Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(62)

It is a blistering way even for Euripides to begin a play. What are we – as a modern audience – to make of this petulant, petty goddess? And what would an Athenian audience in 428 BCE have made of her? A puny mortal doesn’t want to get married, or have sex, and this is the mighty goddess’ response: total destruction. And destruction at the hands of his own father. And what of the claim that she made at the very start, that she favours those who honour her and punishes those who don’t? A few dozen lines later, she is cheerily explaining that Phaedra – who has honoured Aphrodite by building a temple to her – will die as a consequence of the goddess’ revenge on Hippolytus. In fact, Phaedra has already been punished with two years – years – of agonizing love. Perhaps this seems like a trivial complaint, but only if we have forgotten the soul-sucking agony of wanting someone we cannot have.

And all of this suffering has been imposed on Phaedra from outside, by Aphrodite. The gods play multiple, layered roles in Greek tragedy, and one of those roles is essentially psychological. While we might say that we have fallen in love or developed a crush on someone unsuitable, the Greeks tended to externalize the causes of such experiences. We fall in love, they were struck by an arrow shot by the god Eros, for example. A sophisticated language of psychology simply didn’t exist at the time that Euripides was writing, so things which are internalized for us were often launched upon a Greek from without.

We learn from this opening speech that Aphrodite is absolutely vicious and highly organized in her plans for revenge. She has spent two years preparing to destroy Hippolytus, with no concerns for the secondary victims of her revenge: Phaedra and Theseus. They are simply collateral damage that cannot be avoided. We also learn, much as it may pain those who want to decry Phaedra as a villain, that she is a victim in this plot, just as Hippolytus is. In the whole heartless monologue, there is no more agonizing word than sigē – ‘she keeps silent’. Could Phaedra not have told her slave-women or a friend (not her sister, obviously, who is one of her husband’s exes, if she’s still alive) what she was going through? She has not done so, but has suffered in silence, alone. We can surely conclude that Phaedra is profoundly ashamed of her unwanted emotions: this is not the behaviour of a seductress, a scarlet woman. She is not enjoying her infatuation, she is in physical pain. Pain which is killing her.

Hippolytus comes onstage, full of praise for Artemis. One of his attendants makes the suggestion that he should be careful not to slight Aphrodite. But Hippolytus is having none of it. Enjoy your goddess, he says, dismissively.23 We had no hint that Aphrodite might be willing to change her murderous plot, but certainly Hippolytus seems to be going out of his way to offend her.

Then the female chorus give us some more detail about Phaedra’s condition. She has to stay indoors, she hasn’t eaten for three days,24 she won’t say what grieves her, but she wants to die. They try to guess what the reason might be: has she offended a god, is she being punished? They don’t guess Aphrodite is the cause. Then they wonder if Theseus might have been sleeping in another bed, or perhaps Phaedra might have received bad news from Crete. They are obviously perplexed by Phaedra’s sickness, but they seem to be fond of her, and want to be able to help.

Phaedra and her nurse now come onstage. Slaves have to carry Phaedra: she cannot walk. She is feverish, desperate to be outdoors in the forests, hunting deer. Is she remembering her own childhood, on Crete? She wasn’t always the wife of an Athenian king. Or is she simply imagining herself alongside Hippolytus, who we know is a keen hunter: he spends his days in the company of Artemis, after all, and she is the goddess of hunting. Or is she going a step further, and imagining herself as Hippolytus? How much of her desire is for him and how much is it to be him? The fantasy comes to an end and she begs the gods to have mercy on her, and let her die. As we already know from Aphrodite, the gods have no mercy, certainly not for Phaedra.

The chorus ask the nurse what is wrong with Phaedra – has she not managed to find out? The nurse says she has tried and failed. But then she makes one last attempt to dig out the truth. She turns to Phaedra with a brutal statement: if you die, you will be betraying your children.25 They won’t inherit their father’s property, he will: that bastard son of the Amazon queen, Hippolytus. He’ll lord it over your children. Phaedra cries out in sorrow. Does this touch you? asks the nurse. You destroy me, Phaedra replies. I beg you by the gods to be silent about this man. The nurse is triumphant at having brought Phaedra back to herself. Then you don’t want to save your children, she asks, and your own life? This cruel onslaught forces Phaedra to admit what is causing her grave illness. We already know from Aphrodite’s monologue, of course, that it is a sickness of the heart. Phaedra uses the word ‘mi-asma’:26 both a sickness and a defilement. The nurse presses her further and she finally concedes that it is Hippolytus she loves.

This first quarter of the play is a masterclass in character, even by Euripides’ dizzyingly high standards. Phaedra is not – as we might expect her to be from so many later plays and operas – a seductress. She is a reserved, private woman who has spent two years concealing a guilty secret, even from those closest to her (although that is not the same as those she can trust, as the events of this play will make clear). Aphrodite’s casual dismissal of Phaedra – her pain and her imminent death – seem all the more heartless once we meet her. We can see from the depictions of both Aphrodite and, later, Artemis in this play that Euripides is a critical thinker on matters divine. He doesn’t question the existence of the gods, but he certainly questions their nature. These goddesses are entirely amoral: what they want is the same – as far as they are concerned – as what is right. And anyone who gets in their way will be destroyed.