Hippolytus

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 428

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 1-564

Lines 565-1150

Lines 1151-1466

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Lines 1-564Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 1-169 Summary (Prologue and Parodos)

Content Warning: This section of the guide summarizes and analyzes source material that features references to violence, sexual violence, and death by suicide.

The play is set in the city of Troezen before the palace of Theseus. Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and sex, delivers a Prologue speech in which she introduces the backstory and the plot of the play. Aphrodite is angry at Hippolytus, the son of Theseus, because he has spurned erotic love, preferring to honor his patron goddess Artemis by remaining abstinent. Aphrodite has decided to punish Hippolytus by causing his stepmother Phaedra to fall in love with him. Now, having followed her husband Theseus into exile in Troezen, Phaedra is suffering from her forbidden love. Aphrodite admits that Phaedra is going to die—but not before the affair leads Theseus to bring about the death of Hippolytus. Aphrodite is willing to sacrifice Phaedra to have her revenge on Hippolytus.

Aphrodite exits as Hippolytus enters. He is accompanied by a secondary Chorus, made up of the friends and servants who attend him when he goes hunting. Hippolytus and the Chorus praise Artemis, and Hippolytus sets a garland as an offering in front of a statue of Artemis. Hippolytus boasts of his virtue and his devotion to Artemis. A Servant warns Hippolytus that Aphrodite will be angry at Hippolytus if he neglects her worship, but Hippolytus dismisses these concerns. As Hippolytus exits, the Servant beseeches Aphrodite to excuse Hippolytus’s foolishness.

The primary Chorus, made up of women of Troezen, enters and sings the first choral song, the parodos. They describe the sudden illness that has fallen upon Phaedra, their queen. Phaedra, they say, is feverish and weak. They speculate on the cause of Phaedra’s suffering.

Lines 170-564 Summary (First Episode and First Stasimon)

The Nurse enters, supporting the faint Phaedra. For a while, Phaedra speaks incoherently, longing to let her hair down and roam the mountains or ride horses. The Nurse and Chorus do not know how to help Phaedra, especially with Theseus absent. The Nurse repeatedly presses Phaedra to tell her what is ailing her, and at last Phaedra admits the truth: She is in love with her stepson Hippolytus. The Nurse is initially horrified at Phaedra’s confession, storming off the stage.

The Chorus pities Phaedra and laments her inevitable doom. Phaedra delivers a monologue in which she describes her dilemma: She knows what the right thing to do is, but is unable to do it. She failed to keep her feelings quiet and has failed to conquer her feelings too. Now, her only recourse is to end her life—only in this way can she retain her honor and good reputation.

The Nurse returns, apologizing for her outburst and seeking to comfort her mistress. Phaedra is not the first person to be overcome by love: Such universal feelings, she insists, are hardly a reason to end one’s life. Aphrodite is a powerful goddess, after all—why should Phaedra seek to resist her, when even gods have succumbed to her whims? Phaedra resists the Nurse’s suggestion that she simply consummate her love, but agrees not to end her life when the Nurse tells her she has a potion that can end her suffering. Phaedra makes the Nurse promise to reveal nothing to Hippolytus, and the Nurse exits into the house to make the necessary arrangements.

The Chorus sings the first stasimon, describing the power of the love gods Eros and Aphrodite. They cite mythical exempla that illustrate how dangerous and destructive desire can be: It was desire for Iole that caused Heracles to destroy Oechalia, desire that brought about the death of Dionysus’s mother Semele.

Lines 1-564 Analysis

Hippolytus is one of the earliest surviving plays of the Attic tragedian Euripides (ca. 480-406 BCE), produced in 428 BCE (See: Literary Context: The Myth of Hippolytus). The play was an immediate success. Like all Attic tragedies, the play was performed with three other plays in a tetralogy, which were typically made up of three tragedies followed by a satyr play, a burlesque drama featuring a Chorus of satyrs. The tetralogy Euripides staged in 428 BCE—the year he staged Hippolytus—won the first prize in the dramatic competition, one of only four times Euripides won the first prize during his lifetime. Even today Hippolytus remains one of Euripides’s best-known and most widely-read works.

The play is in many ways a paradigmatic illustration of the tragic genre. Like most tragedies, the play begins with a Prologue scene featuring a monologue that introduces the subject and plot; after this, the Chorus sings their entry song (the parodos). The play then passes through several “episodes,” each of which is followed by a choral song called a stasimon. The final scene, which follows the final stasimon, is known as the exodos. The plot employs the literary devices that informed Aristotle’s influential understanding of tragedy, including reversal of fortunes, recognition, and an unhappy ending. However, Euripides’s Hippolytus stands out in some ways too, for example by featuring a secondary Chorus that appears on stage very briefly in the Prologue, just before the entry of the primary Chorus.

The first scenes of the play introduce all the play’s central themes. In her prologue, Aphrodite even presents her own perspective and summarizes the plot of the play that is to follow. She does, however, leave out key details and is even misleading in some respects, neglecting to reveal, for example, what it is that Theseus will find out about the situation or that Artemis will subsequently materialize to effect a reconciliation between Theseus and his dying son.

Aphrodite also highlights The Consequences of Divine Intervention in human affairs. The very first thing that Aphrodite tells us is how she honors those who honor her while crushing those who do not:

Of all who live and see the light of the sun

[…]

those who worship my power in all humility

I exalt in honor.

But those whose pride is stiff-necked against me

I lay by the heels.

There is joy in the heart of a god also

when honored by men (3-9).

Aphrodite’s impulse to punish, however, is much stronger than her impulse to benefit mortals, and she admits with no apparent remorse that she is going to sacrifice the innocent Phaedra in punishing Hippolytus.

The relationship between human beings and the gods is a fraught issue in the play. Hippolytus honors his patron goddess Artemis, the goddess of nature, at the expense of Aphrodite, and for this reason he is punished. However, Artemis does not step up to protect him, and does not even show up until the very end of the play, when Hippolytus is already dying. Humans must worship the gods in a balanced way: There is nothing wrong with Hippolytus’s worship of Artemis—Aphrodite herself states that she does “not grudge him such privileges” (20)—but his way of worshiping Artemis is inappropriate because it is extreme, involving a rejection of love’s domain that Aphrodite, another goddess, can only take as an insult.

The Meaning of Honor is also introduced in the Prologue and first episode. Hippolytus, in his prayer to Artemis, speaks of his “purity and self-control” (81), and over the course of the play these qualities inform his definition of honor. Hippolytus’s sense of honor as an inner quality is juxtaposed with Phaedra’s external sense of honor: To Phaedra, what matters above all else is her reputation—how she is regarded by those around her rather than how she really is. The Nurse, meanwhile, clings to no scruples and no definition of honor in her eagerness to help her mistress.

Phaedra’s desire for Hippolytus—though divinely inspired—explores the theme of The Destructiveness of Love and Desire. The first episode puts on display the physical symptoms of Phaedra’s love, which looks almost like an illness. In the male-dominated Greek world, female adultery was a heinous crime easily punishable with death in historical times (male adultery, on the other hand, was common and generally deemed acceptable). It is for precisely this reason that Phaedra in the first episode fears so much for her honor: If her desire for Hippolytus were made known, her reputation would suffer grievously. At the same time, as the Nurse points out, one must recognize that love (at least in the world of Euripidean tragedy) is a goddess—and, she argues, how can anybody resist a goddess? The themes of divine intervention, honor, and forbidden love thus blend into one another from the first scenes of the play.