Twilight intelligence in Par. 29:1-12

(One paragraph was revised on 10.1.17, as noted)

Paradiso 29:1-12

Quando ambedue li figli di Latona,
coperti del Montone e de la Libra,
fanno de l'orizzonte insieme zona,

quant' è dal punto che 'l cenìt inlibra
infin che l'uno e l'altro da quel cinto,
cambiando l'emisperio, si dilibra,

tanto, col volto di riso dipinto,
si tacque Bëatrice, riguardando
fiso nel punto che m'avëa vinto.

Poi cominciò: “Io dico, e non dimando,
quel che tu vuoli udir, perch' io l'ho visto
là 've s'appunta ogne ubi e ogne quando. 

                              . . .  

At what time both the children of Latona,
Surmounted by the Ram and by the Scales,
Together make a zone of the horizon,

As long as from the time the zenith holds them
In equipoise, till from that girdle both
Changing their hemisphere disturb the balance, 

So long, her face depicted with a smile,
Did Beatrice keep silence while she gazed
Fixedly at the point which had o'ercome me.

Then she began: "I say, and I ask not
What thou dost wish to hear, for I have seen it
Where centres every When and every 'Ubi.'

Alison Cornish does a marvelous job explicating this passage in her article entitled "Planets and Angels in Paradiso XXIX: The First Moment." The elaborate spatial architecture is both an image of balance and a figure of instantaneity -- of the nothing that is the nevernow between one instant and the next.

Cornish sorts out the ambiguities and equivalences arising out of the astronomy, then with great perspicacity relates the passage to what comes after it -- the account of the creation of the angels and their fall. The nature of time as it derives from celestial motion turns out to be integral to a long and significant interpretive tradition of the timing and manner of that fall.

Augustine and Aquinas grappled with the question of the first instant of the angels' existence, and how it came to pass that these first creatures both became self-aware and, seemingly without delay, exercised their will once and for all either to remain faithful to their Creator, or to turn away.

Cornish teases out her reading with formidable learning and delicacy. Without straying from her analysis, she provides insights into Augustine and Aquinas' somewhat abstruse thinking about time and angelic consciousness. Indeed, the question of how long the rebellious angels remained unfallen seems to require Aquinas to distinguish angelic time from celestial time. The essay is a tour de force.

I'll try to add a couple of "grace notes" to Cornish's interpretive work, deriving from two elements built into the passage that were not her focus: the classical resonances of the figure of Latona, and Dante's structuring use of quando, which begins and ends the passage.

The passage paints an image of equilibrium that's a mini-summa of the ancient world. The embattled mother of Apollo and Artemis, the zodiacal references, the symmetrical structure of the equinox, the crepuscular moment between day and night, the thresholds of spring and autumn are all rooted in the world of Aristotle and Virgil, a Cosmos precariously poised between opposing forces that seem equally matched. Libra invokes the balance of Justice and judgment -- think of Zeus holding the scales above the world of men --  as well as the delicacy of Euripides' Sophrosyne, the sound self-control of the well-balanced soul.

Of course the "balance" is eternally elusive. Cornish rightly notes that the "when" of the passage has no duration in time, any more than a point has any extension in space. Dante has painted an elaborate image that extends through time to speak of a quando ("when") that has no measurable time at all.

The classical model is a symmetrical system of binary oppositions whose mirror-like ambiguity is thorough and undecidable. As Cornish, Hollander and others point out, it's impossible to tell which child of Latona is under which sign. If Apollo/Sun is found under Aries (Montone, interestingly, seems to be a wether rather than a ram) Spring is dawning in Rome. At the exact same moment, with the Artemis/moon under Libra, Fall is deepening into dusk in the antipodes. (If the Sun is under Libra, all this is reversed.) Total equilibrium is both a model of specular symmetry, and in this celestial configuration, the precise moment of eclipse.

From Cornish, "Planets and Angels"

Why Latona?

As already noted, the latter part of Cornish's essay addresses the theology of the angels' creation and fall, and it is very rich. But the classical elements of the passage (which, by the way, is not a simile, but a portrait of a celestial position used to elicit the duration of Beatrice's "painted" smile) are not mere window dressing. Why is this story invoked here?

Leto or Latona is the goddess of motherhood, who undergoes extremities of parturitive labor. Jealous Hera decrees that the modest goddess, impregnated by Zeus before Hera became his spouse, will not be allowed to bring forth children on earth or sea. Latona seeks a refuge where she might safely bring her children into the world. The myth spares nothing in detailing her search:

Apollo protects Leto from Tityus

In her wanderings, Leto came to Crete, to Athens, to the island of Aegina in the Saronic Gulf, to Athos in Thrace, to Mount Pelion in Thessaly, to the Aegean island of Samos off the western coast of Asia Minor, to the island of Peparethus north of Euboea, to Mount Ida, to the city of Phocaea in Asia Minor which is between the Elaitic and the Hermaean Gulfs, to the island of Imbros in northern Aegean Sea, to Lemnos, to the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea opposite the coast of Asia Minor, to the island of Chios off the coast of Ionia in Asia Minor, to Mount Mimas opposite Chios, to the rock Corycius on the coast of Asia Minor in Cilicia, to Clarus near Ephesus, to the promontory Mycale in Ionia on the mainland opposite Samos, to Miletus in Caria, to Cos off the southwestern coast of Asia Minor, to Cnidos, Naxos, Paros, and many other lands, looking for a place to give birth.

The floating island of Delos, neither earth or sea, eventually becomes the sacred locus, the opening for Latona to give birth to her twins.

It's hardly by chance that this tale of labor, persecution and escape is evoked here, just before an account of serene divine creation that takes "place" outside of time, space, pregnancy, and labor. When contemplated together, the manifold differences between these two accounts are mutually illuminating.

Both treat of divine making, and the "children" in both accounts are immortal. The tale of Latona stresses the delay, the impedance blocking her infants from coming forth at the natural time. According to the logic of the passage, inhibiting the twins' birth would be nothing less than the simultaneous eclipse of both sun and moon!

Beatrice's description of the creation of the Angels couldn't be more different. There is nothing of labor there, nothing of embryonic development and birthing, no mechanism or natural process to account for the act. A"splendor" is put into the world from a place outside of the world -- a speaking, self-aware being:

Non per aver a sé di bene acquisto,
ch'esser non può, ma perché suo splendore
potesse, risplendendo, dir 'Subsisto,'

Not to acquire some good unto himself,
  Which is impossible, but that his splendour
  In its resplendency may say, 'Subsisto,'  (Par. 29:13-15)

The first act of this new, limitless legion of unique beings is an act of intelligence: each enunciates its being. The creature does not say "I am happy," or "I love corned beef," or "I vote for Satan." The first moment is not seeing, or loving, or desiring, or willing. It's the act of saying subsisto.

In Italian, sussistere seems to suggest simple being: to exist in oneself. The Latin form, subsistere, tends to a wider range of meanings, including but not limited to: to take a stand, to stay, to subsist, to withstand, to stand firm, to sustain, to halt, to oppose, to exist under some larger entity. The prefix "sub" seems to promote a sense that one's standing, or remaining, is in relation to something else. Not just standing, but withstanding.

The distinctive feature of a reflection is precisely its derivative nature: entirely dependent upon an other, it doesn't speak, let alone demonstrate intelligence of existence. Here, each splendor, complete with vocabulary, grammar, syntax, phonemes and voice, speaks. Saying "I am" presumes articulation. A direct intuition of existence might need nothing -- it can exist in itself (sussitere). But to be able to speak this knowing presumes features of grammar, syntax, phonemes -- a complex, shared set of rules that it uses but does not create. In saying "I am," a knowing being puts itself instantly into the world. But something other than itself is inextricably necessary to that self-positing.  (This paragraph was revised 10.1.17.)

As an aside: The "when" of the angels' choice to stand or fall is understood to be distinct from this moment. Citing Aquinas, Cornish says this distinction might be not temporal, but logical. The point here is simply that Beatrice is quite clear that in this prime moment, a being is articulating its being. This "precedes" (logically or ontologically) all else, including light. As we'll see in a moment, it happens on the cusp, in twilight, the exquisitely poised balance between day and night upon which the Latona passage turns.

Beatrice moves seamlessly from this originary moment to the threefold creation of the world:

così 'l triforme effetto del suo sire
 ne l'esser suo raggiò insieme tutto
 sanza distinzïone in essordire.

So from its Lord did the triform effect
Ray forth into its being all together,
Without discrimination of beginning. (29:28-30)

The highest sustanze, pure act, are put there totum simul with mere matter (pure potentiality) and the world of matter and form (what we see). In that raggiò, the whole scala of creation was given, from formlessness through the physical universe to quadrillions of sustanze saying "subsisto." 

The text's description of a total, instantaneous act gains power from contrast with the nearly unending labors of Latona, whose difficulties don't cease even after she's given birth.

The angels' choice to stand or fall is given a thorough going-over by Cornish. I will just note an interesting intratextual gloss that comes earlier in the canticle, as it relates suggestively to the "when" of the Latona passage: In Paradiso 19, the Eagle is expatiating on the theme that no degree of perspicacity will enable creatures to see all, and says:

E ciò fa certo che 'l primo superbo,
che fu la somma d'ogne creatura,
per non aspettar lume, cadde acerbo;

And this makes certain that the first proud being,
Who was the paragon of every creature,
By not awaiting light fell immature. (Par. 19:46-48)

This can only be the moment that Beatrice has been speaking of, here played out with the figure of Satan, who -- in the precarious twilight before he could know whether what was coming was the darkness or the light -- didn't wait to see, and so fell into eclipse without end. It's also the moment in which Paradiso 30 begins.

The figure of Niobe, disdainer of Latona, is treated in the following post.

Witness to a pure act: The end of the Hippolytus

εἴθε φθέγμα γηρύσαισθέ μοι

1075

καὶ μαρτυρήσαιτ᾽

. . . would that you could utter speech on my behalf 

and bear me witness!

This is the second of two afterthoughts on the last portion of the Hippolytus (the first is here). Given that the reading of a work of this richness is never really at an end, more may occur.

We have noted some of the many symmetries of the play -- mirrorings, both verbal and structural, between opening and end; the "bookended" goddesses, and more. The structural circularity gives the audience the formal equivalent of a closed system that is destined to ever repeat the antagonism between Aphrodite and Artemis, which can be translated into any number of conceptual formulae. E.g., the erotic desire to possess and be possessed vs. the aversive assertion of the independence of the integral self.

The play examines certain inherent dangers posed when either of these divine powers moves toward absolute plenitude. Examples include the speech of Hippolytus that rabidly wishes to silence and isolate all women, reaching a vision of wild beasts patrolling cities to ensure the end of the communal bonds and procreative sexuality of the human race. Likewise eros bends Phaedra to a desire that would mean the end of marriage, children, and social position; her solution is suicide and murder.

Given that each goddess's power in its pure form leads to absurdity and death, the play is driven of necessity to explore the virtue of sophrosyne as a means of mediating, reconciling the goddesses through the achievement of a complex balance allowing for love yet also for a freedom from it -- an oxymoronic sweet servitude, chosen subordination, independent agreement to bonds of love and obligation, etc.

In a sense the play then seeks to work out the probability of some viable synthesis or exchange of the properties of love and freedom, after demonstrating some quite extreme versions entailed by the divine fullness of each. Instead of witnessing some realized fusion of the goddesses, the audience gets a vivid rendering of a hanging, a chariot crash and a vow by Artemis that she will destroy Aphrodite's next human lover in an endlessly reversible contention of symmetrically opposed gods.

It would be understandable if the audience were to file out of the theater at this point persuaded that there's no way out of this cycle of creation and destruction. No synthesis can thrive, nothing can combine to progress, allowing for hope for change in the future. As circles tend to demonstrate, there really is nothing new, just the eternal recurrence of a pattern that can be called tragic fate. Even without violence, the correct model of a contented life is to have an end that matches the beginning. As Hippolytus says on the happy morning of his last day, using a buried metaphor of the rounded race course:

τέλος δὲ κάμψαιμ᾽ ὥσπερ ἠρξάμην βίου. 

May I end my life just as I have begun it!

To see whether this iron circle of human life is the only plausible view a reader of the Hippolytus can take away, let's briefly look at a few elements of the final scene. As noted above, the epilogue balances the prologue, but there are some interesting inflections. For example, while Aphrodite appears as herself and then as an immobile statue, Artemis appears, if at all, first as herself, and then to Hippolytus as voice and fragrance. The goddess of love, desire, sexual longing and friendship is associated with the eye while the goddess of independent selfhood is linked to hearing, to music and to smell.

In the final scene, Hippolytus is near death. Artemis explains that she is forbidden to shed tears. and is unable to help Hippolytus avoid the anger of Aphrodite:

πληροῦσα θυμόν. θεοῖσι δ᾽ ὧδ᾽ ἔχει νόμος:
οὐδεὶς ἀπαντᾶν βούλεται προθυμίᾳ1330τῇ τοῦ θέλοντος, 
ἀλλ᾽ ἀφιστάμεσθ᾽ ἀεί.

Among the gods the custom is this: no god contrives to cross the will of another,but we all stand aside [ἀφεστήξω]

Nor can she stay with her devoted follower to the end. Gods can't abide the dying breath of mortals, she explains.

καὶ χαῖρ᾽: ἐμοὶ γὰρ οὐ θέμις φθιτοὺς ὁρᾶν
οὐδ᾽ ὄμμα χραίνειν θανασίμοισιν ἐκπνοαῖς:
ὁρῶ δέ σ᾽ ἤδη τοῦδε πλησίον κακοῦ.

Farewell: it is not lawful for me to look upon the dead or to defile (χραίνειν - touch lightly, taint) my sight with the last breath of the dying. And I see that you are already near that misfortune.

That is the goddess's last word. Her farewell mirrors Hippolytus's distancing himself from the statue of the goddess Aphrodite:

πρόσωθεν αὐτὴν ἁγνὸς ὢν ἀσπάζομαι. 

I greet her from afar, for I am pure. (102)

Artemis leaves as Hippolytus becomes immobile, a statue. We might reflect on the relation of gods to mortals and mortals to statues.

So far, this remains within the echoic symmetry of the play's beginning and ending. But it also sets up the final act of the play, in which Hippolytus frees his father from the blood taint of murder.

Would it not have been more in keeping with a world made of equal and opposite forces for Hippolytus to curse his father with his last breath? While he knows that holding back from vengeance will accord with Artemis's wish, there is nothing he, dying, stands to gain. Immortalizing his name in the pre-nuptial ceremonies of Athenian maidens has already been unconditionally granted by his divine companion.

As Hippolytus turns to his father and releases him from blood curse, he's using a power that could have punished Theseus with exile. Instead, he sustains and extends his life, in full knowledge of what his father has cost him.

 ἐπεί σε τοῦδ᾽ ἐλευθερῶ φόνου 

for of this murder I acquit you

There is no reward here, no reciprocity for Hippolytus. He acts in full knowledge of the seamless solitude that accompanies one who is about to enter Hades. His divine companion has already left:

μακρὰν δὲ λείπεις ῥᾳδίως ὁμιλίαν... 

Yet how easily you leave our long friendship!

The final act of Hippolytus -- a verbal act (ἀφίημι - send away, divorce, excuse, let loose, release) -- exiles taint from his father, who has tainted himself by believing in the taint that Phaedra had cast upon his son. The casting out of taint is a gratuitous gesture that is not eros, but rather a kind of freeing, liberating of the father, an act whose authority and power inheres in its being the last intention of the dying son.

In working toward this moment, the playwright has taken pains to remove every trace of interest, desire, vengeance and reward from Hippolytus's last word. He is staging an unforced act that is ἁγνός, that is, pure, autonomous, good-willed:

ὦ χαῖρε καὶ σύ, χαῖρε πολλά μοι, πάτερ. 

I wish you, father, plenteous joy as well!

We could call it a godlike act, but performed in the moment of imminent death, it is beyond the reach of any Greek god. Instead of gaining immortality for the soul of Hippolytus, it is recognizable as pure by the fact of his human mortality, which in its bare finality stands as guarantor of its authority. The fully self-possessed act arrives in the loss of self...

Such autonomy exists outside the order of necessity and fate. It is purely Greek in the clarity of its refusal to hold out any compensatory reward -- some afterlife*, or diminution of purgation, or prospective sainthood, or a better seat in the paradisal choir -- nothing of the sort is here. Nor is there anything supernatural in what Hippolytus does; no miracle overturns the laws of nature.

In the Greek sense, the audience here are martyrs, witnesses to a gratuitous act that is senseless within the existing moral framework of its occurrence. They witness an autonomy unimaginable in the world of necessity, fate, and divine hatred.

Theseus, the hero of that world of active strength and cleverness, could never dream of anything like this clear-eyed act of Hippolytus. Now, untainted, he witnesses a man -- ἀνδρός -- who fills him with wonder, not unlike the mutual gaze of Achilles and Priam in Iliad 24. Glimpsed in that astonishment is the pure potency of a human act elsewhere not encountered by the much-traveled hero of Athens.

~~~~

*Though outside this discussion, it's suggestive that Ovid (Meta. 15) tells a tale of Hippolytus gaining a curious second life in Italy under the name Virbius (but this release from Hades also, by some legends, causes the death of Aesclepius).

Virbius

Eros, sophrosyne, myth and the Hippolytus

This group has completed its collective reading of the Hippolytus, so I'll post a few afterthoughts rather than continue with close readings of specific passages. As we turn to the Antigone of Sophocles, it might be worth a moment to look at the "raw material" of myth seized on by the Greek playwrights for their works.

For one thing, the material is hardly raw. The figures of Oedipus, Antigone, Hippolytus, Orestes, Philoctetes, Heracles, Dionysus, the Olympians and so many more are the legacy of a tradition formed, refined and elaborated over hundreds of years. Their stories involve families, cities, fabulous creatures, gods and nature, and situate themselves within a larger tapestry that could exfoliate into variations and permutations upon the tales already woven. Unlike, say, Old Testament stories that provoked infinite layers of commentary and interpretive creativity, but usually not literary variants or emulations, the Greek myths fueled and informed fresh literary and artistic works by generations of men at diverse historical moments.

Each moment found its form: for Pindar and Bacchylides, it was primarily the ode; for Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, it was tragic drama; for Homer and Virgil, it was the epic; for Ovid, the old myths offered a shared language of figures, literary modes and structures -- a lens for thinking about culture, storytelling, history and literature with sophisticated panache.

Any particular myth came already bound within a much larger given body of tales -- elaborate genealogies of gods, cities, nature and men. Some were complex skeins tracing sacred blessings and curses down through generations of a family.

As we leave (close readers never say "finish") the Hippolytus and begin the Antigone it's noteworthy how the core myths are generative. They pose dense porcupine problems, labyrinthine knots. Unlike the detective tales of Law and Order or Sherlock Holmes, they resist resolving into neat sums through logical agility or dogged scientific lab work. The audience leaves with no sense of mastery, no comfort of closure; instead, if anything, it's experienced a kind of intimate acquaintance with intolerable tensions.

Aphrodite

The same antagonisms operative at the opening of Hippolytus are there at the close. Even as the characters turn in agonized perplexity asking why certain destinies have come to them, the audience is spared any such questioning. We get the god's eye view of the matter at the very beginning with Aphrodite's prologue. There's no suspense about what will happen, no mystery as to why it's happening. All the "hooks" and plot devices constitutive of much modern storytelling are tossed aside. What motivates us to stay with such a story? Why go to the theater?

Let's suggest that one way of looking at the Hippolytus is as a struggle between eros and sophrosyne -- an oversimplification for the sake of argument. We might at first think about this rather abstractly, and rather limitedly, as the eternal agon of passion and reason, the power of desire versus the ability of the self to know and govern its realm -- all of which it most certainly is. What the play does, in virtually every line, every turn of plot, every speech and response, is offer deeper, richer, more comprehensive and more granular perspectives upon that inherent conflict. Drawn along by the action, we gather the implications of the mythos, and grapple with its complications.

Perhaps we acquire a more complex sense of the nature of love and the astonishing range of its effects. The shaft that leaps from eros' bow to Phaedra's heart to Theseus's pain and rage to the entangled death of the future hero-king is intensified and enriched through the prism of each character's acts and interactions.

Artemis

Perhaps we gather a deeper sense of the strategies of self-possession available to us -- from the curious rapture of Hippolytus to the devious authority of Phaedra to the "laid back" approach of the Nurse.  Are these viable solutions or illusory accommodations? Nothing is quite what we would decree as the ideal for our prim and proper world. Turn to the virginal opponent of eros and you find an arrow coming the other way. No simple, clear, coherent solution to the war of eros and sophrosyne stands readily at hand.

The play doesn't ignore the realm of the polis. At the moment he covers his son's face, Theseus says:

ὦ κλείν᾽ Ἀθῆναι Παλλάδος θ᾽ ὁρίσματα,
1460οἵου στερήσεσθ᾽ ἀνδρός.

Glorious Athens, Pallas' realm,
what a man you have been bereft of!

The line grows in power if we remember that this was the father who had seen his son first as a bookish self-indulgent child, then as a fiendishly deceitful rapist, but never as a man -- a man worthy of the admiration of Theseus, the greatest Athenian hero. The scene gains more yet if we happen to catch, only here, the shadow of Athena in the bottomless awareness of the loss to Athens in the untimely, undeserved, incommensurable death of this man.

==========

Shortly before dying, Hippolytus calls on Zeus:

Ζεῦ Ζεῦ, τάδ᾽ ὁρᾷς;
ὅδ᾽ ὁ σεμνὸς ἐγὼ καὶ θεοσέπτωρ,
1365ὅδ᾽ ὁ σωφροσύνῃ πάντας ὑπερσχών,
προῦπτον ἐς Ἅιδην στείχω, κατ᾽ ἄκρας
ὀλέσας βίοτον, μόχθους δ᾽ ἄλλως
τῆς εὐσεβίας
εἰς ἀνθρώπους ἐπόνησα.

Zeus, Zeus, do you mark this? Here am I, the holy and god-revering one, the man who surpassed all men in σωφροσύνῃ [self-control, temperance], seeing plainly ahead my course to Hades. My life is utterly destroyed; useless have been my hard labors of piety towards men.

He calls upon Zeus, but he might as well address us, the audience, we are on the level of the gods even as we see ourselves in the dying hero. The death he now foresees is the death Aphrodite foretold to us at the beginning. Theater as theoria. The strangeness of a day in which the lives of three great ones (μεγάλων) are lost and a nascent civilization careens off course under the serene sky and eye of Zeus doesn't get less enigmatic, but rather more, on closer scrutiny. Deeper insight into the struggle of eros and sophrosyne provides no practical nostrum with which we could build an optimistic program (e.g., the "power of positive thinking") for a better tomorrow.

This mode of myth is unlike what's meant when we say "myth" today --  a story that we think some deluded folks believe, but which others, namely we sage ones, know to be untrue. We have the closure and managerial composure to rest assured we know better.

When a noted historian recently was asked what he thought was the "most damaging myth in America today," his response was, "the idea of American exceptionalism."

Unlike the tale of, say, Thebes, exceptionalism yields little upon reflection; it's an idle phantasm at the farthest remove from myth. Myths don't pretend to solve our problems -- they are our problems, knots torn from the world's heart, made incandescently palpable to a certain ungrasping contemplation.

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.