Interpreting Greek Tragedy

Myth, Poetry, Text

Charles Segal

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501746710
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythic Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This generous selection of published essays by the distinguished classicist Charles Segal represents over twenty years of critical inquiry into the questions of what Greek tragedy is and what it means for modern-day readers. Taken together, the essays reflect profound changes in the study of Greek tragedy in the United States during this period-in particular, the increasing emphasis on myth, psychoanalytic interpretation, structuralism, and semiotics.

III /

EURIPIDES

CHAPTER 6 /

The Tragedy of the Hippolytus: The Waters of Ocean and the Untouched Meadow

IN MEMORIAM ARTHUR DARBY NOCK (1902–1963)

The clash of human will and divine power is basic to the tragic sense of Greek drama. Not only may the gods serve to set the tragic action into motion, but they may themselves embody its meaning. As this meaning usually involves some of the most complex and difficult issues of human life, so the nature of the gods and their mode of acting upon the human world are. often puzzling, full of real or apparent contradictions or hard, painful truths.

The Hippolytus has its full share of these difficulties.1 The human motivation in the play is totally comprehensible and satisfying in itself;2 yet the gods, Aphrodite in the prologue, Artemis in the epilogue, have significant dramatic, as well as thematic, roles. Their function in the play has often been explained by the claim that Euripides uses them to attack the anthropomorphic religion.3 While certainly true to some extent, this explanation does not account for the meaning of the play as a whole or for the substantial independence of the human action, which is yet interwoven with the opposed natures and wills of the two goddesses.

It is, as will appear, largely through imagery that these gods are bound into the poetic fabric of the play. Through certain recurrent images of the natural world, notably that of the sea, their power is presented as an effective reality acting upon the human world. The imagery thus leads back to the gods and to the broader issues that their natures and actions raise. Thus, however critically Euripides may have regarded the gods of the traditional religion, he can use them poetically and dramatically to enlarge the scope of the tragedy4 and to extend its meaning beyond the inward struggles of the protagonists to the question of man’s relation to the order (or disorder) of the universe.5

The powers of the universe, the objective demands of man’s world upon him, the forces of nature to which he is subject: these are central issues in the play. From their origins the Greek gods stand in close connection with these natural powers, and hence through them Euripides can state these broad themes and conflicts without losing dramatic or poetic vividness.6 He exploits these connections most fully in linking the power of Aphrodite, as it acts throughout the play, with the force of the sea. As an image of the unfolding violence of Aphrodite’s power, the sea becomes also a symbol for the demanding realities of the world—which are the gods.

Aphrodite, born from the sea, has all its irrational elementality. She is, as Seneca describes her in his Phaedra (274), the goddess non miti generala ponto. The imagistic significance of the sea, with its focal position for other images and themes in the play, is a natural outgrowth of the goddess’ own nature and the forces with which the Greek mind, in its mythical formulations, had always associated her.

Euripides’ imagery, therefore, does not become arbitrary or artificial, a forced or self-conscious literary device, but remains intimately related to a deeply rooted, age-old perception, already stated in poetic or proto-poetic form, about the nature of the love goddess and the love force. Here, as often in classical Greek poetry, the poet finds himself aided in his individual creation by the crystallization of traditional experience and perception in the myth. The myth may thus not only give the poet the general content of plot, characters, setting, and so on, but also, as it seems to do here, may suggest his basic images, his underlying poetic structure.

The relevance of Aphrodite’s connection with the sea has, of course, been noted before, and it is well stated by Gilbert Norwood: “In her might and relentless cruelty there dwells ‘something of the sea’ that gave her birth and across which Phaedra, dogged by her unseen curse, voyaged from Crete.” And again: “Aphrodite, the Sea-Queen, wonderful and ruthless like the ocean, bringing joy or grief with indifferent hands.”7 My purpose, however, is to show how the imagery of the sea and related images operate structurally throughout the tragedy, formed as it is under the shadow of the sea-born, sea-wild goddess, and how this imagery underlies the unity of the play and deepens the dimensions and intensity of the tragic action.8

It would be mistaken to regard Aphrodite, that jealous, all too human female, as a symbolical figure and nothing else. Yet she obviously signified to Euripides and his audience a great natural force, the instinctive sexual drive in all its relentless power. In this aspect she is Kypris, and is so referred to in the play almost to the exclusion of the more general name, Aphrodite, which occurs, in fact, only three times (532, 539, 765). She had been so treated explicitly in Aeschylus’ Danaids, and so she recurs, in an unknown play of Euripides, as the authoress of the love and commingling of earth and sky, on which all life depends (frag. 898 Nauck).9

Her terrible ambiguity lies in the fact that she is not only a power of the natural world but in a sense also within man: she is that part of him which responds instinctively to the elemental forces in nature and obeys, spontaneously, the same impulses as the animals, as earth and sky. Here through Aphrodite, as through Dionysus in the Bacchae, the external and internal aspects of human reality interpenetrate. It is this double aspect of Aphrodite, fused symbolically in the sea, which creates the fullness of the tragedy in the Hippolytus: on the one hand, a psychological tragedy, the result of man’s futile attempt to suppress a basic part of his nature, and on the other hand, a tragedy of human helplessness before divine power. In other terms, the tragedy juxtaposes man as a part of nature, a creature among creatures, and man as a sentient being with a will and an inner life. Aphrodite, whose reality is both biological and psychological, enforces the tragic linking of these two basic parts of the human condition. Her power is exercised both internally and externally; and in both aspects she is, like the sea, irresistible.10

These two aspects of Aphrodite correspond to the twofold nature of her dramatic role. She appears in the prologue as part of the external reality, an actor in the tragedy, and so she is spoken of in the exodos. In between, however, she is half real, half metaphorical, a force rather than a person. Thus as the action moves to the purely human sphere, her reality becomes internal rather than external. The same ambiguity is present in her status as a god. As part of external reality, she is indeed a god, an actor who affects the environment in tangible, concrete ways. Yet as an internal force, an instinctive drive pervading all of nature, she is “something greater than a god” (360). It is interesting that in introducing herself she does not say “I am a god,” but “I am called a god,” θεὰ ϰέϰλημαι (2) not θεά εἰμί. Even her role as a dramatis persona is not free from this ambiguity, for as Norwood has well noted, she is more removed from the immediate action than Artemis, though paradoxically the cause of it all;11 and unlike Artemis, she does not address directly any of her victims, or indeed any human character.

Thus the sea, in its vastness, power, and inscrutability, helps expand her significance beyond the anthropomorphic figure so objectionable to modern critics12 into an invincible, eternal force. And, as imaged in the sea, this force appears as a surd, preexisting human nature and human questioning and impenetrable to human reason. Aphrodite, like the sea, is.

The ambiguity of the sea too makes it an apt symbol for the complexity of Aphrodite’s position and her action upon the human characters, for as Euripides and other Greek poets present it, the sea possesses the extremes of beauty when calm and of destructive power when disturbed.13

The symbolic dimensions thus conferred upon the gods are especially important for Euripides. Because of the problematical position in which he places his gods, he needs such active symbols perhaps more than a poet who simply accepts the traditional religion. In an age of growing skepticism and rationalism, these symbolic counterparts of the gods are, at one level, perhaps more real and true to him than the actual anthropomorphic figures.

Within the Hippolytus itself, the sea has several levels of significance, not always easily separable. In purely literal terms the sea is a simple physical element, neutral in itself but, like all aspects of the physical world, potentially destructive. The sea in this aspect has also a historical reality: associations with the past, as the sea that Phaedra crossed from Crete. On the mythical level the sea is connected with powerful divinities, Aphrodite and Poseidon; it is the sphere ruled over by gods whose power is active in human affairs. At this level the inert matter of the physical world becomes potent with divine, often sinister force. Finally, the sea, detached by one step from its gods, becomes symbolic of the unfathomable forces that course through the universe and human life. Its effectiveness as a symbol lies partly in the fact that its scope is without precisely definable limits. It can be viewed, for example, psychologically or metaphysically. Its range is as wide as the scope of the tragedy itself.

The range of the play’s significance is established in the opening lines (1–6):

Powerful and not without name, I am called the goddess Kypris, both among mortals and in the heavens; and all who look on the light of the sun and dwell within the ocean Pontos and the limits of Atlas—those who revere my power I put first in honor and those who think big toward me I trip up.

It includes mortals and heaven (1–2), the sea and the sun (3–4). Aphrodite, the sea-born goddess, defines in terms of the sea the boundaries of the mortal realm over which she has power: “Those who dwell within the ocean Pontos and the limits of Atlas” (Πόντον τεϱμόνων τ’ ’Ατλαντιϰῶν, 3). The human world is placed between two seas, and in the following action the sea will well up and destroy a representative portion of the human world it surrounds. What here only marks the geographical limits of human life will soon play an active part in its substance. The course of the action can be followed in terms of the advance of the sea; and because the outcome is known beforehand, the power of the destroying element is the more terrible and its release the more inevitable.

Aphrodite’s prologue, in stating the situation, states also the basic opposition between herself and Hippolytus in terms of the sea. The “pale-green woods” (χλωϱὰν δ’ ἄν’ ὕλην, 17) wherein the youth associates with his virgin goddess (παϱθένῳ)14 are a foil for the darkness of the surging sea. The instrument of his destruction will be the woman whom Theseus transported across the sea (ναυστολεῖ, 36); and the vengeance will be completed in the destructive aspect of the sea that belongs to Poseidon “the sea lord” (ὁ πόντιος ἄναξ, 44–45; see Πόντου, 3). The sea is thus associated at once with the female passion of Aphrodite (and Phaedra) and the male anger and violence of Poseidon (and Theseus). In both these aspects it will overwhelm the devotee of the virgin woodland goddess.

In the first lines, Aphrodite speaks of her power in the heavens (οὐϱανοῦ τ’ ἔσω, 2) as well as on earth; but Hippolytus enters, in a dramatic contrast, immediately after the prologue, singing of “the heavenly [οὐϱανίαν] daughter of Zeus, Artemis” (59–60). The contrast is sharpened by the hunters’ chorus (61ff.), which takes up his prayer and, though praising Artemis, blithely echoes parts of Aphrodite’s sinister speech (64–69):15

... ὦ ϰόϱα

Λατοῦς Ἄϱτεμι ϰαὶ Διός, [cf. Ἄϱτεμιν, Διὸς ϰόϱην, 15]

ϰαλλίστα πολὴ παϱθένων [cf. παϱθένῳ, 17],

ἃ μέγαν ϰατ’ οὐϱανὸν [cf. οὐϱανοῦ τ’ ἔσω, 2]

ναίεις [cf. ναίουσιν, 4] εὐπατέϱειαν αὐ-/λάν . . .

As Aphrodite is here juxtaposed with Artemis, so sea is opposed to sky, and the latter, as will be seen, appears throughout the play as a place of futile escape until it too is finally touched by the sea that destroys Hippolytus (ϰῦμ’ οὐϱανῷ στηϱίζον, 1207).

Hippolytus’ first significant speech (73–87) develops the theme of his purity and devotion to his pure goddess. The untouched garden from which he offers her the wreath is an ambiguous symbol of chastity (see Song of Songs 4:12: “A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse”; also Catullus 11.22ff.: velut prati ultimi flos . . .). The gift of the crown “from an untouched meadow” is a symbolic offering of his sexuality to the virgin goddess, a concrete embodiment of the offer that he makes every day of his life. This scene thus presents a symbolical enactment of Hippolytus’ whole way of life, and it does so in terms of the pure woodland to which Aphrodite had referred bitterly in her prologue (17). This shel...