Storied light in the Hippolytus

σὲ τὸν εὐπατρίδην Αἰγέως κέλομαι
παῖδ᾽ ἐπακοῦσαι:
1285Λητοῦς δὲ κόρη σ᾽ Ἄρτεμις αὐδῶ.
Θησεῦ, τί τάλας τοῖσδε συνήδῃ,
παῖδ᾽ οὐχ ὁσίως σὸν ἀποκτείνας
ψευδέσι μύθοις ἀλόχου πεισθεὶς
ἀφανῆ; φανερὰν δ᾽ ἔσχεθες ἄτην.

Artemis addresses her first words to Theseus, whom she calls the "well-fathered [εὐπατρίδην] son of Aegeus":

Artemis
Nobly-born son of Aegeus! Listen, I order you! [1285] It is I, Artemis, Leto's daughter, who address you. Why, unhappy man, do you take joy in these things? You have godlessly killed your son, persuaded of things unseen by the false words of your wife. But all too clearly seen is the ruin you have won for yourself! [1290] Why do you not hide yourself beneath the earth's depths in shame or change your life for that of a bird above and take yourself out of this pain? For among good men [1295] you possess no share in life.

It is not that Artemis rejects Theseus's claim to be the son of Poseidon, but here she chooses to underscore, with a kind of built-in irony, his human lineage. She is stating nothing out of the ordinary, but in calling him the child of Aegeus, she is reminding Theseus of his human origin at the very moment his all-too-humanness is coming to light.

Artemis potnia theron

The goddess's language is compressed, but not opaque: Theseus's error is to have been persuaded (πεισθεὶς), by his wife's lying tale, of something unseen, obliterated -- ἀφανῆ -- which in turn makes visible -- φανερὰν -- his ἄτην.

"By lying stories of your wife you were persuaded of the unseen; seen is your blinding."

The well-fathered Theseus here intersects with the common man, who is, according to the Nurse, always semi-blinded, and always borne along by stories.

Recall the Nurse's words coming at the end of her first speech in the play, at the opening of Scene 2:

μύθοις δ᾽ ἄλλως φερόμεσθα.  (197)

We are borne along foolishly by mere tales (μύθοις)

The lying stories of Phaedra are ψευδέσι μύθοις. A longer piece of the passage is worth citing:

ἀλλ᾽ ὅ τι τοῦ ζῆν φίλτερον ἄλλο
σκότος ἀμπίσχων κρύπτει νεφέλαις.
δυσέρωτες δὴ φαινόμεθ᾽ ὄντες
τοῦδ᾽ ὅ τι τοῦτο στίλβει κατὰ γῆν
195δι᾽ ἀπειροσύνην ἄλλου βιότου
κοὐκ ἀπόδειξιν τῶν ὑπὸ γαίας,
μύθοις δ᾽ ἄλλως φερόμεσθα.

Anything we might love more than life is hid in a surrounding cloud of darkness, and we are clearly unhappy lovers of whatever light there is that shines on earth [195] because we are ignorant of another life, since the life below is not revealed to us. We are borne along in vain by mere tales.

The Nurse's words lack lucidity -- and any paraphrase should be true to that -- here's one effort:

Any other thing more dear to us is held back, hidden in cloudy gloom. Yet our inexperience of that other life we do not see makes us unhappy lovers of the light we have. Neither knowing nor not knowing, we are borne by stories.

The Nurse's speech repeatedly interweaves forms of the word ἄλλος -- "other." Some opacity (making us unable to see other than what we see) makes us unhappy lovers of light.  We know there is something we do not see, because seeing some thing -- anything -- is also not-seeing some other. To see is to be blinded to an otherness the seen thing's opacity prevents us from seeing. If the damned light would only get out of the way, we'd see . . .

If the Nurse has grasped the plight of human seeing, then we are all caught in this common predicament, even well-born kings. Artemis echoes that in her condensed summation of Theseus's error. We might keep this in mind as we look at the "death" of Hippolytus, and at what death means in a world borne by stories. If it is the cessation of mortal functions, that's one thing. If it is the obliteration of a name in story, that's another.

{Update} The term used by Artemis to address Theseus, εὐπατρίδην, has a storied past of its own that goes to the origin of Athenian classes:

Eupatridae (literally "good fathered", i.e. "offspring of noble fathers" or "the well-born") refers to the ancient nobility of the Greek region of Attica.

Tradition ascribes to Theseus, whom it also regards as the author of the union (synoecism) of Attica round Athens as a political centre, the division of the Attic population into three classes, Eupatridae, Geomori and Demiurgi. 

Theseus is thus implicated in the very structure of Athenian society, in particular with the aristocracy. Clearly this has interesting implications for the political dimension of the Hippolytus.

Beware the poets -- and Attic tragedy

In a possibly apocryphal dialogue called Minos, Plato has Socrates explain how Minos came to have the terrible reputation he garnered at Athens. He blames the Athenian authors of tragedy:

Socrates
Do you not know which of the Greeks use the most ancient laws?
Companion
Do you mean the Spartans, and Lycurgus the lawgiver?
Socrates
But whence is it that [318d] the best of those ordinances come? Do you know?

Enter Theseus: Uncanny echoes, ambiguous oracles

A kind of fateful ambiguity seems to pursue Theseus throughout his life, extending even to the time before his birth. When Euripides has him enter the Hippolytus, he has just returned from a voyage to Delphi. Instead of announcing some word from the oracle, some response to his quest, his first words respond to the sound of wailing:

[790] Women, do you know what was the shout that came with leaden sound through the door? For the house has not seen fit to open its gates and greet me in friendly (εὐφρόνως) fashion as befits a sacred ambassador (θεωρὸν).

 Informed of Phaedra's suicide, Theseus cries out:

Oh! Oh! Why then is my head crowned with these plaited leaves since my sacred embassy has ended in disaster? 

Instead of Oh! Oh!, Theseus actually says αἰαῖ -- the common Greek cry which is also, according to myth, the grief-stricken cry uttered by Apollo when, while playing with his beloved Hyacinth, his discus accidentally struck the boy in the head, killing him. It's the cry found ever after inscribed on the flower's petals.

Thesesus' return to Troezen from Delphi repeats the act of his father, Aegeus, who had once made a voyage to Delphi to learn the reason why he was not able to have a son. The oracle gave him an answer so cryptic that Aegeus needed to consult his wise friend Pittheus:

"Do not loosen the bulging mouth of the wineskin until you have reached the height of Athens, lest you die of grief."

Pittheus's understanding of the oracle was to get Aegeus drunk and have him sleep with his daughter Aethra. Immediately after, Aethra fell asleep and had a dream in which Athena told her to wade out to the island of Sphairia, where Poseidon possessed her the same night. The child of both unions, Theseus, has questions about his father(s) that receive an answer in this play.

One interesting detail is that Aethra was told in her dream to make a libation at Sphairia to Sphairos, the charioteer of Pelops. For one thing, this reminds us that Pittheus was brother to Atreus and Thyestes, all sons of the son of Tantalos.

For another thing, Sphairos died before Pelops' great race against Oenomaus for the hand of Hippodamia took place. Pelops honored him greatly in death, and legend has it that Sphairos helped him win the race.

Yet the libation to the charioteer recalls another story of that race. Pelops was granted winged horses by his lover, Poseidon, but still doubted he could win, so he bribed Oenomaus's charioteer, Myrtilus, to rig the axel, causing Oenomaus to crash. In return for the help, Pelops was supposed to give Myrtilus the first night with Hippodamia. Instead he killed the charioteer, who cursed him and his house before dying. This was considered one of the main causes of the long-lived curse upon the Atreidae.

Pelops and Hippodamia

The peculiar origin of Theseus links to events earlier in his ancestry that foreshadow what is to come. And the arrival of Theseus now, direct from the Oracle, strikes an uncanny chord, echoing the arrival of Aegeus to Troezen and the curious, fateful events of his own ambiguous conception.