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

Symbols & Motifs

Sex and Gender Roles

Euripides’s Hippolytus explores contemporary attitudes toward the sex and the gendered social and familial roles of men and women in ancient Greece. The gender norms and expectations that demarcate (and oppress) female life are prominent as a motif from early on. In their first ode, the Chorus remarks:

Unhappy is the compound of woman’s nature;

the torturing misery of helplessness,

the helplessness of childbirth and its madness,

are linked to it forever (161-64).

Marriage and childbearing did indeed constitute the central events of a woman’s life in ancient Greece. In the play, Phaedra feels powerless to act on her feelings for Hippolytus precisely because of her role as a wife and mother: To commit adultery would destroy her reputation but also hurt the prospects of her own children.

Hippolytus, less sensitive to the tyranny with which social and familial mores oppress female life, views women in a very harsh light. To Hippolytus, who spurns sex and marriage, women are the “coin which men find counterfeit” (619), a source of “eternal […] wickedness” (666). Whatever Phaedra’s failures may have been, though, Hippolytus also flouts gender norms and expectations, for by remaining abstinent he does not produce children and does not continue his bloodline, thus situating himself outside of the community.

Nature

Nature and the natural world are a recurring motif in the play. Hippolytus himself is a hunter. Artemis, Hippolytus’s patron goddess, is a goddess of nature and wild animals. Even Aphrodite, Hippolytus’s adversary, is associated with the sea. When Phaedra is brought on stage, feverish with passion for her stepson, she longs to escape into the wildness and lawlessness of nature:

Bring me to the mountains! I will go to the mountains,

among the pine trees where the huntsmen’s pack

trails spotted stags and hangs upon their heels.

By the gods, how I long to set the hounds on, shouting,

and poise the Thessalian javelin drawing it back—

here where my fair hair hangs above the ear—

I would hold in my hand a spear with a steel point (215-21).

Natural imagery is also used symbolically throughout the play. When he first arrives on stage, Hippolytus brings Artemis a garland of flowers plucked from her “inviolate meadow” (74), which is a metaphor for the young man’s chastity. Love—and its destructive potential—is repeatedly likened to the forces of nature, as when the Chorus declares that “Love is like a flitting bee in the world’s garden / and for its flowers destruction is in its breath” (561-62, emphasis added). Finally, the bull that emerges from the sea to bring about Hippolytus’s destruction can be interpreted as a symbol too, representing suppressed sexual desires that rise up to destroy the oppressively misogynistic and sexually abstinent Hippolytus.

Legitimacy and Illegitimacy

Another central motif in the play is legitimacy and illegitimacy. Hippolytus himself is the illegitimate son of the Athenian hero Theseus and an Amazon woman, and Hippolytus’s status within his father’s household lies in the background of many of the characters’ preoccupations with legitimacy and illegitimacy. On the surface, what is at issue is simply Theseus’s inheritance: The Nurse, for example, warns Phaedra that if she dies she will risk leaving her children in the power of their stepbrother Hippolytus, “one bastard in birth but trueborn son in mind” (308). Theseus speaks of Hippolytus as “the bastard son / […] always hateful to the legitimate line” (962-63), while Hippolytus himself bemoans his “bastard’s birth” (1082).

However, the motif of legitimacy runs even deeper. To the illegitimately-born Hippolytus, it is women who are “illegitimate”: “counterfeit” (619). There is also a contrast between outward appearances or claims to legitimacy and what is on the inside. When Theseus wishes that there existed “some token now, some mark to make the division / clear between friend and friend, the true and the false” (925-26), he misses his own point: For it is his illegitimate son Hippolytus who ultimately proves truly “virtuous,” his social origins notwithstanding. Conversely, the illegitimacy of Hippolytus can also be interpreted differently, as a threat to the social order, with Phaedra’s false accusation justified precisely because they succeeded in doing away with such a threat to the legitimate line.