Phaedra And Hippolytus

AFTER marrying Phaedra, Theseus sent his bastard son Hippolytus to Pittheus, who adopted him as heir to the throne of Troezen. Thus Hippolytus had no cause to dispute the right of his legitimate brothers Acamas and Demophoön, Phaedra’s sons, to reign over Athens.
b. Hippolytus, who had inherited his mother Antiope’s exclusive devotion to chaste Artemis, raised a new temple to the goddess at Troezen, not far from the theatre. Thereupon Aphrodite, determined to punish him for what she took as an insult to herself, saw to it that when he attended the Eleusinian Mysteries, Phaedra should fall passionately in love with him. He came dressed in white linen, his hair garlanded, and though his features wore a harsh expression, she thought them admirably severe.
c. Since at that time Theseus was away in Thessaly with Peirithous, or it may have been in Tartarus, Phaedra followed Hippolytus to Troezen. There she built the Temple of Peeping Aphrodite to overlook the gymnasium, and would daily watch unobserved while he kept himself fit by running, leaping, and wrestling, stark naked. An ancient myrtle-tree stands in the Temple enclosure; Phaedra would jab at its leaves, in frustrated passion, with a jewelled hair-pin, and they are still much perforated. When, later, Hippolytus attended the All- Athenian Festival and lodged in Theseus’s palace, she used the Temple of Aphrodite on the Acropolis for the same purpose.

d. Phaedra disclosed her incestuous desire to no one, but ate little, slept badly, and grew so weak that her old nurse guessed the truth at last, and officiously implored her to send Hippolytus a letter. This Phaedra did: confessing her love, and saying that she was now converted by it to the cult of Artemis, whose two wooden images, brought from Crete, she had just rededicated to the goddess. Would he not come hunting one day? ‘We women of the Cretan Royal House,’ she wrote, ‘are doubtless fated to be dishonoured in love: witness my grandmother Europe, my mother Pasiphaë, and lastly my own sister Ariadne! Ah, wretched Ariadne, deserted by your father, the faithless Theseus, who has since murdered your own royal mother-why have the Furies not punished you for showing such unfilial indifference to her fate?-and must one day murder me! I count on you to revenge yourself on him by paying homage to Aphrodite in my company. Could we not go away and live together, for awhile at least, and make a hunting expedition the excuse? Meanwhile, none can suspect our true feelings for each other. Already we are lodged under the same roof, and our affection will be regarded as innocent, and even praiseworthy.’
e. Hippolytus burned this letter in horror, and came to Phaedra’s chamber, loud with reproaches; but she tore her clothes, threw open the chamber doors, and cried out: ‘Help, help! I am ravished!’ Then she hanged herself from the lintel, and left a note accusing him of monstrous crimes.
f. Theseus, on receiving the note, cursed Hippolytus, and gave orders that he must quit Athens at once, never to return. Later he remembered the three wishes granted him by his father Poseidon, and prayed earnestly that Hippolytus might die that very day. ‘Father,’ he pleaded, ‘send a beast across Hippolytus’s path; as he makes for Troezen!’
g. Hippolytus had set out from Athens at full speed. As he drove along the narrow part of the Isthmus a huge wave, which overtopped even the Molurian Rock, rolled roaring shoreward; and from its crest sprang a great dog-seal (or, some say, a white bull), bellowing and spouting water. Hippolytus’s four horses swerved towards the cliff, mad with terror, but being an expert charioteer he restrained them from plunging over the edge. The beast then galloped menacingly behind the chariot, and he failed to keep his team on a straight course. Not far from the sanctuary of Saronian Artemis, a wild olive is still shown, called the Twisted Rhachos-the Troezenian term for a barren olive-tree is rhachos-and it was on a branch of this tree that a loop of Hippolytus’s reins caught. His chariot was flung sideways against a  pile of rocks and broken into pieces. Hippolytus, entangled in the reins, and thrown first against the tree-trunk, and then against the rocks, was dragged to death by his horses, while the pursuer vanished.
h. Some, however, relate improbably that Artemis then told Theseus the truth, and rapt him in the twinkling of an eye to Troezen, where he arrived just in time to be reconciled to his dying son; and that she revenged herself on Aphrodite by procuring Adonis’s death. For certain, though, she commanded the Troezenians to pay Hippolytus divine honours, and all Troezenian brides henceforth to cut off a lock of their hair, and dedicate it to him. It was Diomedes who dedicated the ancient temple and image of Hippolytus at Troezen, and who first offered him his annual sacrifice. Both Phaedra’s and Hippolytus tombs, the latter a mound of earth, are shown in the enclosure of the temple, near the myrtle-tree with the pricked leaves.

i. The Troezenians themselves deny that Hippolytus was dragged death by horses, or even that he lies buried in his temple; nor will the reveal the whereabouts of his real tomb. Yet they declare that the gods set him among the stars as the Charioteer.
j. The Athenians raised a barrow in Hippolytus’s memory, close to the Temple of Themis, because his death had been brought about by bad curses. Some say that Theseus, accused of his murder, was found guilty, ostracized, and banished to Scyros, where he ended his life in shame and grief. But his downfall is more generally believed to have been cause by an attempted rape of Persephone.
k. Hippolytus’s ghost descended to Tartarus, and Artemis, in big indignation, begged Asclepius to revive his corpse. Asclepius opened the doors of his ivory medicine cabinet and took out the herb with which Cretan Glaucus had been revived. With it he thrice touched Hippolytus’s breast, repeating certain charms, and at the third touch the dead man raised his head from the ground. But Hades and the Three Fates, scandalized by this breach of privilege, persuaded Zeus kill Asclepius with a thunderbolt.
l. The Latins relate that Artemis then wrapped Hippolytus in a thick cloud, disguised him as an aged man, and changed his features. After hesitating between Crete and Delos as suitable places of concealment, she brought him to her sacred grove at Italian Aricia. There with her consent, he married the nymph Egeria, and he still lives beside the lake among dark oak-woods, surrounded by sheer precipices. As he should be reminded of his death, Artemis changed his name Virbius, which means vir bis, or ‘twice a man’; and no horses are allowed in the vicinity. The priesthood of Arician Artemis is only to runaway slaves. In her grove grows an ancient oak-tree, the branches of which may not be broken, but if a slave dares do so the priest, who has himself killed his predecessor and therefore lives hourly fear of death, must fight him, sword against sword, for priesthood. The Aricians say that Theseus begged Hippolytus to remain with him at Athens, but he refused.
m. A tablet in Asclepius’s Epidaurian sanctuary records that Hippolytus dedicated twenty horses to him, in gratitude for having been revived.

1. The incident of Phaedra’s incestuous love for Hippolytus, like that of Potiphar’s wife and her adulterous love for Joseph, is borrowed either from the Egyptian Tale of the Two Brothers, or from a common Canaanite source. Its sequel has been based upon the familiar icon showing the chariot crash at the end of a sacred king’s reign. If, as in ancient Ireland, a prophetic roaring of the November sea warned the king that his hour was at hand,  this warning will have been pictured as a bull, or seal, poised open-mouthed on the crest of a wave. Hippolytus’s reins must have caught in the myrtle, rather than in the sinister-looking olive, later associated with the crash: the myrtle, in fact, which grew close to his hero shrine, and  was famous for its perforated leaves. Myrtle symbolized the last month of the king’s reign; as appears in the story of Oenomaus’s chariot crash; whereas wild olive symbolized the first month of his successor’s reign. Vir bis is a false derivation of Virbius, which seems to represent the Greek hierobios, ‘holy life’-the h often becoming v: as in Hestia and Vesta, or Hesperos and Vesper. In the Golden Bough Sir James Frazer has shown that the branch which the priest guarded so jealously was mistletoe; and it is likely that Glaucus son of Minos, who has been confused with Glaucus son of Sisyphus, was revived by mistletoe. Though the pre- Hellenic mistletoe and oak cult had been suppressed in Greece, a refugee priesthood from the Isthmus may well have brought it to Aricia. Egeria’s name shows that she was death-goddess, living grove of black poplars.
2. Hippolytus’s perquisite of the bride’s lock must be a patriarchal innovation, designed perhaps to deprive women of the magical power resident in their hair, as Mohammedan women are shaved on marriage.
3. The concealment of Hippolytus’s tomb is paralleled in the stories of Sisyphus and Neleus, which suggests that he was buried at some strategic point of the Isthmus.