One uncomfortable question is whether Phaedra intends Hippolytus to die. She makes the accusation before taking her own life, which means she can never be interrogated. But although she presumably knows Theseus has a short temper （they are currently living in exile because he had killed a large group of young men, which Aphrodite told us at the beginning of the play）， can she know that he will respond as violently as he does? Theseus himself is unsure whether the curses from Poseidon are real or not. He banishes his son, which implies he is doubtful about them: why bother banishing someone if you think they’ll be dead from divine wrath in a few minutes? So perhaps – to give Phaedra some benefit of the doubt – she believes Hippolytus will be exiled rather than murdered.
But it is difficult to defend her in the light of what actually happens: Hippolytus does die in a horrific chariot crash. And he is kinder, softer in his dying moments than at any point in the play: he doesn’t blame Theseus for cursing him so cruelly, and nor does he blame Phaedra for her lie. He blames Aphrodite, and perhaps （to a much lesser extent） Poseidon – Poseidon’s gifts have been bitter to you, his son,39 he tells his father. So while none of the characters seeks to defend Phaedra’s lie, they do not hold her responsible: everyone in the play accepts that Aphrodite has wrought this destruction. In the last moments, Artemis even binds Phaedra’s name to Hippolytus’： you will be remembered in song, she promises him, and Phaedra’s love for you will not be kept silent either.40 In the Greek, the words ‘Phaedra’ and ‘you’ are separated only by the word ‘for’。 In their deaths, Phaedra finally has the closeness that Aphrodite had made her desire during their lives.
*
For Euripides, the story of Phaedra and Hippolytus is an object lesson in divine malevolence. The play was awarded first prize by the judges at the Dionysia in 428 BCE, so they were obviously less shocked by this second draft than they were by the ill-received first one. And yet, it was not universally popular. As mentioned above, Aristophanes parodied it several times, specifically that line Hippolytus says to the nurse: My tongue swore, my mind was unsworn. It is a salutary lesson in the way values change through time: what do we care if Hippolytus means what he says? We live in a bureaucratic society where we have paperwork to fall back on if people renege on their promises. But for a fifth-century BCE Athenian audience with limited literate resources （for the most part）， the power of oaths and pledges was immense. Zeus himself punished perjurers. If people went around swearing an oath and then refusing to keep it, the whole value system on which their society functioned was in jeopardy. Aristotle even tells us41 that Euripides was prosecuted for asebeia – ‘impiety’ – over this particular line in the play.
So what happens if the gods are removed from the story? That is a question answered by Racine, whose 1677 play Phèdre is probably better known to modern audiences than Euripides’ Hippolytus. Not least, in the UK, because the title role has been played by both Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren in productions of an adaptation by Ted Hughes. For Racine, the gods are scarcely in the picture at all; they are not characters in the play. And although much of the story remains the same, the shift in emphasis – and the consequences for how the characters experience blame and guilt, in particular – is remarkable.
In this version, Theseus is missing, presumed dead. Hippolytus has a （so far） unexpressed love for a young woman named Aricia, whose family are sworn enemies of Theseus. Hippolytus too is changed: his devotion to chastity is not because he despises all women and sex, but because he only desires one, whom he believes he cannot have. His friend Théraméne teases him for having scorned Venus too often in the past: now he is her sacrificial victim after all. Hippolytus is no slave to Aphrodite/Venus though: he wishes he could erase his father’s sexual conquests from memory （Plutarch might have been relieved to see mention of Periboea, Helen and Ariadne here, though Helen’s extreme youth when ‘stolen out of her bed in Sparta’ is glossed over once again）。
If Hippolytus is less chaste than he is in Euripides’ play, so is Phaedra. She doesn’t just build a temple to Venus, but she ‘spent half my wealth to decorate it. From dawn to dusk I sacrificed beasts,/ Searching their bodies for my sanity.’ Here, Hughes is surely referencing the behaviour of another tragic, lovelorn queen: Dido, in Book Four of Virgil’s Aeneid, who peers into the entrails of sacrificial victims as though she is herself the haruspex, charged with reading entrails and interpreting the future. Phaedra has ‘pretended to hate him as my stepson’。 In order to disguise her feelings, she really has played the role of the wicked stepmother. A servant named Panope （‘all-seeing’） now appears to tell Phaedra that Theseus is dead. The nurse （here named Oenone, but we’ll keep calling her the nurse to save confusion） is delighted: Phaedra can now declare her love to Hippolytus and marry him. She is free.