Signs of misreading: Theseus, Crete, and hamartia

1.

Twice in Euripides' Hippolytus, Theseus confronts the death of a family member. Both instances involve misreading.

First, barely arrived in Troezen from Delphi, Theseus finds Phaedra has hung herself. In this encounter with inexplicable loss, Theseus feels helpless -- his beloved wife has escaped him through that "headlong leap to Hades." His impotence is equaled only by his ignorance of its cause. His heroic capabilities are useless. Bereft of both actionable recourse and understanding, he speaks of a dim place beneath the earth:

τὸ κατὰ γᾶς θέλω, τὸ κατὰ γᾶς κνέφας
μετοικεῖν σκότῳ θανών, 

To the gloom under earth, under earth,
I would change my dwelling and die in darkness

Theseus's life seems riddled with doubleness, from his dual paternity to the two daughters of Minos to his odd mirroring of Heracles. As he speaks these words, the evocation of entering a dark space under the earth might recall the labyrinth and its monster. Thanks to Ariadne, who secretly gave him a knife and thread, he once penetrated Daedalus' maze, alone, killing the Minotaur in his lair.

Phaedra's dead hand holds a key threading the labyrinth of her suicide. If Ariadne enabled Theseus to kill her mother's monstrous bastard child, Phaedra makes Theseus's own bastard son into a monster. How could he doubt Phaedra?

Phaedra's letter is doubly enabling: it sheds light on the cause of her death, and it gives Theseus a task that is quite within his reach -- that he avenge Hippolytus's scandalous act. After reading her letter, his first act is to turn to the sea, addressing the city and his divine progenitor. His prayer to Poseidon loads and activates the lethal weapon of his curse:

Θησεύς 

τόδε μὲν οὐκέτι στόματος ἐν πύλαις 

καθέξω δυσεκπέρατον ὀλοὸν 

κακόν: ἰὼ πόλις.885 

Ἱππόλυτος εὐνῆς τῆς ἐμῆς ἔτλη θιγεῖνβίᾳ,  

τὸ σεμνὸν Ζηνὸς ὄμμ᾽ ἀτιμάσας. 

ἀλλ᾽, ὦ πάτερ Πόσειδον, ἃς ἐμοί ποτε 

ἀρὰς ὑπέσχου τρεῖς, μιᾷ κατέργασαι 

τούτων ἐμὸν παῖδ᾽, ἡμέραν δὲ μὴ φύγοι890

τήνδ᾽, εἴπερ ἡμῖν ὤπασας σαφεῖς ἀράς. 

Χορός 

ἄναξ, ἀπεύχου ταῦτα πρὸς θεῶν πάλιν,
γνώσῃ γὰρ αὖθις ἀμπλακών: ἐμοὶ πιθοῦ. 

Θησεύς 

οὐκ ἔστι. καὶ πρός γ᾽ ἐξελῶ σφε τῆσδε γῆς,
δυοῖν δὲ μοίραιν θατέρᾳ πεπλήξεται: 

895ἢ γὰρ Ποσειδῶν αὐτὸν εἰς Ἅιδου δόμου 

ςθανόντα πέμψει τὰς ἐμὰς ἀρὰς σέβων,
ἢ τῆσδε χώρας ἐκπεσὼν ἀλώμενος 

ξένην ἐπ᾽ αἶαν λυπρὸν ἀντλήσει βίον. 

Theseus 

sung 

No more shall I hold this ruinous bane, hard to send forth though it is, within the gates of my mouth!

Ho! City of Athens! Hear me!

(Bystanders enter quickly by Eisodos B and gather around.) 

[885] Hippolytus has dared to put his hand by force to my marriage-bed, dishonoring the holy eye of Zeus.
But, father Poseidon, with one of the three curses you once promised me, kill my son, and may he not live out [890] this day, if indeed you have granted me curses I may rely on. 

Chorus Leader 

My lord, I beg you by the gods, take back your prayer! For you will learn in time that you have made a mistake. Be ruled by me! 

Theseus 

It cannot be. And what is more, I shall banish him from this land, and of two fates one shall strike him: [895] either Poseidon, honoring my curses, will send him dead to the house of Hades or being banished from here he will wander over foreign soil and drain to the dregs a life of misery.
Enter Hippolytus by Eisodos B.

The hero had declared himself dead upon finding Phaedra gone, but suddenly he's filled with new life and purpose. Taking charge, he commands the city, calling upon his divine father to honor his promise. He's the hero of old, gearing up to penetrate another labyrinth. He doesn't pray that Poseidon kill Hippolytus if the boy did the terrible deed; he asks that his son not live another day if the promises of the father were σαφεῖς -- that is, clear, reliable.

It is worth asking whether the very qualities that made the young, heroic Theseus great -- courage, physical strength, alacrity, a high sense of justice -- are coming into play here in ways that send him profoundly into error. Is he trapped in his former self? That self being the fiery young man who dared teach the lordly Minos the virtue of sophrosyne: "ἐρύκεν ὕβριν," he says -- restrain yourself:

war-lord of Knossos, I bid you to restrain your grievous violence; for I would not want to see the lovely immortal light of Dawn if you were to subdue one of these young people against her will. Before that we will show the force of our arms, and what comes after that a god will decide.” So spoke the hero, excellent with the spear; and the sailors were astonished at the man's extraordinary [50] boldness ὑπεράφανον θάρσος. (Bacchylides)

If there is irony in the fact that masher Minos is eventually betrayed to Theseus by his virgin daughter Ariadne, there is further irony in Theseus's being led astray by Phaedra. There are two lessons from Crete: (1) Cretans always lie, and (2) no straight path leads to the center.

Phaedra's letter, a written sign, composes a labyrinth and an infamy, yet it offers the illusion of clarity, transparency and literal truth. Theseus' error is to believe there is no error, no deviation, from the straight talk of her simple accusation of Hippolytus. He mistakes a silent deviant image for a window upon living reality.

As such, it is an error of reading.

2.

Cut to the second death in the family -- the messenger's story of Hippolytus' end.

This was a calm day. Surrounded by friends, a young man skilled in horsemanship is moving slowly along a shore -- no warrior enemies, no perilous escarpments, no bad weather.

The messenger's tale is a compact set piece that's rich in sound, vivid imagery, and metaphor. Take the sound -- it begins beneath the earth:

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

The sound then moves to the crashing surf, then to the bellowing of the bull that the wave puts forth:

With its bellowing the whole land was filled and gave back unearthly echoes, and as we looked on it the sight was too great for our eyes to bear.

The language literally re-echoes, using the words φθέγματος and ἀντεφθέγγετ᾽ (voice, sound, echo):

οὗ πᾶσα μὲν χθὼν φθέγματος πληρουμένη  

φρικῶδες ἀντεφθέγγετ᾽, εἰσορῶσι δὲκρεῖσσον θέαμα δεργμάτων ἐφαίνετο.

Just as the wave fixed in the sky blots out the skyline, so the bellowing bull overpowers sight.

The bull then becomes eerily silent:

it drew near and silently accompanied the chariot until it upset and overthrew the chariot,

The last sound we hear is the voice of Hippolytus addressing his horses, his father's curse, and his friends:

 ‘Stay, horses my mangers have nourished, do not blot me out! O wretched curse of my father! Who wishes to stand by the best of men and save his life?’

The Perseus translator catches the sense of erasure in "do not blot me out!" The Greek word is ἐξαλείφω, which has the sense of plaster over, erase, as when a name is stricken off a roll.

The scene begins with a voice beneath the earth and ends with the cries of a dying man, and of course the entire description comes to us in the voice of the messenger.

Theseus takes the narrative as the fulfillment of his will and as divine legitimation of his judgment. But is it? Yes, Hippolytus is injured and will die. But the narrative contains elements that seem inconsistent with a reading that sees it as a transparent execution of his father's wish.

Does Theseus wonder at the underground roar, or that the horizon is blocked by a portentous fixed wave? (He might remember upon finding his dead wife, how he described himself:

I look upon a main of troubles so great I cannot swim out of them or cross the flood of this sorrow. (825))

Or does he make anything of the bull coming from the sea which clearly frustrates his own decree of banishment by preventing the boy from leaving the city? If the bull comes from the sea, the boy becomes a sailor trying to keep his ship from wreck:

My master, who had lived long with the ways of horses, [1220] seized the reins in his hands and pulled them, letting his body hang backwards from the straps, like a sailor pulling an oar. But they took the fire-wrought bit in their teeth and carried him against his will, paying no heed to their captain's hand...

Static motion, earth and sea exchanging properties, voice overwhelming vision: these strange, dreamlike elements of the messenger's tale fail to attract Theseus' attention. He steadfastly believes that roar, wave and bull form parts of a clear (σαφεῖς) action that reflects entirely and explicitly his wish. But if we attend to the tale, it seems more a kind of dumb-show offering portents that literally cause violent disfiguration and death:

the poor man himself, entangled in the reins, bound in an inextricable knot, was dragged along, smashing his head against the rocks and rending his flesh 

3.

At each of his encounters with death in the play, Theseus makes the same mistake: he takes what he is told as transparent, literal truth, when in fact things are far from transparent. Phaedra's note, since it is writing, is dumb speech that cannot answer, as Socrates tells his young friend:

"Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing."

Yet this voiceless speech leads to the death of Theseus's son at his own behest, relying on the gift of his father. The gift of his father turns out to be a series of wonders that, far from being literal causation, are thick with complication, resonance, portent. The messenger says:

ἵπποι δ᾽ ἔκρυφθεν καὶ τὸ δύστηνον τέρας
ταύρου λεπαίας οὐ κάτοιδ᾽ ὅποι χθονός. 

The horses vanished and so too did the monstrous bull to some place or other in that rocky land.

The "monstrous" bull is in fact τέρας -- either (1) a monster, or (2) a sign or portent. Deciding whether a simple text or tale is just a transparent representation of, say, a monster, or whether it is itself monstrous -- a sign with destructive power so potent as to cause the greatest Athenian hero to destroy his promising child -- is the burden of reading.

In taking the signs of Phaedra as transparently true, Theseus produces a reading that is not only mistaken, but destructive in its consequences. Hearing the messenger's account of those consequences, he reads it as he would a newspaper, ignoring the rebus-like intimations of something of greater import, especially to himself. Instead of viewing this story (or, as we tend to read history) as the shadow of his will, he might discover that it is speaking back to him in a language he refuses to see, or hear. Language that speaks with two tongues, or voices, is known as ἀλληγορία -- allegory.

What has this tale of misreading signs to do with the play's key theme of sophrosyne?

For now, a dumb-show must serve for an answer. The Hippolytus is the story of Athens' greatest hero, a man of action who acts upon interpretations that ignore the perilous complications of signs. Theseus acts with the rashness of his younger self, and kills the living image of that self, his son. It would have been fair game for Hippolytus to repeat to his father the words Theseus said to Minos on that fateful voyage to Crete:

“the spirit you guide in your heart is no longer pious. Hero, restrain your overbearing force. Whatever the all-powerful fate of the gods [25] has granted for us, and however the scale of Justice inclines, we shall fulfill our appointed destiny when it comes."

ὅσιον οὐκέτι τεᾶν
ἔσω κυβερνᾷς φρενῶν
θυμόν: ἴσχε μεγαλοῦχον ἥρως βίαν.
ὅ τι μὲν ἐκ θεῶν μοῖρα παγκρατὴς
25ἄμμι κατένευσε καὶ Δίκας ῥέπει τά-
λαντον, πεπρωμέναν
αἶσαν ἐκπλήσομεν, ὅταν
ἔλθῃ: 

Hippolytus doesn't say this, however. What he actually says and does might help bring together the perplex of signs with the theme of self-possession.

A cup of Euphronios

Around 500 BC, well before the Greek tragedians put their work before Athens, Euphronios was running a pottery workshop in the city. Along with the painter Onesimos, he produced bowls, cups and other work that addressed some of the great scenes of Greek lore - the death of Sarpedon is renowned. Another work, now in the Louvre, is a large cup that on one side stages the encounter of Theseus with Amphitrite, the goddess wife of Poseidon.

Thanks to a thoughtful post on Something by Virtue of Nothing I now know that that encounter is told in a dithyramb by Bacchylides, found here. The poet vividly captures the moment when Theseus, sailing with Minos to Crete as one of the Athenian youth to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, objects to the Cretan king's wanton attempt to touch the face of an Athenian virgin.

The objection escalates to a competition of claim and counterclaim as Minos asserts his power by virtue of his descent from Zeus, and challenges Theseus to prove to be the son of Poseidon. It's a great story, a contest of a sky god's world versus that of the sea god, narrated with economy -- Bacchylides doesn't go for completeness -- he extracts certain bits of it for his song. In addition to the version here, there's another translation on Perseus, here.

The relevance for us is that these works -- poems and pots -- offer a suggestive witness to the figure of Theseus. In this image from the Louvre, the workshop of Euphronios and Onesimos render the scene after Theseus dives into the sea to retrieve a ring thrown by Minos. The king is clearly expecting Theseus to drown. Instead he is borne by dolphins to Amphitrite, who gives him a splendid purple cloak and a wreath. Theseus reappears at the stern of the ship, which has been sailing on, "unwetted."

Between Theseus (left) and Amphitrite (right), the workshop depicted Athena:

On another piece that shows Theseus slaying the Minotaur, Athena stands by the hero:

The human hero of Athens who overcame Minos and the Minotaur is deeply associated with Athena. On the other side of the first image above, the workshop portrayed several of Theseus's famed encounters with monsters on the road from Troezen to Athens -- his first heroic acts, performed before he'd even met his human father, Aegeus. A description notes:

On the outside of the bowl, Onesimos has completed the cycle of Theseus by representing four of the hero's deeds on the road from Troezen to Athens. They appear above a meander and are separated by trees from which the hero's attributes (himation and sword) are hanging. Beside a bronze pool, Theseus is picking up the bandit Sciron in order to throw him into the sea. His head tipped back, his eyes bulging, and hair shaggy, Sciron is trying to cling on to the rock to avoid falling. Next to this scene, Theseus is seizing Procrustes by the hair and preparing to kill him with his sword. On the other side, Theseus is fighting with Kerkyon, whose look of fear is accentuated by the frontal positioning of his face. In Theseus's final exploit, he manages to hobble the bull of Marathon.

Theseus is not purely a hero of force, of power. He has a special link with the goddess of wisdom -- as did Odysseus. 

It's worth keeping this in mind as we wrestle with the profoundly unwise act of Theseus, who calls on his divine father to destroy his son, based upon a lie from the daughter of Minos. And it's with this story in mind that we want to look at what befalls Hippolytus as he is about to set out from Troezen, to begin his own life outside the city of Pittheus. In a sense, he's at the same point in his life as Theseus was when he set out and met the monsters. We should consider all this as we ponder the wave, the bull, and the fulfillment of Theseus's prayer -- before we too quickly find him a fool, or a dupe of callous divine powers.

The drowning queen: The song at the center of the Hippolytus

Phaedra has just walked off, committed to her own death. The remarkable choral ode that begins with line 732 is at the center of Euripides' Hippolytus:

ἠλιβάτοις ὑπὸ κευθμῶσι γενοίμαν,
ἵνα με πτεροῦσσαν ὄρνινθεὸς ἐν ποταναῖς
ἀγέλαις θείη:

Would that I could flee to secret clefts in the high mountains, and that there a god might make of me a feathered bird amid the wingèd throngs!

As we consider the "I" who sings (and dances) this choral song, we note the desire embodied in the wish to fly to high, hidden places, to blend in with a flock, to be anything other than a single, individual human being. It could be Phaedra's desire. The dream of flight immediately brings the memory of the Heliades, the seven sisters of Phaethon, whose name traps the name of the sun just as the ἠλεκτροφαής -- the amber radiance of their tears -- captures the beaming sun in mourning his precipitous fall, as they weep into the Eridanus.

ἀρθείην δ᾽ ἐπὶ πόντιονκῦμα τᾶς Ἀδριηνᾶς ἀκτᾶς Ἠριδανοῦ θ᾽ ὕδωρ, ἔνθα πορφύρεον σταλάσ-σουσ᾽ ἐς οἶδμα τάλαιναι         740
κόραι Φαέθοντος οἴκτῳ δακρύωντὰς ἠλεκτροφαεῖς αὐγάς.

Would that I might soar aloft over the surf of the Adriatic shore and the waters of the Eridanus where into the deep-blue swell the luckless girls, in grief for Phaethon, drop the amber radiance of their tears.

The strong, up-down vertical trajectory of the first strophe is balanced against an equally strong horizontal movement in the antistrophe:

To the apple-sown shore of the Hesperides, famous singers, would I go my way, there where the lord of the deep-blue mere forbids further passage to sailors, fixing the sacred boundary of the skies, held up by Atlas.

Ἑσπερίδων δ᾽ ἐπὶ μηλόσπορον ἀκτὰν
ἀνύσαιμι τᾶν ἀοιδῶν,
ἵν᾽ ὁ πορφυρέας πον-
τομέδων λίμνας745ναύταις οὐκέθ᾽ ὁδὸν νέμει,
σεμνὸν τέρμονα κυρῶν
οὐρανοῦ, τὸν Ἄτλας ἔχει:

Both the waters of Poseidon's sea and the waters of the Eridanus are πορφυρέας -- purple -- like the waters of the first choral ode, as we noted here. The boundary is imposed by the lord of the sea, but its manifestation is the σεμνὸν τέρμονα, the sacred limit, or term, held up by Atlas.

At the center of the play is this song sung by an "I" whose deepest desire is to go to, or past, limits of sky and sea that have already been tested by mortals. Limits that have been upheld as impassible.

Aphrodite names this limit in the opening lines of the play:

Of all those who dwell between the Euxine Sea and the Boundary (τερμόνων -- Kovacs: "Pillars") of Atlas and look on the light of the sun, [5] I honor those who reverence my power, but I lay low all those who think proud thoughts against me.

Holding up the sky, Atlas himself is the living horizon and terminus ad quem of horizontal human motion. This limit is not something we sailors can overgo. Even Heracles who managed to steal those golden apples didn't find a way to go beyond Atlas. Using a ruse, he stood in Atlas's place, substituting for him in his role as sky-holder, while Atlas went to gather the precious fruits.

The erotic play of Zeus and Hera -- their one moment of bliss -- is endowed with the fertile potency of Earth:

There fonts immortal flow by the place where Zeus lay, and holy Earth with her gifts of blessedness makes the gods' prosperity wax great. 

κρῆναί τ᾽ ἀμβρόσιαι χέον-
ται Ζηνὸς μελάθρων παρὰ κοίταις,750  

ἵν᾽ ὀλβιόδωρος αὔξει ζαθέα
χθὼν εὐδαιμονίαν θεοῖς.

The "I" singing now loses human bounds, merging with the Muse remembering things beyond the power of any human eye to have seen. A witness, like Tantalos, at a table of eternal fruition.

In the third part of the song, the "I" snaps back to the immediate backstory of the play, recalling the ship that brought Phaedra to Athens:

O Cretan vessel with wing of white canvas, that ferried over the loud-sounding wave of the sea [755] my lady from her house of blessedness, a boon that was no boon to make an unhappy bride: 

Grene has: "O Cretan ship with the white sails."

Euripides is more condensed:

ὦ λευκόπτερε Κρησία πορθμίς

 O white-winged Cretan ship

It seems odd to ignore the wings given that the ode began with the chorus's desire to be turned into a bird. Even more odd, given that the ship is δύ̣σ-ορνις - which Kovacs translates as ill-omened. The root meaning of ορνις is bird. 

The fateful ship's white wings remind us of the folly of Theseus's black sails, which should have been white, leading to the death of Aegeus, who threw himself from a cliff. Given how things turn out, the white sails of Phaedra's ship should have been black.

it was with evil omen, at the start of her journey and its end, that she sped from the land of Crete [760] to glorious Athens and they tied the plaited ends of the mooring-cable on Munichus' shore and trod the mainland.

What carries through here is symmetry at either end of her voyage. Like the two wings of a bird, the beginning of Phaedra's sailing venture, Crete, is as ill-fated as its end upon the mainland of Greece. The mooring cable's ends are "plaited" -- πλεκτός: twisted, wreathed -- an interesting detail, because πλεκτός is used only in two other places in the play. It describes the crown made by Hippolytus for Artemis when we first see him, and it's used again to characterize the ambassadorial garland worn by Theseus upon his return from Delphi. Like Phaedra's white winged ship, the "crowns" of Hippolytus and Theseus are symmetrical, mirroring images, ill-fated: seeming bright, but boding ill.

In view of the actual title of the play, Hippolytos Stephanophoros (Hippolytus Crown Bearer), the intertwining of Phaedra's ship's cable with the wreaths of father and son might evoke the fatal knot interweaving the three main characters.

The waters of the first three parts of the choral ode reach flood level in the final antistrophe, as the "I" again seems to gaze, in an amplified and prophetic mode, beyond the palace walls, into the bridal chamber of Phaedra, and into the interior state of the queen:

Therefore her mind is wrenched (φρένας κατεκλάσθη: mind/heart is broken, snapped off) by a terrible malady of unhallowed passion sent from Aphrodite; and sinking under a load (ὑπέραντλος: "full of water") of hard misfortune she will fasten about her from the beams of her bridal chamber a hanging noose, fitting it about her white neck . . .

κρεμαστὸνἅψεται ἀμφὶ βρόχον λευκᾷ καθαρμόζουσα δείρᾳ

The word for "hung" or "suspended" is κρεμαστὸν, which can also signify "ship's rigging." As Phaedra drowns, the noose fastened "about her white neck" carries forward the image of the coiled ship's cable binding the white-winged ship to the port of Athens. The image she presented when first addressing the chorus culminates here:

Many a time in night's long empty spaces I have pondered on the causes of a life's shipwreck. 

The I of the chorus seems a floating voice -- part Phaedra, part Muse, part women of Troezen. Its song charts the limits of human space and tells the tale of Phaedra's journey and end. After seeking flight, the "I" comes to rest upon the queen in her bridal chamber. If the union of Zeus and Hera enjoyed the flows of ambrosia, Phaedra's chamber is flooded with sorrows too great to contain.

. . . feeling shame at her bitter fate (δαίμων), choosing in its stead the glory of a good name (φήμαν: report), and putting from her heart her painful desire.

The limits of her world prove too constricting, but the silent utterance, the "report" of her good name, remains to be read.