Hippolytus comes onstage, full of praise for Artemis. One of his attendants makes the suggestion that he should be careful not to slight Aphrodite. But Hippolytus is having none of it. Enjoy your goddess, he says, dismissively.23 We had no hint that Aphrodite might be willing to change her murderous plot, but certainly Hippolytus seems to be going out of his way to offend her.
Then the female chorus give us some more detail about Phaedra’s condition. She has to stay indoors, she hasn’t eaten for three days,24 she won’t say what grieves her, but she wants to die. They try to guess what the reason might be: has she offended a god, is she being punished? They don’t guess Aphrodite is the cause. Then they wonder if Theseus might have been sleeping in another bed, or perhaps Phaedra might have received bad news from Crete. They are obviously perplexed by Phaedra’s sickness, but they seem to be fond of her, and want to be able to help.
Phaedra and her nurse now come onstage. Slaves have to carry Phaedra: she cannot walk. She is feverish, desperate to be outdoors in the forests, hunting deer. Is she remembering her own childhood, on Crete? She wasn’t always the wife of an Athenian king. Or is she simply imagining herself alongside Hippolytus, who we know is a keen hunter: he spends his days in the company of Artemis, after all, and she is the goddess of hunting. Or is she going a step further, and imagining herself as Hippolytus? How much of her desire is for him and how much is it to be him? The fantasy comes to an end and she begs the gods to have mercy on her, and let her die. As we already know from Aphrodite, the gods have no mercy, certainly not for Phaedra.
The chorus ask the nurse what is wrong with Phaedra – has she not managed to find out? The nurse says she has tried and failed. But then she makes one last attempt to dig out the truth. She turns to Phaedra with a brutal statement: if you die, you will be betraying your children.25 They won’t inherit their father’s property, he will: that bastard son of the Amazon queen, Hippolytus. He’ll lord it over your children. Phaedra cries out in sorrow. Does this touch you? asks the nurse. You destroy me, Phaedra replies. I beg you by the gods to be silent about this man. The nurse is triumphant at having brought Phaedra back to herself. Then you don’t want to save your children, she asks, and your own life? This cruel onslaught forces Phaedra to admit what is causing her grave illness. We already know from Aphrodite’s monologue, of course, that it is a sickness of the heart. Phaedra uses the word ‘mi-asma’：26 both a sickness and a defilement. The nurse presses her further and she finally concedes that it is Hippolytus she loves.
This first quarter of the play is a masterclass in character, even by Euripides’ dizzyingly high standards. Phaedra is not – as we might expect her to be from so many later plays and operas – a seductress. She is a reserved, private woman who has spent two years concealing a guilty secret, even from those closest to her （although that is not the same as those she can trust, as the events of this play will make clear）。 Aphrodite’s casual dismissal of Phaedra – her pain and her imminent death – seem all the more heartless once we meet her. We can see from the depictions of both Aphrodite and, later, Artemis in this play that Euripides is a critical thinker on matters divine. He doesn’t question the existence of the gods, but he certainly questions their nature. These goddesses are entirely amoral: what they want is the same – as far as they are concerned – as what is right. And anyone who gets in their way will be destroyed.
We are left in no doubt that Phaedra would have gone to her grave without ever speaking to or about Hippolytus and her feelings for him. She does not wish to act on her desire, she simply wishes to die so her suffering can be over. The nurse exploits her weakness, which is her anxiety for the life her children will have after she is gone. Just as Alcestis worried that Admetus might prefer a new wife who would treat her children harshly, here we see Euripides dramatize the opposite side of the same coin: a stepmother provoked to terrible anxiety that her children will be passed over in favour of her husband’s older son （whom the nurse, incidentally, calls nothon – ‘a bastard’）27 after her death. And this is a real, plausible fear: Hippolytus is older than her children, he might well inherit Theseus’ property if Phaedra isn’t around to advance her own offspring’s cause. We have already seen that Hippolytus is immune to the suggestion that he might prefer not to insult a powerful goddess. If he is impervious to social mores, Phaedra might well be afraid that he would disinherit her children.