Hippolytus

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to violence, sexual violence, and death by suicide.

In its most basic form, the myth of Hippolytus describes how Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus. After Hippolytus rejects her, the devastated Phaedra accuses him of raping her (or attempting to rape her). Theseus, furious, has his son killed before finding out the truth; Phaedra ultimately takes her own life.

The myth of Hippolytus belongs to the collection of stories surrounding the exploits of the Athenian hero Theseus. In fact, Theseus’s most famous exploit—the slaying of the Cretan Minotaur—lies in the background of the myth, for Phaedra, Theseus’s wife, is the daughter of Pasiphae, the queen of Crete who gave birth to the Minotaur when she slept with her husband’s prize bull. Also in the background is another one of Theseus’s important exploits, namely, his forays in the land of the Amazons, where he met the Amazon queen who became the mother of his son Hippolytus. There was also a hero cult of Hippolytus that was highly important in Athens as well as Troezen, the city in the Argolid where Theseus was said to have been born and in which Euripides’s play is set. In this hero cult, young girls made offerings to the ghost of Hippolytus before their weddings.

The origins of the myth are hazy. We know that two of the three great Athenian tragedians, Sophocles and Euripides, wrote plays on the myth, but no earlier sources are known. Sophocles’s retelling of the myth, a play titled Phaedra, is now lost; next to nothing is known about it. Euripides, on the other hand, wrote two plays on the myth. Scholars ancient and modern have distinguished between the two plays by referring to the earlier one as Hippolytus Veiled (Hippolytos Kalyptomenos in Greek) and to the second as Hippolytus Crowned (Hippolytos Stephanephoros in Greek) or simply Hippolytus. Only the latter survives.

Hippolytus Veiled, Euripides’s first attempt at treating the myth, appears to have been produced in the mid-430s BCE—and to have been an utter failure. The play was judged very harshly, possibly because it was viewed by contemporaries as immoral. Euripides’s second Hippolytus, on the other hand, was extremely successful, and the tetralogy with which it was performed in 428 BCE won the first prize in the dramatic competition of that year. This is the only occasion on which a Greek tragedian was known to have dramatized the same myth in two different plays.

Only fragments of Euripides’s first Hippolytus survive, but we know of some key differences in how the playwright’s two plays handled the same myth. In the first play, it seems that Euripides had Phaedra herself proposition Hippolytus, and subsequently end her life only after it was revealed that her accusation of rape was fabricated. In the surviving Hippolytus, on the other hand, Phaedra does not approach Hippolytus herself, and hangs herself before making her fateful accusation. Euripides’s retelling(s) of the Hippolytus myth were to become extremely influential, and even in antiquity represented the standard version of the myth. Much later, Seneca’s Latin tragedy Phaedra was much indebted to Euripides.