Cup and coin: Metaphors of moderation in the Hippolytus

The second stanza (the antistrophe) of the choral ode concluding Scene 5 of the Hippolytus is apparently sung by the women of Troezen. After the first strophe, with its vision of a world bereft of gods and of intelligibility (sung by Hippolytus's male friends), the women revert to the purely practical question of survival:

Χορός
εἴθε μοι εὐξαμένᾳ θεόθεν τάδε μοῖρα παράσχοι,
τύχαν μετ᾽ ὄλβου καὶ ἀκήρατον ἄλγεσι θυμόν.
1115δόξα δὲ μήτ᾽ ἀτρεκὴς μήτ᾽ αὖ παράσημος ἐνείη,
ῥᾴδια δ᾽ ἤθεα τὸν αὔριον μεταβαλλομένα χρόνον αἰεὶ
βίον συνευτυχοίην.

Chorus
O that in answer to my prayer fate might give me this gift from the gods, a lot of blessedness and a heart untouched by sorrow! [1115] No mind unswerving and obdurate would I have nor yet again one false-struck, but changing my pliant character ever for the morrow I would share the morrow's happiness my whole life through.

The thought is similar to the notion of "getting by" voiced by the Nurse earlier in the play:

πολλὰ διδάσκει μ᾽ ὁ πολὺς βίοτος:
χρῆν γὰρ μετρίας εἰς ἀλλήλους
φιλίας θνητοὺς ἀνακίρνασθαι
255καὶ μὴ πρὸς ἄκρον μυελὸν ψυχῆς,
εὔλυτα δ᾽ εἶναι στέργηθρα φρενῶν
ἀπό τ᾽ ὤσασθαι καὶ ξυντεῖναι.

Nurse: My long life has taught me many lessons: mortals should not mix the cup of their affection to one another too strong, [255] and it should not sink to their very marrow, but the affection that binds their hearts should be easy to loosen, easy either to thrust from them or to bind tightly.

The Nurse is speaking of love, but instead of έρος, she uses φιλίας, friendly affection, and στέργηθρα φρενῶν, fondness, love charms of the heart. She speaks of mortals as needing to temper the wine of powerful desire with water, to accomplish μετρίας -- moderation. And she speaks of not allowing affection to "sink to their very marrow," as if, rather than an intoxicating drink, love was a toxic poison.

Her choice of metaphor can be compared with that of the women's chorus of Scene 5, which, to be clear, is speaking less of heart than of mind, of δόξα -- expectation, opinion -- but nonetheless is speaking of how to avoid sorrow. The mind should be pure -- ἀκήρατον -- a word used early in the play -- first by Hippolytus to describe the undefiled garden of Artemis which only he may enter, and later by Theseus to mock his son as someone who wore a mask of purity, of being virginal and "untouched by evil." (948)

Yet, to avoid tragedy, this chorus says, one should avoid being too proper. More precisely,

μήτ᾽ ἀτρεκὴς μήτ᾽ αὖ παράσημος
neither too precise nor falsely stamped (i.e., counterfeit)

The goal, says the chorus, is to be ῥᾴδια δ᾽ ἤθεα - easy going, flexible enough of disposition. A minted coin that is neither too exact nor too counterfeit. The metaphor is no longer the mixed drink, with its continuum of infinitesimal parts. One can always water down one's wine and join the Nurse in some choice attitude of moderation, but it's less simple to brandish a coin that is neither true coin of the realm nor counterfeit. Unlike water, coins are either true or false -- not infinitely subdividable, but binary.

The chorus aspires to the Nurse's mores of flexibility, but instead of the intimacy of the lovers' wine goblet, they sing of the representation of the royal treasury, the proper stamp of the realm. One could make the case that coins can be clipped or shaved so as to still be "true" in some compromised fashion. But much as Phaedra wondered how a wife could be false yet seem true, and just as her offspring would have been defiled if she were to seduce Hippolytus, so any effort to persuade representatives of the realm that clipped coins are still, sort of, maybe partly, true is not likely to win the day. (As William Chaloner learned in 1699 when he was hung for tampering with England's currency, when it came to counterfeiting, his prosecutor Isaac Newton, inventor of the calculus, found no "happy medium.")

The basic opposition here is between two analogues of heart and mind: the liquidity of the Nurse's vision of desire - not too strong, nor too weak, but certainly not reaching the marrow - and the impermeable solidity of both the coin and the stamp upon it. Coin and stamp are fixed, unable to be changed without losing that which makes them what they are. Where is the middle ground between a system of infinitesimal parts and another system of integral wholes?

There is one place  in the play, though, where solid and liquid appear to be not two, but one:

ἱερὸν εἴδομεν

κῦμ᾽ οὐρανῷ στηρίζον

we saw, immense and uncanny, 

a wave set fast in the sky

A tempting existential reading of the chorus (Hippolytus Sc. 5)

I want to return to the choral ode that concludes Scene 5 of the Hippolytus. Our discussion the other day was very helpful in getting a bit further along with it. Some of the difficulties of that ode as noted in a previous blog post now seem a bit clearer. Or perhaps what's clearer is the nature of the difficulties.

It comes right after the confrontation of Theseus and Hippolytus and the final condemnation that Theseus pronounces upon his son, sending him into exile. The chorus -- probably a combination of male friends of Hippolytus and women of Troezen, (men singing strophes and the women antistrophes) -- is reacting to this.

The first strophe is the hardest:

Χορός
ἦ μέγα μοι τὰ θεῶν μελεδήμαθ᾽, ὅταν φρένας ἔλθῃ,
1105λύπα παραιρεῖ ξύνεσίς τε: τίς ἐλπὶς ἃ κεύθει
λείπεται ἔν τε τύχαις θνατῶν καὶ ἐν ἔργμασι λεύσσειν;
ἄλλα γὰρ ἄλλοθεν ἀμείβεται, μετὰ δ᾽ ἵσταται ἀνδράσιν αἰὼν
1110πολυπλάνητος αἰεί.

Here's yet another translation - by E.P. Coleridge:

strophe 1
In very deed the thoughts I have about the gods, whenso they come into my mind, do much to soothe its grief, but though I cherish secret hopes of some great guiding will, yet am I at fault when survey the fate and doings of the sons of men; change succeeds to change, and man's life veers and shifts in endless restlessness.

 The rest of the ode in his translation:

antistrophe 1
Fortune grant me this, I pray, at heaven's hand,-a happy lot in life and a soul from sorrow free; opinions let me hold not too precise nor yet too hollow; but, lightly changing my habits to each morrow as it comes, may I thus attain a life of bliss!

strophe 2
For now no more is my mind free from doubts, unlooked-for sights greet my vision; for lo! I see the morning star of Athens, eye of Hellas, driven by his father's fury to another land. Mourn, ye sands of my native shores, ye oak-groves on the hills, where with his fleet hounds he would hunt the quarry to the death, attending on Dictynna, awful queen.

antistrophe 2
No more will he mount his car drawn by Venetian steeds, filling the course round Limna with the prancing of his trained horses. Nevermore in his father's house shall he wake the Muse that never slept beneath his lute-strings; no hand will crown the spots where rests the maiden Latona 'mid the boskage deep; nor evermore shall our virgins vie to win thy love, now thou art banished.

epode
While I with tears at thy unhappy fate shall endure a lot all undeserved. Ah! hapless mother, in vain didst thou bring forth, it seems. I am angered with the gods; out upon them! O ye linked Graces, why are ye sending from his native land this poor youth, guiltless sufferer, far from his home?

The first strophe is riddled with ambiguities:

In very deed the thoughts I have about the gods, whenso they come into my mind, do much to soothe its grief,

Do we think of the gods as caring, or does the gods' care cause us to have thoughts of them? It's unclear whether the gods are products of our thought, or our thought the result of their care. This suggests an awareness of certain complications in the mind's understanding of its own understanding, of what it knows.

This is followed by statements that use verbs which chiefly mean a lack, a removing, or negating, rather than some positive action. The verb which Coleridge translates as "soothe" the mind's grief, or pain,  is παραιρεῖ -- "take away, remove, filch." The taking away of pain or grief could in fact leave an emptiness that, in contrast with the prior pain, is experienced as soothing, but that's an inference. What is described is a void where before there was grief or pain. The loss of the thought of the care of the gods leaves an absence, a lack.

Our translators show how this in turn is open to reversal. Kovacs gives us grief, the pain of ξύνεσίς, of understanding, banishing the thoughts of the gods:

Thoughts about the gods, when they come into my mind, are banished by painful understanding: [1105]

Our two translators are at odds: does the thought of the gods help us by taking away painful understanding, or does the pain of understanding removes thoughts of the gods?

What's common to both is the sequence that goes from (uncertain) knowledge of the gods to a void which is experienced as a loss, a banishment. The chorus, witnessing the banishment of Hippolytus, confronts a sense of banishment on a cosmic level, as if to say, "If this can happen, then we can't believe in divine order." This is not unlike a modern person witnessing the horrors of WWI, or WWII, or a vast natural disaster, and having his or her faith in some Deity shaken to its foundations. A kind of existential crisis.

The next clause, though tricky, can be parsed:

Coleridge: though I cherish secret hopes of some great guiding will, yet am I at fault when survey the fate and doings of the sons of men;

Kovacs: what hope is there left to see their hidden workings in the fortunes and doings of mortals?

Grene: So I have a secret hope / of someone, a God, who is wise and plans  / But my hopes grow dim when I see / the deeds of men and their destinies.

Where Coleridge and Grene see the hope as being kept a secret by the self that is speaking, Kovacs sees the workings of the Gods as what is concealed, hidden from human verification.

Despite the differences, all three agree that there is another failing, another lack: the verb is λείπεται -- "to leave, to quit, to fail, to lack." Whether or not the chorus's hopes were a guarded secret, such hopes might just as well have not existed, because they leave. failing us when we look upon the works and fates of men.

Both the thought of the gods and the hope of some divine order appear to be negated, or at least thrown into radical doubt, as the chorus witnesses Theseus's harsh judgement. Their sense of the care of a just god is itself experiencing a leaving, a banishment, as they watch Hippolytus leave the city.

One could see this as the existential crisis that takes place when an entire structure of belief in divine order comes crashing down. The vision of human life as πολυπλάνητος αἰεί -- forever much wandering -- comes home just as Hippolytus begins his journey into exile. Human life, to the extent it is banished from order, from meaning, from being at home in the world, is not merely in exile from a home it knew in some anterior condition. Rather, there never was a home. The only possible fate of wandering men -- and we are all wanderers -- is the endless error the Greeks call hamartia.

Now while it might be tempting to hold up a reading like this of the first strophe and declare it a potent statement of the radical existentialist skepticism of the author Euripides, let's note, first, that we've just seen a powerful dramatization of a judgment (Theseus's) based on erring reading of a voiceless witness. Now it is this very scene of bad judgment, or poor reading, which the chorus witnesses, giving rise to its dashed hopes. Shall we, the audience and readers of the play, rush to read the chorus's reading of Theseus's misreading as the summation of Euripides' thinking about men, gods, and life? What's transpired up to this moment in the play might caution us to be more critically aware of hyperbolic interpretive pitfalls.

In short, for the reader of this play about errors of reading, it could be premature to leap from these few lines sung by the chorus to interpretive conclusions about the play and its author as a whole. Besides, this is only the first strophe of the ode; the antistrophe pursues a different tack.

The messenger: Part I

The messenger (Ἄγγελος) who rushes in to describe what happened to Hippolytus begins in prosaic fashion. He first speaks simply and without "art" of  how the banished young man took his leave of his friends at the border of Troezen:

We were scraping and combing the horses' coats near the wave-beaten shore and [1175] weeping at our task. For a messenger had come saying that Hippolytus would no longer dwell in this land, being exiled by you. And he came, singing the same tearful burden, to join us at the shore, and a countless throng [1180] of friends and age-mates at his heels came with him.

Hippolytus finally turns away from the polis to head north, toward Argos and Epidaurus.

The messenger's language heightens as he begins to describe what happened the moment Hippolytus enters the blank terrain beyond the polis of Troezen. Lines 1200-01, describing Zeus's thunder, are richly onomatopoeic and more dramatic. They explode in alliterative b's and br's before shrieking into the terrifying φρικώ

βροντὴ Διὸςβαρὺν βρόμον μεθῆκε, φρικώδη κλύειν:

a great noise in the earth, like Zeus's thunder, roared heavily—it made one shudder to hear it.

Further on, there's the "sea-beaten beach" - ἁλιρρόθους (1205) whose rolling r's roar like the sea:

ὀρθὸν δὲ κρᾶτ᾽ ἔστησαν οὖς τ᾽ ἐς οὐρανὸν
ἵπποι: παρ᾽ ἡμῖν δ᾽ ἦν φόβος νεανικὸς
1205πόθεν ποτ᾽ εἴη φθόγγος. ἐς δ᾽ ἁλιρρόθους

Here's the first part of the passage:

When we struck deserted country, there is a headland that lies beyond our territory, [1200] lying out towards what is at that point the Saronic gulf. There a great noise in the earth, like Zeus's thunder, roared heavily—it made one shudder to hear it. The horses pricked up their heads and ears to heaven, while we servants were taken with a violent fear [1205] at the thought where this voice came from. 

After this, the narrator recounts a marvel:

ἀκτὰς ἀποβλέψαντες ἱερὸν εἴδομεν
κῦμ᾽ οὐρανῷ στηρίζον, ὥστ᾽ ἀφῃρέθη
Σκίρωνος ἀκτὰς ὄμμα τοὐμὸν εἰσορᾶν,
ἔκρυπτε δ᾽ Ἰσθμὸν καὶ πέτραν Ἀσκληπιοῦ.
1210κἄπειτ᾽ ἀνοιδῆσάν τε καὶ πέριξ ἀφρὸν
πολὺν καχλάζον ποντίῳ φυσήματι
χωρεῖ πρὸς ἀκτὰς οὗ τέθριππος ἦν ὄχος

When we turned our eyes to the sea-beaten beach, we saw a wave, immense and uncanny, set fast in the sky, so great that my eye was robbed  (ἀφῃρέθη) of the sight of Sciron's coast, and the Isthmus and Asclepius' cliff were hid from view. [1210] And then as the sea-surge made it swell and seeth up much foam all about, it came toward the shore where the chariot was.

Our translators take two different approaches to conveying the strangeness of the wave:

[Kovacs] we saw a wave, immense and uncanny, set fast in the sky

[Grene] we saw a wave appear, a miracle wave, lifting its crest to the sky 

Kovacs uses "uncanny" to capture the sense of the wave, the very incarnation of motion, fixed in space; Grene offers a "miracle wave" still in motion, rising to the sky.

The messenger calls the wave ἱερὸν, which has the sense of "filled with divine power" - and he says the wave "stood fixed in heaven"-- οὐρανῷ στηρίζον. 

 στηρίζον carries the sense of something set in place to stay, propped, fixed fast.

A wave standing still in the sky arguably offers something we could imagine to be filled with divine power, and this strangeness, this oxymoronic unwaving wave, betokens something qualifying as "uncanny."

Note that the messenger names two causes of the fear felt by the attendants of Hippolytus -- the thunderous sound coming from the Earth, and the wave fixed above the otherwise tumultuous sea. He goes on to describe how this vast wave "steals," i.e., obstructs their view of the usual horizon -- "Sciron's coast, the Isthmus, and Aesclepius' cliff."

We'll take up the rest of the messenger's account next, but a look at the map suggests that anything blotting out Sciron's coast, the Isthmus and the cliff of Aesclepius (in Megara) had to be pretty big. Big enough to usurp the entire horizon.

Sciron beaten by Theseus