David Stuttard has turned his attention to Euripides’ Hippolytus, and we should all be grateful for his doing so. As he has in the case of seven other ancient Greek dramas, Stuttard gathers new essays on the play from ten scholars, published along with his own translation. The scholars, all experts in their field, were given latitude as to their topics and worked independently of one another. The breadth of scholarly interests represented in this volume results in a varied and reasonably full treatment of this complex drama, but each chapter stands alone without connection to the others. Some of the chapters come with full bibliographic apparatus; others are only mildly annotated. All can be read by a non-specialist and will benefit scholars as well. I will treat briefly each of the essays and then the translation.
In his introduction, Stuttard provides basic information about historical context, myth, politics, and staging. Not all will agree with the connections he makes between the play and contemporary events, including the close relationship he sees between Theseus and the historical Pericles. On staging, I was surprised to read that in the opening scene Hippolytus and followers might have entered the stage on horseback (7) and that the aulos-player “may have also provided incidental musical interludes” (8).
Euripides famously treated the story of Phaedra’s passion for her stepson Hippolytus on two occasions. Ioanna Karamanou, following the play’s hypothesis, accepts that the surviving play of 428 BCE is the later of the two and offers a reconstruction of the earlier play from its twenty or so fragments. Karamanou shows how Euripides modified his earlier presentation to make Phaedra virtuous, not soliciting Hippolytus to sate her desires but seeking to kill herself to preclude such an illicit union. Karamanou describes the many concomitant changes in the second play and gives us a helpful look at a playwright “rewriting” a myth. Karamanou also offers a possible reconstruction of Sophocles’ Phaedra, using Seneca’s Phaedra as an aid, since the fragments from his play are so few.
In treating the play’s many staging issues, Rosie Wyles expands the scope of analysis to include not only the earlier version of Hippolytus but also Agamemnon, Ajax, Oedipus the King, Alcestis, and Medea. Just as a tragedy can allude verbally to an earlier play (or other poetry), so too can it refer to earlier productions. This larger framework is valuable and does not detract from her focus—the production of 428. Wyles successfully describes the several mirror images within the play—the two gods at the opening and close of the play, the scenes of supplication, wreath-wearing entering characters, displayed corpses, etc. She points to the impotent chorus in Agamemnon when discussing the equally feckless choral response to Phaedra’s cries within. While I appreciate her focus on objects, I would be reluctant to say the several references to Aphrodite’s on-stage statue give it power “to have control over the drama’s events” (28) or that the hymn to Artemis is an “attempt to animate this stage object” (29). These statues, framing the main door of the skene/palace, serve as powerful visual reminders throughout the drama of the battle on the divine level, but I see no need to suggest their actual power. The gods themselves are enough.
Rush Rehm begins his chapter with Hippolytus’s name and two chief ways one might construe it—“loosener of horses,” its likely etymology, and “loosed (i.e., destroyed) by horses,” an apt descriptor of his painful end. Rehm gives parallels for the prophetic power of names in Greek myth (Oedipus, Pentheus). He observes that the name Hippolytus appears over seventy times in the play and “[e]ach iteration anticipates or confirms the role that horses play in Hippolytus’ death” (40). Phaedra, however, can barely bring herself to say his name, and at first gets her nurse to utter it for her. Rehm details the equine imagery in the play (and in the myth) and also shows how in the horrific description of Hippolytus’s death, the important imagery of horses and the sea are joined. He also explores the language around heads, wounds, and wreaths, and the motif of misogyny and procreation.
Theseus, the Athenian mythological hero, was a frequent character in Athenian tragedies, appearing as the protector of the weak and disenfranchised and standing for the self-defining civic ideology of the Athenian elite. In this play, however, he takes on a very different role—an absent husband, rash in judgment, impulsive in punishing his son. And all too human, part of the web of miscommunication that ensnares three family members in one goddess’s vengeance. Sophie Mills explores Theseus’s character in the play, especially the ways in which father and son share traits that accelerate their mutual ruin. The concluding claim, however, that “Theseus could not have done other than what he did” (58) flies, I think, in the face of play’s action. Hippolytus’s death is a given—Aphrodite makes it so—but the drama shows Theseus making choices, even when they aid in Aphrodite’s punishment.
Strikingly, the play’s titular figure has virtually the same number of lines as three other characters in the drama—Phaedra, the Nurse, and Theseus; no other surviving play so evenly divides among four characters. Isabel Ruffell makes a strong case for the centrality of the Nurse, positing that her “ethical choices are at the heart of the play, as she works to establish a rationale for every action rooted in mutual aid and an ethics of care” (61). She argues how Phaedra’s adherence to doing what is “patriarchally acceptable” (66) brings about her downfall. Unlike other characters in the play, the Nurse’s actions are “rooted in the idea of care, which is thematically connected with her social role and experience” (74).
Robert Parker’s chapter (“The Gods in Euripides”) is the shortest, a mere six pages with two endnotes. This is unfortunate because the topic is so central to the drama, and Parker’s expertise could add much more than he provides here. But what he does say is valuable, taking head-on the issue of how the gods were imagined and the pitfall of trying to “demythologize” the play. Much of the action could be attributed to non-divine causes—people can feel deep illicit passion and can make terrible mistakes without divine agents—but this play does show the gods at work. In conclusion Parker offers this thoughtful formulation: “Tragedy doesn’t express everyday assumptions about the gods; rather it takes up extreme possibilities presented by the inherited myths.” (82)
Hanna Roisman explores the play’s mirror images, dualities, symmetries, and design in a full discussion of these features. Much of what Roisman presents is valuable and reflects a careful reading of the play. But I think in several places she pushes her observations too far. For example, in discussing Hippolytus’s speech about the garland from the special meadow, she refers to the Cologne Archilochus and suggests that “had [Hippolytus] been able to see and not only hear her [Artemis] he might well have chosen to act as the man in the [Archilochean] fragment did” (92). Really? Similarly, do Hippolytus’s “language and metaphors indicat[e] a vigorous sexual appetite although he conceals this under the guise of sexual purity” (98)? A sensitive reading of the play’s rich language is undercut by overreaching interpretation.
Douglas Cairns, who has contributed greatly to a nuanced understanding of how Greek culture encompassed both shame and guilt (the two capable of being felt simultaneously) uses this concept to animate his treatment of the play. He sees the play as “mak[ing] a significant contribution to this debate [about shame and guilt], dramatizing the whole question of what values of honour and shame really amount to” (110). Cairns’s essay brings the play into conversation with contemporary thinkers and especially with the famous Socratic paradox, which is called to mind in Phaedra’s “great speech” on her motivation for taking her life. Phaedra, Cairns observes, unlike Socrates, sees the limit of reason, but her “opposition to intellectualism is expressed in thoroughly intellectualist terms” (113). In concluding this subtle and important essay, Cairns writes that this drama “probes the issues raised in the comparatively abstract discourse of contemporary debate, but dramatizes their affective, embodied, situationally and socially contextualized aspects” (121).
Hippocrates, Elizabeth Craik reminds us, was Euripides’ contemporary, and the great plague afflicted Athens only a few years before the play’s production. So it is unsurprising that the poet uses medical, and even specifically Hippocratic, terms and metaphors. The descriptions of Phaedra’s symptoms, for example, both before and after her entrance, “exactly parallel” language in On Diseases of Women, and her mental state closely matches depictions in On the Diseases of Girls (128). Craik touches on the connections in Greek usage between physical and mental states and observes that while demas and psyche are used as near synonyms, the latter has an “emotional charge” (129). Craik also suggests, less plausibly, some double-entendres based on medical terminology (130-1).
The play’s reception is explored in the concluding contribution, from Tori McKee. She starts with Seneca’s play and then moves on to Racine’s play and Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera Hippolyte et Aricie, which remarkably ends on a happy note with a living Hippolytus. In treating O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms, McKee explores how Freudian theory has influenced his treatment of the story. McKee also touches upon later twentieth-centuries adaptations, including those of Martha Graham, Robinson Jeffers, Tony Harrison, and Ted Hughes, with particular attention to how the divine apparatus is handled in these plays.
For his translation, Stuttard’s principles are that it be faithful to the original meaning and style and that it not read like a translation (8). The non-lyric portions are rendered in prose, while the lyrics are presented by contrast in very short lines, with, very reasonably, no attempt to capture the varied meters of the original. Proper names in the dialogue and speeches are capitalized; in the lyric sections they are not, producing what to me are eye-jarring effects: “zeus, aphrodite, demeter,” etc. Stuttard has directed this play several times using his translation, and I can easily imagine that it’s effective in performance—speakable, lively, smooth. But for reading on one’s own or using in a classroom, it comes up short in some ways. Stuttard acknowledges that all translation is a kind of “fudge” (8), and no translation will be satisfactory in all ways or to all readers. That said, in too many places I think Stuttard strays from the text and ignores important nuances. I offer a handful of examples to illustrate this point.
- The words ἔρως and ἐράω are consistently translated as “lust.” While this root’s semantic range includes what we would call “lust” in English, in all (or at least almost all) of its uses in the play this sense is off base. Passion is celebrated and prayed to (cf. ode to Eros at 525ff.), and in the exchange between Phaedra and her Nurse (347ff.) the translation “lust” spoils the scene. Phaedra is not depicted as a randy woman but a noble one fighting her passion.
- σωφροσύνη/σωφρονέω has no simple translation but ranges among “sensibleness, moderation, sexual moderation, virtue.” The play’s two main characters battle over control of this term, and greater consistency in translation would have allowed a reader to see how the dynamics of this term play out.
- 614, 615, 655: “sin[ner]” is loaded in English, redolent of Christianity. The three words translated in these lines are, respectively, ἄδικος, ἁμαρτάνω, and κακός. Strong words, but different from “sin/sinner,” and the nuances are especially important in a play deeply focused on moral standing and behavior.
- 731: “He’ll share this problem with me.” “Problem” translates νόσος (“disease”) and thereby spoils the play’s leitmotif of diseases: Phaedra’s love-struck state has been widely described as a disease, and she now plans to spread her illness to the object of her passion.
- 946: “Since I’m already polluted by bloodguilt.” With the phrase ἐς μίασμ᾽ἐλήλυθα Theseus refers not to his own bloodguilt, the cause of his current exile, but, rhetorically, to coming face to face with his own son.
Authors and titles
David Stuttard, Introduction
- Ioanna Karamanou, Hippolytus in Fragments
- Rosie Wyles, Staging Hippolytus
- Rush Rehm, Caught in the Reins: Hippolytus and His Horses
- Sophie Mills, The Character of Theseus in Hippolytus
- Isabel Ruffell, Caring for Phaedra: The Nurse as an Ethical Character and Political Agent
- Robert Parker, The Gods in Hippolytus
- Hanna M. Roisman, Reflections and Mirror Images in Hippolytus
- Douglas Cairns, Doing Wrong in Secret: Immoralism and Emotion in Euripides’ Hippolytus
- Elizabeth Craik, Hippocrates and Hippolytus
- Tori McKee, Euripides’ Hippolytus: Reception from Antiquity to the Present Day