Hippolytus

Overview

Hippolytus is eighty pages and took first prize at the Dionysia in 428 BCE, which for Euripides was unusual. It is also a second attempt. He had staged an earlier Hippolytus some years before in which Phaedra propositioned her stepson directly on stage, and Athens was scandalised. The surviving play is the rewrite, and almost everything that makes it great comes from the decision he made in rewriting: this Phaedra never speaks to Hippolytus at all, and she would rather die than have him know.

The structure is framed by two gods. Aphrodite delivers the prologue, announces exactly what she is going to do and to whom, and leaves. Artemis arrives at the end to explain what happened to the people it happened to. Everything between is watched by an audience that already knows the outcome, which turns the play into a study of how human beings walk into something the gods have arranged, using nothing but their own characters.

The setting is Troezen, across the gulf from Athens, where Theseus is in temporary exile. He is offstage for the first half, consulting an oracle, which is why the catastrophe can develop.

What happens

Aphrodite explains her grievance. Hippolytus, Theseus’ son by an Amazon, honours Artemis alone, hunts, keeps himself chaste, and calls Aphrodite the least of the gods. So she has made Phaedra, his father’s wife, fall in love with him. Phaedra will die, she says without any apparent regret, but Hippolytus is the target. Hippolytus then enters from the hunt with a garland for Artemis’ statue. An old servant gently suggests that he might also greet the other goddess whose image stands at the door. He declines, with courtesy, and goes in.

Phaedra is carried out, wasted by three days of not eating, delirious with longing for mountains and hunting and running water, which is to say for Hippolytus’ world. The Nurse, who loves her and wants only to keep her alive, coaxes and then extorts the secret. Phaedra then makes the long speech that is the centre of the play: she has thought this through, she knows what is good, she has tried silence and then self-control and neither worked, and she has concluded that the only honourable course left is death, because her children must not be shamed.

The Nurse, appalled, tells her there is a cure and hurries off. She binds Hippolytus by an oath of secrecy and tells him. He erupts from the house in a rage, denouncing women as a counterfeit coin and wishing that men could buy children at temples and live without them, all of it delivered while Phaedra listens unseen. He will keep his oath, he says, because he swore it, but his tongue swore and not his mind.

Phaedra now knows she is exposed to the one person who must not know. She hangs herself, and leaves a writing tablet in her hand accusing Hippolytus of forcing her. Theseus returns to find his wife dead and the tablet, and does what the play has been waiting for: he uses one of the three wishes Poseidon promised him, and curses his son to die that day. Hippolytus, bound by his oath, cannot say what actually happened, and defends himself with a speech about his own unmatched purity that convinces nobody. He is banished.

A messenger describes the end. As Hippolytus drove his chariot along the shore, a wave stood up and a bull came out of it, the horses bolted, and he was dragged among the rocks. He is carried back broken and conscious. Artemis appears, tells Theseus the truth, says she could not intervene because gods do not cross one another, and promises Hippolytus that the girls of Troezen will cut their hair for him before marriage forever. Father and son forgive each other, and Hippolytus dies.

How to read it

Read the prologue carefully and then forget that you know. Euripides tells you the plot in the first eighty lines so that you will watch the mechanism rather than the surprise, and the play is designed to be watched that way.

Read Phaedra’s long speech in lines 373 to 430 at least twice. It is the philosophical core, and Plato’s Socrates in the Protagoras, who denies that anyone knowingly does wrong, is arguing against exactly this.

Hold your judgement on Hippolytus. First-time readers usually decide he is a prig or that he is innocent, and the play will not let you keep either verdict. He is chaste, brave, devout and completely incapable of imagining that anyone else’s life is real.

Watch the Nurse. Every disaster in the play is caused by a woman trying to save her mistress, acting out of affection and ordinary practical sense. Euripides gives the fatal step to the most sympathetic motive on stage.

Notice the oath. Hippolytus says his tongue swore and his mind did not, which sounds like a licence to break it, and then he keeps it and dies. Whether that is integrity or the last act of a man who cares more about his own purity than about the truth is the standing question.

If you read Racine’s Phèdre afterwards, note what changed. Racine gives Hippolyte a love interest and makes Phèdre learn that her husband is alive, which turns an involuntary affliction into something closer to guilt.

Questions it raises

• Phaedra says she knows the good and cannot do it. Is that a real psychological state, or, as Socrates argues, a description of not really knowing?
• Aphrodite destroys an innocent woman to punish a young man. Is the play accusing the gods, or describing forces that are not moral at all?
• Hippolytus keeps an oath that costs him his life and lets a lie stand. Is that honour?
• Phaedra’s suicide note destroys the man who has done nothing to her. Does the play explain that act, or leave it as the one thing shame will do?
• Theseus spends his curse in a single furious minute. What does the play think about the power to be believed?
• Artemis tells Theseus the truth and offers Hippolytus a cult. Is that a consolation, or the coldest speech in Greek tragedy?