EURIPIDES
tury Greek, sexual relations between stepmother and stepson
would be technically incestuous or not. It is enough that we
can be sure that they involved an extreme violation of the
trust and affection between father and son, and something
worse than that, even if the evil cannot be exactly charted.
The play is framed by a Prologue and an Epilogue, each
spoken by a goddess. When these goddesses are identified as
Aphrodite and Artemis, it becomes all too easy to allegorize
them and see the play as a conflict between Lust and Con-
tinence with Phaedra and Hippolytus as the appropriate hu-
man representatives. But if this view were correct, surely the
point of issue would have to be a conflict where the moral
really emerged, where, that is, it was dramatically stated with
a fair chance of an outcome in either direction. Hippolytus
should be tempted where an ordinary man might fall, and
Phaedra yield to a passion which, if blameworthy, is compre-
hensible. Instead, the monstrousness of the relationship is the
hinge on which everything turns. Phaedra, when rejected,
must kill herself for shame. Theseus, when he learns of it? is
ready to murder his son; Hippolytus, in his defense before his
father, says-that he is accused of a crime from which even an
ordinarily unchaste man would shrink. The truth seems to be
that Euripides used a story with an almost Homeric flavor, of
rival goddesses and their favorites, to write of the absolute
power of passion over the human animal. The more horrible
the crime of which she is guilty, the more clear it is that
Phaedra is being driven far out of her natural course. The
perversity of Hippolytus' ostentatious purity—for so the
Greeks certainly regarded it—is the cynical foil to Phaedra's
guilty lust. She must fall in love with the one man who is a
very monk for continence!
This is certainly the right way to see the play, but the ex-
planation also shows some of the play's weaknesses. The
author is deeply concerned with Phaedra—Aristophanes is
quite right to see that she is the principal character—and
much less with Hippolytus. Consequently, when Phaedra dies,
only halfway through the play, Euripides is left to deal with a
denouement in which he is only professionally interested, be-
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