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.

Cup and coin: Metaphors of moderation in the Hippolytus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ἱερὸν εἴδομεν

κῦμ᾽ οὐρανῷ στηρίζον

we saw, immense and uncanny, 

a wave set fast in the sky

Who's there? Euripides' Hippolytus, 667-79

Immediately following Hippolytus's high-strung tirade about women comes this speech:

τάλανες ὦ κακοτυχεῖς
γυναικῶν πότμοι.
τίν᾽ ἢ νῦν τέχναν ἔχομεν ἢ λόγον
670 σφαλεῖσαι κάθαμμα λύειν λόγου;
ἐτύχομεν δίκας. ἰὼ γᾶ καὶ φῶς:
πᾷ ποτ᾽ ἐξαλύξω τύχας;
πῶς δὲ πῆμα κρύψω, φίλαι;
675 τίς ἂν θεῶν ἀρωγὸς ἢ τίς ἂν βροτῶν
πάρεδρος ἢ ξυνεργὸς ἀδίκων ἔργων
φανείη; τὸ γὰρ παρ᾽ ἡμῖν πάθος
πέραν δυσεκπέρατον ἔρχεται βίου.

κακοτυχεστάτα γυναικῶν ἐγώ. 

(sung) How luckless, how ill-starred, is the fate of women! [670] What arts do we have, what speech, once we have faltered, that can undo the knot our words have created? I have received my just deserts! Ho, earth, ho, light of the sun! How shall I escape what has befallen, how hide the painful fact, my friends? [675] What god, what mortal shall appear to help me, sit at my side, and lend hand to my unjust deeds? For my present misfortune crosses now—unhappy the crossing—to the farther bourne of life. Unluckiest am I of women! 

Kovacs' translation (on Perseus) gives it to the nurse; Grene, Coleridge and Hamilton all give it to Phaedra. As our discussion showed, both choices can be argued for and against.

Note how the root τύχη is interwoven, appearing in this brief speech four times. The word is capable of symmetrically opposite senses. It can carry the force of Fate, the act of a god, as well as the caprice of chance, fortune, mere accident.

The semantic force given to the word might change depending on whom one believes is speaking. If it's Phaedra, the sense can be fraught with the sense of Necessity. Indeed, the audience knows her predicament stems from the act of a goddess. If it's the Nurse, then translating τύχη as luck, fortune, or chance seem more suitable. In a sense, the sense of the scene and of the world it takes place in depends on who we hear speaking. The choice of character divides along the faultline within the complex sense of τύχη.

Aphrodites Kallipygos

For what it's worth, I hear the Nurse. The speaker looks to techne (τέχναν) -- arts, skills, craft -- to escape the knot (κάθαμμα) of words that she has stumbled into. First, Phaedra has only spoken to the Nurse, so the knot was limited in its range until the Nurse spoke to Hippolytus. We have noted that we don't hear all of that conversation. There are gaps, empty spaces where we must infer what was said, and how the oath that binds Hippolytus was set up. He will say he bound himself in an unguarded moment -- a kind of knot, or trap, resulting from a lowering of defenses, that he regrets. But we don't actually hear his full exchange with the Nurse.

Further, to wish to solve the knot through techne is not unlike the earlier thinking of the Nurse who said she'd find a way out of Phaedra's problem through the use of some ἐπῳδαὶ καὶ λόγοι θελκτήριοι, or φάρμακον -- some incantations or charms, some drug . . .

When the Nurse (or Phaedra) in the speech we are discussing expresses her hopeless hope:

What god, what mortal shall appear to help me, sit at my side, and lend hand to my unjust deeds?

It's difficult to envision the proud, strong Phaedra saying this. It's the speech of the subject class, of those who serve. Besides: what "deeds"?

If so, then the voice of Phaedra that we hear when she next enters reverts to the grander style of vehement authority:

ὦ παγκακίστη καὶ φίλων διαφθορεῦ,
οἷ᾽ εἰργάσω με.

Phaedra

Vile destroyer of your friends, see what you have done to me! May Zeus the father of my race destroy you root and branch with his thunderbolt! [685] Did I not warn you—did I not guess your purpose?—to say nothing of the matters now causing me disgrace? But you could not bear to do so: and so I shall no longer die with an honorable name. I must plan anew.

That the community of readers of this play could be so divided over this question of "who is speaking?" is a sign that the language of this play rests -- restlessly -- on a very fine edge.