When Troy was ash and the victors prepared to sail, they sacrificed to all the gods — threw Astyanax from the battlements and slaughtered Polyxena on the grave of Achilles, for the dead hero's ghost demanded the maiden as his share of the spoils.1
Sacrifices after the fire
The Greeks had slain the sleepers, fired the city, and divided the spoil. Before the fleet could leave, Apollodorus says, they sacrificed to all the gods — the last rites of a war that had already taken Priam at the altar and Hector on the plain. In that same hour of victory they threw Astyanax from the battlements, the child Hector had called Scamandrius and the people Astyanax, lest any seed of Priam survive to avenge Troy; Ovid paints him hurled from the very tower whence he had watched his father fight.2
The ghost at the tomb
On the Thracian shore, where the fleet lay waiting for a fair wind, the earth gaped and Achilles rose from it as large as when he lived. His shade would not let the Achaeans embark ungrateful: let Polyxena be immolated, he demanded, that his sepulchre not go without honor. Hyginus gives the demand a motive — Achilles had sought the maiden in marriage, and coming to the interview was killed by Paris and Deiphobus — but in Ovid the dead man needs no further reason than that his worth be buried with his bones.3
The virgin at the tumulus
Torn from Hecuba's bosom — the queen who cherished her as almost the last child left — Polyxena was led to the tumulus before Neoptolemus son of Achilles and his drawn sword. Ovid makes her brave, more like a man than a woman: she bared her own throat and breast, declaring she would never live a slave, that no man's hand should touch her virgin body, and that her mother might ransom her corpse not with gold but with tears. Even the priest wept as he drove in the steel; in falling she still covered what should be concealed, keeping her chaste modesty to the last.4
The painters remembered
Homer passed over the slaughter in silence — and Pausanias thinks he did well to omit so barbarous an act. Yet the painters did not forget: in the picture gallery at Athens Polygnotus showed Polyxena about to be sacrificed near the grave of Achilles, and at Delphi her hair is braided after the custom of maidens; Pausanias had seen the tragedy depicted at Athens and at Pergamus on the Caicus as well. The Epic Cycle knew what the Iliad would not tell.5
Division of the captives⚖
When the rites were done the victors took their special awards: Agamemnon received Cassandra, Neoptolemus Andromache widow of Hector, and Odysseus Hecuba — though some say Helenus won the old queen and crossed with her to the Chersonese, where she turned into a bitch with fiery eyes and the place was called Cynosema, the Dog's Tomb. Boreas then counselled departure; the sails filled, and the Achaeans cried farewell to Troy.6
· EXEUNT ·
How the centuries saw it
The Sacrifice of Polyxena
Giovanni Battista Pittoni, c. 1733–1734
Pittoni's Rococo staging — Polyxena at Achilles' tomb, Neoptolemus and the grieving Trojans, the rite Ovid placed on the Thracian shore before the fleet sailed home.
The Sacrifice of Polyxena
Giovanni Battista Pittoni, c. 1730s
A second Pittoni version in the Hermitage — the maiden led to the tumulus, the priest's steel, Hecuba's last child taken from her arms.
The Sacrifice of Polyxena at the Tomb of Achilles
Giovanni Battista Pittoni, c. 1735
Pittoni's Stuttgart canvas — Achilles' sepulchre in the background, the virgin's voluntary death before the son of the hero whose shade demanded her.