Euripides Talks by Alan Beale;

Author:Alan Beale;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472521309
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2008-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Forces at work in Hippolytus

Kenneth Dover

When this play begins, you are confronted by a single figure who tells you what the situation is and also makes some statements about what is going to happen in the play. The figure who speaks this prologue is Aphrodite. She is a goddess, also very commonly called ‘Kupris’ by the Greeks because there was a myth that she was born out of the sea on the coast of Cyprus.

This idea of having a god or goddess come before the audience to put them in the picture and sometimes also predict what is going to happen is quite a favourite technique of Euripides’. It is a technique which was taken up and used also a hundred years later in the New Comedy by playwrights like Menander.

First of all, about the present situation: Theseus, the legendary Athenian hero, has a son, Hippolytus, by his first marriage. His second marriage is to Phaedra. Phaedra falls madly in love with her step-son, Hippolytus. She conceals her emotion. Hippolytus, we are told in the prologue, is intensely hostile to Aphrodite. That is to say, he is obsessively hostile to sex.

Then Aphrodite goes on to tell us something of what is going to happen in the play. Theseus is going to curse his son, Hippolytus, and this will cause Hippolytus’ death. Phaedra also meets her death, but Aphrodite says, ‘Well, I’m not bothered about her.’ This prediction, this statement about what is going to happen, is in many ways misleading, partly by omission, because Aphrodite does not tell us anything about what is one of the mainsprings of the plot of the play – that is, that Phaedra’s old nurse, against Phaedra’s wishes, tells Hippolytus that Phaedra is in love with him. Also (something that is quite significantly misleading, I think) Aphrodite says, ‘I will reveal the situation to Theseus’ (42). Now, this is misleading in a way because it suggests that she is going to tell Theseus about it, but what she means by ‘I shall reveal it’ is ‘I shall cause a sequence of events which will cause Theseus to know about it’. This is the kind of thing that we not infrequently find in a Euripidean prologue. He may sometimes mislead us a bit, so that what actually happens comes as something new and surprising.

About Aphrodite. She is the goddess whom the Romans called Venus, and she is commonly referred to as the goddess of love. Among other things, this expression ‘of’ needs a bit of explaining, as no doubt many a modern philosopher would say: what does one mean by saying that a deity is the god or goddess ‘of’ such-and-such? In some cases it is quite obvious. For example, the god Ares. He is the god of war, in the sense that he tirelessly enjoys and promotes war. He could also be thought of as the embodiment or personification of war. And sometimes you have abstractions. One of the most obvious ones is Peace, who is really simply a personification of a state of affairs.

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