Hippolytos by Euripides - I wish we men could curse gods

Now here’s a Greek tragedy – Hippolytos, performed 428 BCE, winning Euripides the first prize.  Or maybe one of the other lost Euripides plays performed with Hippolytos was even better.  Another kind of tragedy.

Hippolytos is like Medea, an objectively important artwork, art that generated more art, culminating in Jean Racine’s Phèdre (1677).  Below we see Sarah Bernhardt as Phèdre in an 1893 lithograph by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec which I have borrowed from the Art Institute of Chicago.

Phaedra has fallen in love with her step-son, who is a member of an anti-sex purity cult and reacts badly when her nurse clumsily reveals Phaedra’s passion to him.  A series of almost logical disasters follow.  In a sense the tragedy is driven by a conflict between gods, with Aphrodite wrecking lives to punish Hippolytos for rejecting sex, but in what I think of as a typical Euripidean touch the psychology of the characters could as well be driving everything.  Racine will be able to toss out Aphrodite and Artemis without much effort.

Where The Heracleidae seemed both overstuffed and overwritten, Hippolytos is balanced, well-paced, and full of complex and subtle imagery.  It is obviously much more carefully written.

By subtle and careful, I mean things like the bee image that Carson mentions in her introduction, which I will not describe here.  Hunting, horses, running water.  I’ll look at the “house” theme.  Here Phaedra, suffering and literally fasting to death to control her lust and shame (she is also a purist), is imagining other adulterous women.

What keep them from shaking in honest terror

at the darkness, their accomplice?

What keeps them poised in the embrace

of the wooden skeletons of their homes

which might any second break their disgusted silence?  (37, tr. Bagg)

That is pretty original, and weird, on its own, and Euripides develops the image.  A couple of pages later the “earthbound” life-loving nurse, having overcome her very brief shock at the possibility of her queen’s adultery, decides that sex is the answer (the nurse occupies the anti-purity position):

To spend your life in a neurotic drive

for perfection is simply not worth it.

Look at the roof of your own house.

Is there a single timber not slightly askew?

As a roof it’s a great success.  (39, tr. Bagg)

The nurse gets a lot of the most outrageous lines.  Euripides is a master of the outrageous, and the nurse is his mouthpiece.  The house returns once more, now invoked by Hippolytos, who wishes he had a witness against a false accusation of rape:

If only this calm inanimate house

could speak for me, and say faintly

if there’s anything so vile in my blood.  (68, tr. Bagg)

As much as I enjoyed Anne Carson’s Hippolytos, line by line I preferred Robert Bagg’s 1973 Oxford version, so I am using it more.  Do not miss, though, Carson’s strange essay written in the voice and under the name of Euripides justifying his (and I presume her) obsession with the Phaedra myth. 

Like many later writers, like Racine, Carson is more interested in Phaedra than Hippolytos.  But poor Hippolytos, what a death scene he gets.  I really had to slow down, which was hard to do at that point in the play, but what pathos, and what great lines:

Why me?  I have not done

one wrong act in my whole life.  (81)

Or even better:

I wish we men could curse gods –

curse and destroy those killers from our graves.  (83)

Is that ever Euripidean.  The deus ex machina appearance of Artemis at the end of the play is a cheap device in most hands, but Euripides, a kind of postmodernist, is actually interested in the device, and as skeptical as his readers.  Artemis is as outrageous as the nurse.  She can’t cry for him, sorry, gods can’t cry.  She can’t see him die, that would be “pollution.”  And don’t worry about justice, since Artemis will just murder one of Aphrodite’s favorites to balance things.  So no problem, right, you know, cosmically?  We’ll see this again, several times.

Nex week is the play of plays, Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus the King, the first detective story, among other things.  I am not a fan of “should read,” but if there is one Greek play you should read, it is probably this one.