A FATHER’S CURSE IN EURIPIDES’ HIPPOLYTUS1
Justina Gregory
The penalties that Theseus imposes on his son in the third episode of Hippolytus comprise an uncharacteristic rough spot in an otherwise polished play. Theseus arrives back in Trozen to find his wife a suicide, an accusatory tablet dangling from her wrist. No sooner has he absorbed the tablet’s message than he calls on his father Poseidon, reminding the god of the three wishes he once promised him and asking Poseidon to destroy Hippolytus on that very day, “if indeed you granted me reliable curses” (). When the members of the chorus implore Theseus to rescind his words, the king not only denies their request but also appends a further sanction.HebanisheshissonfromTrozen—asentencehecanpronounce on the spot and without recourse to divine aid—to ensure that “of two fates [Hippolytus] will be struck by one” (). Each of these punishments poses its own difficulties, and together they create a redundancy (Herter : ) that is arguably associated with the process of revision. While certainty about the contents of the first Hippolytus is beyond our reach, the most plausible reconstruction will conform to the pattern of revision identified in antiquity by Aristophanes of Byzantium, a sophisticated literary critic who was in a position to read and compare both versions.2 In what follows I suggest that while Theseus undoubtedly cursed his son in the first version of the play, his exclusive appeal to Poseidon is a feature of the revision, designed to displace onto the god some of the responsibility for Hippolytus’ death. The motif of the
1 For Martin Cropp, in gratitude for all he has taught us about the lost tragedies of ancient Greece. 2 By “the first Hippolytus” I mean the tragedy traditionally referred to as Hippolytus Kaluptomenos. In light of fr. B. – of the Michigan papyrus, which on Luppe’s inter- pretation (: –) mentions the veiling or concealment of somebody other than Hippolytus, that designation now appears doubtful. Gibert questions the order tra- ditionally assigned to Euripides’ two treatments of the Hippolytus myth and suggests that the extant Hippolytus may have preceded the lost version. His discussion (taken further by Hutchinson ) is designed to refute the notion that Euripides’ principal purpose in revision was to improve Phaedra’s moral character. I argue, in contrast, that Aristo- phanes of Byzantium’s comment on the principal difference between the two plays can accommodate a different interpretation. justina gregory three wishes I regard as a second addition consequent on the first that serves to deflect blame from the god, in turn, for killing his grandson. The sentence of exile may have been another second-version innovation, affording Theseus a punishment that is temperate as well as “humanly comprehensible and rationally intelligible” (Segal : ). Despite the difficulties of integration that these additions entail, ultimately they enrich the play. They lay the groundwork for the climactic messenger speech and reinforce the structural symmetry that is one of the most striking features of the extant Hippolytus. In his discussion of ancestral curses West distinguishes between ele- ments that are fundamental to a myth and “secondary elaborations” that “enhance . . . the story but [are] not essential to it.”3 Phaedra’s god-sent4 passion for Hippolytus, her false accusation of her stepson, and the curse laid on him by Theseus presumably constituted the unalterable core of the Hippolytus myth; Phaedra’s response to that passion, her method of implicating Hippolytus, and the form of Theseus’ curse fit the category of secondary elaborations. These would have been among the elements that Euripides felt free to vary as he reworked the play. The most signif- icant variation between the two versions is summed up by Aristophanes of Byzantium’s statement in the hypothesis to the existing tragedy that in the revision “what was unseemly and deserving of condemnation has been corrected” (τ ... 2πρεπ@ς κα' κατηγρας 47ιν ... δι+ρ ωται, –).5 This statement, based as it is on Aristophanes’ personal com- parison of the two texts, will prove more informative about the first ver- sion than the tattered hypothesis or the largely gnomic6 fragments of that play, provided we take into account the full range of its implica- tions.
3 West : . Plutarch is referring to the same mythical core when he speaks of the dustuchiai of Phaedra and Hippolytus that have been represented by all the tragedians (Theseus .). 4 Cf. the reference to to ελατι κακ at Eur. fr. . K (from the first Hippolytus) and to νσι ελατι at Soph. fr. . R (from Phaedra). 5 Although Gibert recognizes that Aristophanes was in a position to compare the two plays, his discussion (: ) of lines – of the hypothesis risks leaving the impression, by its references to “the extant play” and to “the lost one,” that “the lost one” was also lost to Aristophanes. Moreover, when he writes that Aristophanes “concluded that the extant play corrected the lost one,” he does not acknowledge that Aristophanes is more concerned (as the perfect tense δι+ρ ωται indicates) to contrast the tone of the two plays on the basis of his own perusal than to identify Euripides’s motives for revision. 6 Jouan : – notes that sixteen of the twenty-one fragments are gnomic in character.