Hippolytus Flashcards
What was so bad about the first version of Hippolytus
Phaedra loved shamelessly and lied blatantly, staying alive to bear false witness against her stepson.
What did Euripides do to make the 2nd version different from the first ?
The characters all try at doing their best within their individual moral frame of reference, and acting within an unusually perfect literary structure emphasising the parallels between the two deviant characters who die in it.
According to Edith hall how would have been interpreted by the original audience
As an eloquent manifesto of the humanist principle that virtue has its own reward in the face of apparently arbitrary suffering and death. Especially as the Athenians in 428BCE were recovering from a terrible plague
What were the Greek attitudes to stepmothers ?
They distrusted them as their stepchildren would have been no less younger than themselves. Legal speeches of the day attest to the domestic conflicts in addition sexual confusion.
Pheadra’s love for Hippolytus is compounded by the quasi-incestuous connotations of the step-parent-stepchild bond.
F.I. Zeitlin in his Book says that Greeks perception of Eros is…
‘the most dangerous of all relations’ and ‘A serious threat to the boundaries of the autonomous self by putting it in another’s power under the magnetic pull of desire’
What is Pheadra’s familial relations and how are they significant ?
Her mother Pasiphaë bore a Minotaur and her sister Aërope slept with her husband’s brother. Cretan Women in tragedy are usually susceptible to transgressive erotic impulses, it makes her tragedy even worse as she is unable to deviate from her lust partly due to genetic inheritance.
What is Hippolytus familial relationships and what are there significance
His apathy towards sex is due to his mother’s Amazonian origins; they spurned sex and roamed the virginal world.
He is also the illegitimate son of Theseus. The nurse assumes Hippolytus wants to hurt Pheadra and her kids ‘aspirations of the legitimate’.
What is the importance of language in Hippolytus
Plot emphasis above all the power of language to reveal and silence to conceal.
- Pheadra was pressurised by the Nurse to reveal her secret
- If Hippolytus didn’t express is misogyny
- If Pheadra’s suicide note didn’t contain Hippolytus
- if Thesus didn’t curse hi son
There wouldn’t be a tragedy of words and actions but just of situations
Diction is the 4th most important principle by Aristotle
What place did Hippolytus get at the City of Dionysis
1st Attempt wasn’t successful
2nd/428BC placed 1st
