INTRODUCTION TO HIPPOLYTUS

"If it is necessary that I say anything about a woman's ex-
cellence/' says Pericles in the history of Thucydides, "I could
sum it up in the words: great is her renown whose name is
least upon the lips of men either for good or for ill." This has
sometimes been taken as the general view of women in Athe-
nian society of the fifth century B.C. However, we have only
to look at the tragic stage to realize that the audience at least
was immensely interested in women and in their place in
human society, Aristophanes attacks Euripides as the author
in whose plays the perverse, violent, or monstrous woman has
a leading place, and he cites Medea, Sthenoboea, and Phaedra
in support of the justice of his charge. As far as the importance
of feminine roles goes, Euripides' two predecessors are as
guilty as he is. Clytemnestra, Cassandra, Queen Atossa, Elec-
tra, Tecmessa, Antigone, and Deianeira are among the most
crucial and carefully worked characters in the plays of Aeschy-
lus and Sophocles.
But it is probably true that the Athenian audience noticed
with special interest, either with delight or with repulsion,
Euripides' gallery of bad women. Medea, Sthenoboea, and
Phaedra are the three singled out by Aristophanes. Both
Sthenoboea and Phaedra are examples of incestuous love; in
the Hippolytus, Euripides apparently had to revise an early
version of the play in which Phaedra makes her proposal of
love direct to her stepson. In the second version the nurse was
invented to act as a go-between, and Phaedra's conscious re-
sponsibility for the address to Hippolytus is left in doubt. But
Phaedra's passion for Hippolytus is still the center of the
piece. It is not necessary to debate whether, .to the fifth-ecu-:
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