Hippolytus

Hippolytus was the son of Theseus by an Amazon. Euripides's Hippolytus calls him simply the son "born of the Amazon" and says he was brought up at Troezen by the holy Pittheus. Apollodorus's Epitome agrees that Theseus had him by the Amazon he carried off, whom most writers named Antiope and Simonides called Hippolyte. Pausanias adds a reason for the Troezen upbringing: when Theseus was about to marry Phaedra, he sent his son to Pittheus to be raised as the future king of Troezen, so that he would neither serve nor displace any children of the new marriage.

Euripides builds the young man around a single loyalty. He hunts the woods with his hounds in the company of Artemis, whom he counts the greatest of goddesses, and he wants nothing to do with love or marriage. In the opening scene he lays a woven wreath, gathered from an untouched meadow, before her image and says that he alone of mortals may speak with her and hear her voice. When an old servant urges him to honor Aphrodite too, whose statue stands at his own gate, he answers that he greets her from a distance and bids her a long farewell.

That refusal is the cause of everything that follows. Aphrodite speaks the play's prologue herself and states her purpose plainly: she will punish Hippolytus this very day for slighting her. Her instrument is his stepmother Phaedra, the daughter of Minos, whom the goddess had already filled with desire for him when he came to Athens for the Mysteries. Phaedra's side of the story belongs to her own page. For Hippolytus, the turning point comes when her nurse reveals the secret to him under an oath of silence. He reacts with horror and a long tirade against women, but he keeps the oath. His famous line concedes that his tongue swore while his heart did not, yet he never breaks it.

Phaedra hangs herself and leaves a sealed letter accusing him of rape. Theseus reads it and calls on his father Poseidon, who had promised to grant him three prayers, to kill his son before the day is out. He also banishes Hippolytus. Apollodorus's Epitome tells the same story more starkly: Phaedra tears her own clothes, breaks open the doors of her bedroom and accuses him, and Theseus believes her and prays for his son's death.

The death is told by a messenger in Euripides. Hippolytus harnessed his horses and drove out along the shore road toward Argos and Epidaurus. At a lonely stretch of beach a huge wave rose from the Saronic Gulf, and out of it came a monstrous bull whose bellowing terrified the team. He was an expert driver. He wrapped the reins around his body and leaned back on them like a rower, but the bull kept turning the horses toward the rocks until a wheel struck a stone and the chariot broke apart. Tangled in the reins, he was dragged over the rocks. The Epitome gives the same end: Poseidon sent up a bull from the surf, the horses bolted, and Hippolytus, caught in the reins, was dragged to death.

In Euripides he is carried back to the palace still alive. Artemis appears and tells Theseus the truth: Phaedra's charge was false, Aphrodite planned it all, and the curse was a misuse of Poseidon's gift. Artemis promises Hippolytus lasting honors at Troezen. Unmarried girls will cut their hair for him before their weddings, and maidens' songs will keep his memory alive. At her urging he forgives his father and frees him from the guilt of his death before he dies.

The honors Artemis promises in Euripides were real cult practice. Pausanias, visiting Troezen, describes a famous precinct of Hippolytus with a temple and an old image, a priest who served for life and yearly sacrifices. Every girl cut a lock of hair before her marriage and dedicated it in his temple. The Troezenians, he says, would not accept that the horses dragged him to death. They knew where his grave was but would not show it, and they identified him with the constellation called the Charioteer. The same precinct held a race-course named after him, and above it a temple of Aphrodite the Spy, from which Phaedra was said to have watched him exercise. Athens also claimed him: Pausanias saw a burial mound of Hippolytus below the Acropolis, beside a temple of Themis.

A second tradition refuses to let him stay dead. Apollodorus's Library lists Hippolytus among the dead raised by Asclepius, and credits the story to the lost epic called the Naupactica. At Epidaurus, Pausanias read an old slab saying Hippolytus had dedicated twenty horses to the healing god. The people of Aricia in Italy told him that Asclepius revived Hippolytus. He then refused to forgive his father, went to Aricia, became king and set up a precinct to Artemis there.

The Roman poets develop that Italian ending. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Hippolytus himself tells the story to the grieving nymph Egeria in the grove of Aricia. He describes the bull from the sea and his body torn apart in the reins. Then he tells how Apollo's son restored him with potent herbs, against the will of the ruler of the dead. Diana hid him in clouds, made him look older so he would not be recognized, and gave him a new name, Virbius, because the old one recalled his horses. He now lives in her grove as one of the lesser gods.

Virgil's Aeneid tells it slightly differently. It sends a warrior named Virbius, son of Hippolytus and Aricia, to fight for the Latins. Virgil explains that Diana's love and Paeonian herbs brought Hippolytus back, and that Jupiter, angry that a mortal had returned from the dead, struck down the healer with a thunderbolt. Diana hid Hippolytus in Egeria's grove, where he lived on alone under the name Virbius. For that reason, Virgil says, horses are kept out of Diana's temple and sacred groves.

Euripides himself dramatized the story twice. The surviving play is his second version. The first, known in modern scholarship as Hippolytus Veiled, is lost. The production note preserved with the surviving text dates it to the archonship of Epameinon, 428 BCE, and records that Euripides took first prize, ahead of Iophon and Ion. Seneca's Latin tragedy Phaedra retells the story again, with Phaedra confessing her love to Hippolytus herself rather than through the nurse.

Jean Racine's tragedy Phèdre, first performed in Paris on 1 January 1677 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, draws on both Euripides's Hippolytus and Seneca's Phaedra. Racine makes a notable change to the young man at the center of the story. His Hippolyte is no longer indifferent to love: he loves Aricie, the last survivor of a royal house Theseus overthrew. The false accusation is devised by Phèdre's nurse, Oenone. His death still follows the ancient pattern, with a horned monster rising from the waves and his panicked horses dragging him against the rocks.