Hippolytus by Euripides

1/ I picked up the play thinking it’s about a woman desiring her stepson, which it is, but it’s also about a false rape accusation. 

The play begins with Aphrodite, feeling slighted and disrespected by Hippolytus, causing his stepmother Phaedra to fall in love with him. In this revised version of the play (the first of which only survives in fragments), Phaedra resists her desires but her nurse, seeing her despair, gets the secret from her and tells Hippolytus (even a worse busybody than Emma Woodhouse). Repulsed by sexuality and even more by Phaedra’s passion for him, he gets angry and threatens to tell his father Theseus, only for her to hang herself and leave a note accusing Hippolytus of having raped her. Theseus banishes and curses his own son, despite Hippolytus’s protests, and in the end discovers the truth only too late. 

“HIPPOLYTUS Three lives by her one hand! ’Tis all clear now.” 

(translated by Gilbert Murray)

The play is not only about the titular character. If we look at Shakespeare’s plays, I think it would be fair to say that Hamlet is the tragedy of Hamlet; Macbeth is the tragedy of the Macbeths; King Lear is the tragedy of Lear (Gloucester only mirrors Lear); Othello is the tragedy of Othello (though you might also argue for Desdemona). But Hippolytus is the tragedy of Phaedra and Hippolytus and Theseus—all three are tragic characters—Euripides lets us see the downfall and suffering of all three. 

2/ This is another play about the cruelty of the gods. I had read some Greek mythology before but it was a long time ago—it’s rather curious to encounter the Greek gods when I’m only used to Buddha and the Christian God. 

The Greek gods have all the faults of human beings—they just have immortality, and power to mess with people’s lives—Aphrodite causes all this suffering, for what? But Artemis can’t stop her—all she can do is to take revenge on Aphrodite’s favourite—poor soul!  

3/ The nurse has some interesting lines: 

“NURSE […] Oh, pain were better than tending pain! 

For that were single, and this is twain, 

With grief of heart and labour of limb. 

Yet all man’s life is but ailing and dim, 

And rest upon earth comes never.” 

Is that why she wants to cause some drama? 

“NURSE […] And because thou lovest, wilt fall 

And die! And must all lovers die, then? All 

That are or shall be? A blithe law for them! 

[…] A straight and perfect life is not for man…”

She’s much more impulsive than Juliet’s nurse. 

Phaedra is a great tragic character: 

“PHAEDRA […] When the first stab came, and I knew I loved, 

I cast about how best to face mine ill. 

And the first thought that came, was to be still 

And hide the sickness.—For no trust there is 

In man’s tongue, that so well admonishes 

And counsels and betrays, and waxes fat  

With griefs of its own gathering!—After that 

I would my madness bravely bear, and try 

To conquer by mine own heart’s purity. 

My third mind, when these two availed me naught 

To quell love, was to die…” 

I’ve read that apparently in the earlier version of the play, Euripides depicts Phaedra as a lustful woman who shamelessly makes sexual advances at her stepson. Here instead is a tragic depiction of a woman who struggles against her own desires and suffers on her own; that she does the awful thing of falsely accusing Hippolytus of rape, out of shame and a wish to save her own honour and also out of anger, only makes her a more complex character, makes her more alive. 

4/ Hippolytus, at least at the beginning, is not a very likeable character: 

“HIPPOLYTUS O God, why hast Thou made this gleaming snare, 

Woman, to dog us on the happy earth? 

Was it Thy will to make Man, why his birth

Through Love and Woman? Could we not have rolled 

Our store of prayer and offerings, royal gold, 

Silver and weight of bronze before Thy feet, 

And bought of God new child-souls, as were meet 

For each man’s sacrifice, and dwelt in homes 

Free, where nor Love nor Woman goes and comes?” 

Not hard to see why Aphrodite dislikes him. Euripides however gets us to sympathise with Hippolytus in the two scenes with his father. 

“HIPPOLYTUS […] Oh, strange, false Curse! Was there some blood-stained head, 

Some father of my line, unpunished, 

Whose guilt lived in his kin, 

And passed, and slept, till after this long day 

In lights… Oh, why on me? Me, far away

And innocent of sin?

O words that cannot save! 

When will this breathing end in that last deep 

Pain that is painlessness? ’Tis sleep I crave. 

When wilt thou bring me sleep, 

Thou dark and midnight magic of the grave!” 

It is such a moving moment, as Theseus looks at his son in anguish, and anger at his own rashness, and the dying Hippolytus forgives his father. 

Structurally, Hippolytus is possibly the most perfect of Euripides’s plays, at least among the ones I’ve read. Now I’m also curious about the versions by Seneca and by Racine.