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.
