Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(58)

And once Eurydice has found her voice, she is loath to give it up. In 1999, Carol Ann Duffy published The World’s Wife, a collection of poems offering women’s perspectives of stories which had usually been told from their husbands’ points of view. In ‘Eurydice’, she gives us a glorious, bristling version of this character who was delighted to find herself in the Underworld: ‘It suited me down to the ground.’32 She invites us to picture her face ‘in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe/ from the kind of a man/ who follows her round/ writing poems’. This Eurydice is horrified when Orpheus – whom she views as a self-satisfied stalker – pitches up in Hades to seek her return. She is very much less impressed with Orpheus’ talent, having, as she says, ‘done all the typing myself,/ I should know.’ She has no interest in being his muse, and never did: ‘And given my time all over again,/ rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself’.

Duffy nails Eurydice’s problem in the traditional versions of the myth: no one ever asks her what she might like. She has no agency in her story, and we don’t even know how she feels about it. Orpheus makes his grand katabasis in search of her, so we are dazzled by the romantic power of his attachment and the persuasive power of his lyre-playing. But why should Eurydice feel the same way about him that he feels about her? Because she is so frequently silenced, we have just assumed that she does. In one of the finest twists in this excellent poetry collection, Duffy takes the moment of Orpheus’ gaze and Eurydice’s second death and turns it on its head. Her Eurydice is desperately trying to make Orpheus look back, so she can return to the Underworld in peace. After multiple attempts (‘what did I have to do, I said,/ to make him see we were through?’), she finally lights upon the solution. She touches his neck and tells him she wants to hear his poem again. Unable to resist this appeal to his ego, Orpheus turns around and Eurydice ‘waved once and was gone’. She finally gets the peace she craves away from the man who bores her with his arrogance and his popular reputation. Eurydice knows the man behind the genius and she would, it turns out, prefer to be dead.





Phaedra




THE WICKED STEPMOTHER IS ONE OF THE OLDEST TROPES IN storytelling. Where would Cinderella be without a vicious stepmother and cruel stepsisters? The story appeals to us on multiple levels: a tragic young woman receives a spectacular change in fortunes (and attendant makeover), and the unkind women who persecuted her get their comeuppance. All this, plus true love and nice shoes.

But Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, makes Cinderella’s wicked stepmother seem positively benevolent. Phaedra falls in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. He rejects her and she takes her own life by hanging. She has left a note accusing him of rape. Theseus – finding his wife dead and his son denounced – calls down a curse on Hippolytus which results in the young man’s death. Phaedra has achieved what evil stepmothers secretly always desire: the elimination of their love-rival’s offspring. Not only that, but she has confirmed the secret (or sometimes overt) belief of so much of our society: that women lie about rape because they are malevolent and trying to entrap or punish innocent men.

This thumbnail sketch of Phaedra is accurate, but only partially so. It ignores a great deal of the source material that we have on her, and adds in no small quantity of our own prejudice: against stepmothers, against female sexual desire and, yes, against women who accuse men of injuring them, rightly and wrongly. Phaedra commits an act of terrible dishonesty and its consequences are catastrophic. But she is not – at least not in one of the most celebrated plays to survive to us from fifth-century BCE Athens – a villain. She is one half of a tragedy, which is not the same thing.

So let’s begin with her family history, before looking in more detail at her portrayal in Euripides’ play from 428 BCE, Hippolytus. Phaedra is one of the daughters of King Minos and Queen Pasipha?, and so was born and raised on the island of Crete. To describe her family dynamics as complex is quite the understatement. She is the sister of Ariadne, with whom Theseus left Crete after slaying the Minotaur. And both women are the half-sisters of the Minotaur (also known as Asterion).1 We’re usually told the Minotaur is the product of an unnatural fascination exerted by a handsome bull over Pasipha?, who notoriously had the craftsman Daedalus carve her a wooden cow costume to enable her to trick the beast into mistaking her for an actual cow. But this makes Pasipha? the guilty party, because who else goes around having bestial urges and then concealing themselves in a bizarre cow-shaped contraption? Actually, as Pseudo-Apollodorus explains,2 Pasipha? is the victim of the blasphemy and greed of her husband, Minos. Minos prays to Poseidon that a bull will rise from the ocean (bulls rising out of the sea are a major theme in Phaedra’s story, although none of them is summoned by her). In return, he promises that he will sacrifice the bull to Poseidon: he is trying to prove to his subjects that he has the divine right to rule Crete and the proof is that he can ask the gods to grant his wishes and they will. Poseidon hears his prayer and sends him a beautiful bull (the Greek word diaprepē is usually translated as ‘distinguished,’ but this makes it seem like the bull is wearing a monocle, which it is not). Minos then performs a transparently obvious switch, keeping Poseidon’s bull for himself and sacrificing a regular, non-oceanic one instead. Poseidon then punishes him by making Pasipha? develop an intense affection for the bull. And this is when she persuades Daedalus to help her out with the wheeled wooden cow disguise. We can only assume it is more convincing to the bull than it sounds, because their resulting offspring is the Minotaur. This poor creature therefore owes both his existence and his imprisonment to Daedalus, who also builds the labyrinth which contains him. So, not for the first time, we can see that the popular version of a story is missing crucial information. Information that absolves poor Pasipha? of at least some responsibility. Minos’ deceit and Poseidon’s revenge are the twin causes of her misplaced passion. As we will see throughout this chapter, you offend the gods at your peril, perhaps more in this myth than in most. And – as the story of Pasipha? should always remind us – the gods rarely care who they hurt in their pursuit of vengeance.