We see a child approaching, floating above the ground as if carried by the wind. A child royally dressed, his face shining with simple dignity. Perhaps it is a young god; or some human child divinized for his beauty or his swiftness. ‘Here I am’, the child begins, in a voice that seems to express trust and openness. The unaccustomed sight of a child on the tragic stage, opening a play, elicits from us, in turn, a simple directness of response. We think, briefly, of potentiality and hope; of the beginnings of noble character; of the connection between noble character and this childish trustfulness. We feel, perhaps, in this moment, our love for our own children. Then we hear it. ‘Here I am. Back from the hiding-place of the dead and the gates of darkness. Polydorus, child of Hecuba and Priam.’ We are watching, then, not a child, but a dead child. A child-ghost. A shade without hope, its possibilities frozen. And there is more. This child, as he soon tells us, has been brutally murdered by his parents' best friend, to whom they had entrusted him for safe-keeping in wartime. Killed for his money, he has been tossed, unburied, into the waves that break on this Thracian shore.

Euripides has chosen to begin this play in a very unusual manner. No other extant Greek tragedy has a prologue spoken either by a ghost or by a child; the combination occurs nowhere in any extant play.