Greek tragedy meets the stepmom category 🌽
A summary of / some thoughts on Euripides' Hippolytus (also there's a mosaic)
I’ve been travelling around the Middle East over the past few weeks and have seen some downright dazzling sites and artefacts which will no doubt find their way into later newsletters BUT there was one particular mosaic in Madaba, Jordan, which was particularly beautiful (and rather odd, given its context). I’m very aware that I am quite far down the rabbit hole of Greek mythology / Attic drama so I posted a little note asking if you were familiar with the myth / if you’d fancy a retelling and I received some very kind encouragement so pls allow me the HONOUR of being the first to walk you through the tragic story of Hippolytus, as told by Euripides.
THIS is the mosaic, depicting the myth of Hippolytus, located in the creatively named Hippolytus Hall. Byzantine art isn’t typically my thing but I was quite taken with how this myth (and by extension, Euripides’ tragedy) had been immortalised centuries later during the Byzantine period (I myself was also seeing it centuries later and am similarly obsessed with Euripides so it was all very meta).
Now I promised a retelling so we are SKIPPING detailed artistic analysis (if you have any burning thoughts or feelings regarding the mosaic itself please feel free to comment or message me). When researching Hippolytus I actually stumbled across some very recent scholarship that mentions this exact mosaic (it’s on page 64 of the chapter by Jane Chick that I cite at the bottom) - so if you are desperate to nerd out you can head there.
Now let’s get into it. Firstly, it’s Greek tragedy so some content warnings ~ there will be mentions of sexual assault and suicide.
Euripides’ Hippolytus possibly contains both the origin of the stepmom kink AND the earliest false accusation of r*pe made by a woman (as far as I’m aware).
Hippolytus is the bastard son of Theseus, the king of Athens, (and the dude who abandons darling Ariadne on the beach all alone after she helps him escape the labyrinth so we hate him), and an Amazon - a female warrior who was possibly/probably assaulted by Theseus, it is unclear.
Hippolytus grows up in a tricky spot, on the one hand he is the king’s son, on the other he is illegitimate. He decides the wise thing to do is sack off the goddess Aphrodite (A BOLD CHOICE) i.e. reject love, sex, and marriage in favour of the goddess Artemis, the virginal goddess of the hunt.
Aphrodite, in a move that I’m sure will shock you, doesn’t take too kindly to this. In a particularly cruel twist, the goddess decides to make Hippolytus’ stepmom Phaedra fall madly, desperately in love with him. But in a particularly horny way.
Two things: 1. Euripides LOVES writing women in the throes of sexual and/or murderous passions (I may make a Venn diagram). 2. While we are talking about destructive horniness, allow me to draw your attention to Phaedra’s mother, Pasiphaë, who is cursed to fall in love with a bull (we are told it is a very handsome bull), climbs into a mechanical cow costume, has sex with the bull and gives birth to the Minotaur. So it runs in the family.
Phaedra has been confessing, debriefing with her old nurse, who THEN decides to TELL Hippolytus about his hornbag stepmother but swears him to secrecy. To say Hippolytus is horrified would be an understatement.
Phaedra is so overcome with shame and self-disgust when she discovers that Hippolytus knows just how much she desires him she commits suicide, hanging herself—and this is where it gets wild even by the standards of Greek tragedy—leaving a NOTE, claiming that she has been raped by Hippolytus and this is why she has killed herself. The plot is TWISTING. The wildest uno-reverse possible, Phaedra is no longer the lustful wife, she is dutiful, chaste, and the pure youth Hippolytus is now a violent, uncontrollable criminal.
Theseus understandably kicks off, invoking the wrath of Poseidon, god of the sea. Cut to Hippolytus driving his chariot along the seashore, having a lovely old time, and then BAM a supernatural bull (??) sent by Poseidon himself bodysurfs onto the shore, freaking out Hippolytus’ horses who then hurl him from his chariot and drag him around until he is fatally wounded. Artemis steps in as Hippolytus lies there dying (I mean if you were going to intervene, I feel like before the bodysurfing bull burst onto the scene would’ve been ideal), telling Theseus the truth about what went down so Hippolytus does actually manage to reconcile with his father before he trundles off to the Underworld. So that’s something.
Now what is actually going ON here 🧐🧐🧐🧐
First up, Hippolytus’ excessive rejection of sexuality is, in and of itself, fascinating. It’s also fascinating how it is taken as a personal slight by Aphrodite—clearly sex, more specifically your reproductive role as an elite Athenian male, was not to be compromised, no matter how much you wanted to frolic in the forest with Artemis and shoot arrows. Also Hippolytus is quite heavy handed with the whole pure-as-the-driven-snow thing; he goes into great detail about how the garland he has gathered for Artemis is from a virgin meadow where no shepherd has DARED enter. Not exactly subtle.
His status as illegitimate is also surely coming into play here – is his devotion to the goddess Artemis some sort of pious overcompensation? Purity being a key theme in the play, Hippolytus’ religious purity or piety exists in conflict with his fraught, transgressive status as illegitimate, what Charles Segal describes as “his ambiguous social status as the bastard offspring of one of his father’s adventures.” Or perhaps because he was born of sexual assault, i.e. Theseus giving in to his base desires, Hippolytus decides he wants no part in that side of things? That angle I could get behind. He laments his unhappy mother and bitter birth when he’s being torn to shreds by Theseus (verbally, not literally) so this doesn’t seem unreasonable. Condemning the sexual violence of his father, Hippolytus wants to make sure he is not responsible for creating any bastards, as he has intimate knowledge of such a stigmatised, unhappy existence. Shame he took it a smidge too far (and was rather preachy about it). Also as far as the plot goes, the overcorrection on the part of Hippolytus, in his desperation not to follow in the steps of his father, means that his father is the person least likely to believe his defence. Theseus is an absolute menace when it comes to the opposite sex so he simply cannot comprehend Hippolytus’ way of life let alone his claim to innocence.
Anne V. Rankin argues that Hippolytus’ devotion to the goddess Artemis is all because of his mummy issues i.e. he’s looking for a sort of surrogate mother and Artemis is the closest goddess to an Amazon as far as vibes and priorities are concerned. So Artemis and his mother are lumped into one category, celebrated for their chastity, while the rest of womankind are uncontrollable hornbags and Hippolytus wants no part of it. Rankin’s translation does have Hippolytus eloquently/histrionically bemoaning all of womankind;
“O Zeus! why have you plagued this world with so vile and worthless a thing as woman?” (Eur. Hipp. 616)
Assuming this question is rhetorical, moving swiftly on.
You might think the eponymous play would be all about Hippolytus and, I mean, it is, but we ALSO have Phaedra, a tormented woman who lusts feverishly after her stepson (I’m seeing a smidge of a similarity with Aeschylus’ Agamemnon – yes the play is CALLED Agamemnon but it’s really about Clytemnestra). Though I nodded to the stepmom category of p0rn in the title, Phaedra is actually overcome with shame and disgust when it comes to how she feels about her stepson (it kind of reminds me of how anything Oedipal means that a man fancies his mum but Oedipus was so horrified when he realised he’d married his mother he stabbed himself in the eyes ~ Freud really did him dirty with that).
Look, writing the note was a CHOICE. Falsely incriminating her stepson does mean that Phaedra is, at least in part, responsible for his death. There are two things I want to clarify though ~ firstly, though it is tempting, I think it would be ultimately reductive to attribute her false accusation of rape to her bruised ego after sexual rejection. There are much more complicated issues of status, reputation, and shame at play here; Phaedra is very much at the mercy of the demands of public opinion. And secondly, I feel like when we demonise some of these female characters we forget that they had no control over what they were doing or how they were feeling. It’s literally the gods MAKING them do it and why is that? Because the men have pissed them off !! The only reason Phaedra wants to bang her stepson is because her stepson has pissed off Aphrodite, just like the only reason Pasiphaë wanted to roll around with a bloody bull is because Minos had pissed off Poseidon. And yet all we seem to remember is that these women were dangerous, destructive, and alarmingly horny. I mean, they were, BUT IT’S NOT THEIR FAULT. How can blame be assigned when it is made remarkably clear that these women don’t have agency or control and that their feelings are divinely mandated?
Much has been written about Euripides’ Hippolytus—there is a LOT to work with—but what jumps out to me is my favourite playwright penning another tragedy where he illustrates the ruinous, destructive capacity of sexual passion. Also male fear of a false rape accusation can officially be dated back to over two thousand years ago but I’m gonna leave that in the hands of psychologists.
reference list / further reading 📖
Chick, Jane. “Iconographic Analysis.” In From Wilderness to Paradise: A Sixth-Century Mosaic Pavement at Qasr El-Lebia in Cyrenaica, Libya, 40–115. Archaeopress, 2024.
Mitchell, Robin N. “Miasma, Mimesis, and Scapegoating in Euripides’ “Hippolytus.” Classical Antiquity, 1991 10, 1 (1991): 97-122.
Rankin, Anne Vannan. “Euripides’ Hippolytus.” American Imago (1968): 333–46.
Segal, Charles. “Shame and Purity in Euripides’ Hippolytus.” Hermes (1970): 278-299.
Thank you for this: the best, most interesting, most well-written, most compelling thing in my in-box this morning! ~pours another cup of coffee... sips~ Would that every day began as well!
Outstanding analysis! What other plays are based on this lovely family? I can think of Racine's Phèdre.