The figure of reading in the Inferno

It would be a sign of something about our attention to close reading if we did not at least acknowledge how the Inferno early on foregrounds the act of reading.

There is, of course, the gate of hell in Canto 3: a gaping mouth whose inscription we meet and read precisely as Dante and Virgil do. The gate states that it is the first text, marking the moment that mutability, temporality and death entered Creation:

Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
     Se non etterne, ed io etterna duro.

A further irony (also noted here) is built into this threshold for those condemned to cross it: For them, time and change, development and movement toward salvation, now come to an end -- the damned are fixed, frozen for all time in the contrapassi of their perdition. The gate is a grave marker; for lost souls, it's the terminus ad quem of the temporal order of which it also was the initial instance, thanks to the villainy of the original lost soul.

Reading is also implicit in the structure of the Inferno from the beginning.

Palace of Minos

Here's Minos in book 6 of the Aeneid:

Nor far from these,
The throng of dead by unjust judgment slain.
Not without judge or law these realms abide:
Wise Minos there the urn of justice moves,
And holds assembly of the silent shades,
Hearing the stories of their lives and deeds.

hos iuxta falso damnati crimine mortis. 430
Nec vero hae sine sorte datae, sine iudice, sedes:
quaesitor Minos urnam movet; ille silentum
conciliumque vocat vitasque et crimina discit.

Here's Minos in canto 5 of the Inferno:

There horrid Minos makes a snarling sound,
Examines the offenders that come in,
Then dooms and sends them as his tail is wound.
I mean, the soul of evil origin,
Approaching him, confesses all its past;
And that discerner of the grades of sin
Determines where in Hell it should be classed,
Then wraps his tail around himself to show
How many circles down he wants it cast.

Minos by Dore

When Dante the pilgrim encounters Virgil in canto 1, he meets a classical author whom he has read. That Virgil comes to him at all is an interesting result of Dante's having friends, including Beatrice, in high places. But to make the guide to the Christian afterlife a Roman pagan poet -- one whose text is both a model of classical epic and a work whose many pagan errors undergo heavy editorial correction in the Commedia -- is to construct a narrative that both is about reading Classical works and about critical discernment of their virtues and their errors.

In the Commedia, Virgil is both the literal Roman poet of history and literature, and the figure of Dante's reading of that poet's works. True to the archaic notion of allegory -- alienum eloquium -- the Roman poet is his literal text even as that text undergoes revision by something alien to it: a reading rooted in the authority of the Scriptural Word has caused that text to bear another, allegorical dimension.

Dante exhibits admiration for Virgil even as the Roman poet's text is radically transformed by Dante's own text, as the two Minoses make clear. The commanding power of ancient classical texts -- their auctoritas -- is essential to Christian education for Dante: it is the peak of human attainment sans Revelation. But Virgil and all classical works are also errant texts, which need a third eye, as it were, to gloss their purported truth with the truth revealed in Scripture.

From the beginning, then, Dante's dark wood is even more obscure than it seemed. The selva oscura of canto 1 returns in Canto 4 as the selva . . .di spiriti spessi -- a wood thick with the noble spirits of Limbo, including Virgil. These spirits are wise and useful, yet remain a selva in which one can lose oneself.

Dante makes the act of reading both explicitly and implicitly central to his poem. This is dramatized even more in Canto 5, where reading a romance leads lovers astray. Reading has consequences. We'll look at Francesca's scene in another post.

The imagination of lust in Inferno 5

 
Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende,
    prese costui de la bella persona
    che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende.
Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,
    mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
    che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona.
Amor condusse noi ad una morte.
    Caina attende chi a vita ci spense».
    Queste parole da lor ci fuor porte.

Love, which quickly kindles in noble hearts,        100
    Seized him for that fair body which from me
    Was torn—what grief the manner still imparts!
Love, which makes each loved one pay love’s fee,
    So seized me with the beauty of my friend
    That yet it does not leave me, as you see.
Love led us both to one death in the end.
    Caïna waits for him who quenched our lives above.”
    Thus did these words from them to us descend.*

In Inferno 5, Francesca speaks of Amor as if ironclad rules - like those of courtly love - applied at all times. That is, Amor is not merely a human experience, but it has the force of law, of science, of a system. Her fate is the inevitable result of an inescapable logic before which one -- especially one of the refined sort -- helpless.


The crowds of lovers Dante sees as he enters the circle of Lust are compared to starlings driven by a hurricane:

That hellish tempest roars incessantly;
    It grasps and draws the spirits in its train,
    Spinning and thrashing souls in agony.

As these victims of Love are carried past the ruina - the place where the structure of Limbo was broken by the advent of Christ, they curse:

Each time that they whirl past the ruined terrain,
    Loud shrieks and moans and lamentations spill
    From them—it’s there they curse God’s might in vain.

Quando giungon davanti a la ruina,
    quivi le strida, il compianto, il lamento;
    bestemmian quivi la virtù divina.

Now it's one thing to be "carried away" by an overpowering force; it's another to choose, at a certain moment, to curse divine power. Yes, it's a repetitive process - they utter their imprecations every time they pass the ruina - but to curse requires an act of speech, a decision, a judgment and act of will, quite unlike what it takes for a human body to be propelled by cyclonic winds.

What's more, they are cursing the evidence of a power greater than the forces of nature - a power that liberated certain souls from nature and endless desire, in fact from death. These lovers are cursing the traces of a Love strong enough to break the ultimate rule, the final law, a Love that might have saved them had they not bowed to an ideology that defines mortals as the slaves and playthings of inescapable Love.

One can easily multiply examples of this, irony, this comical disjunction. Essentially the ideology of inescapable Love relies on a model of mechanics. All is determined by measurable forces that cause predictable effects. The very first lines of the canto summon a mathematical relation:

From the first circle I thus went below
    Into the second, which girds a smaller round
   And so much greater grief that stings to woe.

This might well be the most uninspired opening of any canto in the poem - so obviously so that it's best to assume it was deliberate. Numbering, inverse proportionality, going from up to down, it's a dull way to introduce the realm of love and lust. It's mechanical, and the mechanicality gets cruder right away as we encounter the judge:

There horrid Minos makes a snarling sound,
    Examines the offenders that come in,
    Then dooms and sends them as his tail is wound.
I mean, the soul of evil origin,
    Approaching him, confesses all its past;
    And that discerner of the grades of sin
Determines where in Hell it should be classed,          10
    Then wraps his tail around himself to show
    How many circles down he wants it cast.

As a parody of confession, the scene is rich enough - instead of leading to absolution, the Confessor listens, gets an interesting sort of erection, which in turn produces a number indicating where the soul is to be thrown.

Dante and Virgil have just left some of the greatest judges and minds of all time - supple intellects who would have listened, judged with nuance, and invoked insightful reason in the service of justice. But no such luck after Limbo: every soul beyond this point - including Francesca - got treated to the same robotic reflex, the same absence of meditation, the same catapult.

Canto 5 is rich in exempla of a sort of Hobbesian world in which desire simply rules. There is no stopping it, as the souls there know - because for them, desire demands instant capitulation. There is no suspension of cause and effect that would allow understanding, will, and resolve to enter in.

The imagination of Lust will be turned on its head on the Mount of Purgatory -- no time to get into that here. But it's worth a quick look. Compare the lovers buffeted by the whirlwind of Inferno 5 with the newborn soul described in Purgatorio 25 -- the Terrace, not by chance, of the Lustful who are regaining their freedom.

We find a circling there, but one not driven by any natural force outside itself. Statius describes for Dante the new soul, which has just been breathed joyously into life:

                      . . . un alma sola,
che vive e sente e se in se rigira.            74-75

                                 . . . a single soul
that lives and feels and itself revolves upon itself.

However one ultimately chooses to see this model of the psyche, it is not going to be found in Hobbes. Comedy in Dante derives in part from the ironies it finds and probes within the fallen world. As the voyage progresses, it springs more from the delights that come with leaving that world behind.

*All tranlations from Inferno are from an unpublished version by Peter D'Epiro. Purgatorio is from John D. Sinclair's prose edition.

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.

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?

Theseus' difficulties with the opposite sex

Unlike Hippolytus, Theseus was a devotee of Aphrodite, and a builder of bonds, relations, between alien entities:

As Heracles was the Dorian hero, Theseus was the Athenian founding hero, considered by them as their own great reformer: his name comes from the same root as θεσμός ("thesmos"), Greek for "institution". He was responsible for the synoikismos ("dwelling together") — the political unification of Attica under Athens, represented emblematically in his journey of labours, subduing highly localized ogres and monstrous beasts. Because he was the unifying king, Theseus built and occupied a palace on the fortress of the Acropolis that may have been similar to the palace that was excavated in Mycenae. Pausanias reports that after thesynoikismos, Theseus established a cult of Aphrodite Pandemos ("Aphrodite of all the People") and Peitho on the southern slope of the Acropolis.

It is worthwhile to look at Hippolytus in relation to his father's devotion to Aphrodite Pandemos, which suggests an openness, an affability, a willingness to tolerate and accept all the people. Euripides is at pains to indicate how Hippolytus veers away from this democratic approach -- the young man prides himself on being a natural follower of Artemis, different from those who might have learned of her from books. His appreciation of her is bound up with his very nature, he says:

Shamefast Awe [αἰδώς] tends this garden with streams of river-water, for those to pluck who have acquired nothing by teaching but rather in whose very nature [80 φύσει] chastity [σωφρονεῖν (sound-mindedness, self-control)] in all things has ever won its place [εἴληχεν (connotations of chance, rather than artifice]: the base may not pluck.

Theseus, in marked contrast, is linked to many women; four in particular stand out:

Ariadne - daughter of Minos who betrayed her father/king, abandoned.
Hippolyta - Amazon queen, mistress (?),  mother of Hippolytus.
Phaedra - daughter of Minos, wife, mother of his two sons.
Helen - abducted by him and Perithoos when a young girl.

If nothing else, the list suggests that Theseus was not put off by obstacles that might give pause to less pandemic followers of Aphrodite. None of these relationships led to solid alliances, either with the individual women or with their peoples.

At the beginning of the Hippolytus, Theseus could have envisioned the fusion of a realm including Crete, Athens and Troezen, an incipient union of Attica, Argos and Minos' empire. By the end of the play, those prospects are gone.

The tale of his erotic exploits has him go on to capture Helen, leading to his entrapment in Hades, where he not only lost half his buttocks (gained the nickname hypolispos), but also Helen, who was re-captured by her brothers Castor and Pollux during his absence. "The rape of Helen is said to have filled Attica with war," says Plutarch. It intensified the rivalry between Athens and Sparta and led to Theseus' loss of the rule of Athens and to his eventual death in exile at Scyros.

More on Theseus here, here, and of course in Plutarch's life, which he paired with that of Romulus.

It cannot have escaped Euripides' notice that Theseus's choices of women were uniformly disastrous. And that it's Hippolytus' elitist ideas of eros, especially with regard to the love of women, that precipitates the hero's lethal curse upon his son.