Hippolytus

Phaedra is the wife of Theseus and the stepmother of Hippolytus. In myth, her father is Minos, the king of Crete and the husband of Pasiphae, notorious for sleeping with her husband’s prize bull and begetting the Minotaur. In Euripides’s Hippolytus, Phaedra may have been played by the same actor who played her husband Theseus (since Greek tragedies only allowed for three speaking actors, it was common for multiple parts to be played by the same actor).

In the play, Phaedra is shown in an exceptional state of suffering. She is utterly consumed by her forbidden desire for Hippolytus, which she is unable to control or suppress. She resists the Nurse’s advice that she act on her feelings because of her exacting sense of The Meaning of Honor: To act on her feelings would destroy her reputation and disgrace her children by Theseus. Finding her situation unbearable, Phaedra believes that her only recourse is to end her life. She agrees not to be too hasty only when the Nurse claims that she can find her a magical potion to cure her. When Hippolytus finds out about Phaedra’s feelings from the Nurse, Phaedra finds a new plan to maintain her honor: She hangs herself, holding in her hand a tablet in which she accuses Hippolytus of raping her.

Phaedra’s internal conflicts arise from social and familial norms set out for women in the ancient Greek world. As a married woman, her reputation rests on her loyalty to her husband, but Phaedra’s inability to suppress her desire for Hippolytus means that she cannot do this and live honorably, leading her to conclude that the only way to maintain her good reputation—which she values above all else—is to end her life. Phaedra is thus essentially a sympathetic character. Even her obsession with her honor and reputation is not purely selfish: After all, if Phaedra’s honor is impacted, her children will lose their standing too. However, Phaedra loses some of her sympathy by the way she chooses to maintain her reputation—namely, by destroying Hippolytus’s. Phaedra’s false accusations are unjustified and lead to the death of the innocent Hippolytus. Even if this is not what Phaedra had intended, these are the destructive consequences of her actions, and as a result contribute to how her character is judged.

Theseus is the most important mythical hero of Athens, the dominant city in the central Greek region of Attica. In Euripides’s play, he is living in exile in Troezen, the city where he was born, having been exiled from Athens for killing his political rivals, the sons of his uncle Pallas. Theseus is the father of Hippolytus and the husband of Phaedra.

Euripides’s Theseus is an impulsive and emotionally-volatile character. When he arrives on the stage in the third episode, he leaps in rapid succession from grief at his wife’s death to murderous rage at Hippolytus for his alleged rape to repentance for his unjust treatment of Hippolytus. Theseus’s defining characteristic and “tragic flaw” is his tendency to make judgments without adequate consideration: He condemns Hippolytus to death as soon as he reads his dead wife’s accusations, not taking a moment to investigate. For this failure to observe due process, Artemis tells Theseus:

[That he has] been proven wicked both in [Hippolytus’s] eyes

and mine in that you did not stay for oaths

nor voices of oracles, nor put to proof,

nor let long time investigate (1320-323).

However, Theseus is not without honor. He refuses to openly rejoice when he learns of Hippolytus’s accident, even though he feels when he first hears the news that Hippolytus’s death is just. Theseus also repents immediately when he finds out his mistake—but he still does not take full responsibility for his actions, claiming that it was the gods who tripped him up.

The Nurse is the elderly servant of Phaedra. She plays an important role in the play, serving as the catalyst for much of the action of the play. She is notable above all for her relativistic sense of morality and her dubious manipulation of rhetoric. Protective of her mistress to a fault, she readily bends conventional morality to help Phaedra.

When Phaedra first tells the Nurse about her feelings for Hippolytus, the Nurse’s response is one of disgust that reflects conventional contemporary moral codes. Afterward, the Nurse undergoes a change of heart. She urges Phaedra to give in to her love and to act on her feelings, even arguing that to resist Aphrodite is “insolence” and “insolent pride” (474). There is a calculated reasoning behind the Nurse’s thought process: As she says early in the play, “I praise less / the extreme than temperance in everything” (264-65), and it is not long before the Nurse is arguing that temperance in honor and morality is apparently included in this blanket statement. To the Nurse, all honor and morals are relative, determined by changeable human beings and by the tides of fortune.

Even when her plan to proposition Hippolytus on Phaedra’s behalf fails, the Nurse does not admit that she behaved wrongly. Rather, she tells Phaedra just before she exits:

Had I succeeded, I’d have been a wise one.

Our wisdom varies in proportion to

our failure or achievement (700-02).

In this sense, she serves as a foil to both Phaedra and Hippolytus, who are largely driven by their preoccupations with The Meaning of Honor.

The primary Chorus of Euripides’s Hippolytus is made up of women of Troezen. There is also a secondary Chorus of attendants and companions of Hippolytus, but their role is much more minor. The Chorus of the play is present throughout the action of the play, witnessing the conflicts and misunderstandings that arise between the different characters but lacking the power to steer events away from their inevitable course.

In some ways, the Chorus represents the moral conscience of the play. They perceive the weaknesses and errors of the characters but are also able to sympathize with them: They pity Phaedra even though her way of dealing with her feelings is flawed, but they also pity Hippolytus and Theseus when their relationship is destroyed by Phaedra’s accusation. Their presence as witnesses throughout the drama gives the Chorus access to much privileged information—information that they are unable to share because they keep being sworn to secrecy.

Aphrodite is the ancient Greek goddess of love and sexuality. She appears in the play only once, during the Prologue, where she introduces the backstory and previews the plot of the play. Aphrodite is nonetheless a significant force throughout the play. It is she who brings about the destruction of Hippolytus, whom she feels has dishonored her.

Aphrodite, like other Euripidean gods, is concerned first and foremost with her own honor, and has little compassion (or understanding) for human beings and their lives. She knows that the innocent Phaedra will die as a result of her machinations, but callously dismisses her as collateral damage. To many of the characters as well as to the Chorus, Aphrodite represents The Destructiveness of Love and Desire.