerable heel, after which Paris and Deiphobus kill him in Apollo's temple.
Some accounts say she killed herself from guilt after Achilles died. The better-known ending, shaped by Euripides' Hecuba and Trojan Women, places her death after Troy's fall: Achilles' ghost demands her sacrifice so the Greek fleet can sail, and Neoptolemus cuts her throat at the hero's grave.
II.Sacrifice and character
In Euripides she refuses slavery and asks to die free, arranging her clothing so that even in death she remains modest. Odysseus leads her away; Neoptolemus performs the rite after a libation to his father. Her virginity and royal bearing are essential to the scene's pathos — she dies as a princess, not a captive.
Ancient art securely identifies a few sacrifice scenes, usually over Achilles' tomb; the Polyxena sarcophagus from Gümüşçay (c. 500 BC) is a major early witness. Post-classical painters from Primaticcio to Pittoni and Le Brun returned to the subject, and Pio Fedi's Rape of Polyxena in Florence's Loggia dei Lanzi shows her seizure for the sacrifice rather than sexual violence.
III.On the stage
Besides Euripides' Hecuba and Seneca's Troades, Sophocles wrote a lost Polyxena. Later works include Lully and Collasse's Achille et Polyxène, Dauvergne's Polixène, and a role in Berlioz's Les Troyens; Shakespeare mentions her in Troilus and Cressida.