The Noose of Words: Readings of Desire, Violence and Language in Euripides' Hippolytos

THE NOOSE OF WORDS

The noose of words Readings of desire, violence and language in Euripides5 Hippolytos

BARBARA E. GOFF Junior Research Fellow, King's College, Cambridge

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge New York Port Chester Melbourne Sydney

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521363976 © Cambridge University Press 1990 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1990 This digitally printed first paperback version 2006 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Goff, Barbara E. The noose of words: readings of desire, violence, and language in Euripides' Hippolytos / Barbara E. Goff p. cm. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0-521-36397-7 1. Euripides. Hippolytus. I. Title PA3973.H7G84 1990 882'.01-dc20 89-17259 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-36397-6 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-36397-7 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-03323-7 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-03323-3 paperback

For Margaret and Kenneth Goff

CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgements Glossary ofGreek terms

page ix xii xiii

1

Speech and silence The house Concealment and revelation The gaze

i 2 12 20

2

Desire Desire speaking and speaking desire Sophrosune The pharmakon

27 30 39 48

3

Violence Death in the meadow Dissolutions

55 58 65

4

Imitation and authority Divine and human Myth Writing

78 81 90 95

5

The end Artemis The brides Ritual

105 106 113 117

Bibliography Index

130 137

Vll

PREFACE

This is a study of Euripides' Hippolytos, 'one of the most-loved and most-studied of Euripides' plays' (Michelini 1987: xiv). Each of the five chapters elaborates a different focus of analysis, and together they construct a reading of the Hippolytos that differs significantly from other available treatments, both in detail and in its overall allegiances. Connections among the chapters are provided by the notions of speech and silence as they are debated throughout the play. In the first chapter the opposition of speech and silence is read to articulate relations of gender and of power. In the second, third and fourth chapters this opposition provides a heuristic to construct the play's related discourses on desire, violence and language. In the fifth chapter, which concerns itself solely with the ending, the play is read to turn its gaze inward, so that speech and silence, desire, violence and language reappear as problems not only for the society within which the play emerges and which it addresses, but also for the play's internal representation of its external achievement. My study differs from other recent treatments in that it does not rely on one argument or term of analysis but adopts a plurality of approaches to the text. Such multiplicity is afforded not only by present-day critical practices, about which I shall have more to say later, but also by the historical context of the play in fifth-century Athens. The issues in the Hippolytos that I have isolated for debate - gender, desire, violence, language, the status and authority of poetry and drama - can all be seen to be matters of pressing concern in contemporary Greek sources of all genres. Throughout my work I have tried to make the Hippolytos meaningful by siting it in the contexts of Euripides' oeuvre, of Greek tragedy, and of Athenian society; I have tried to make the Hippolytos reverberate through the culture that produced it, and thereby to make the culture reverberate through the play. At the same time, it will be obvious that my readings of the Hippolytos are conditioned by the critical practices of the period in which I write. The critical context of classics in the late twentieth century might be broadly characterised as produced by the theoretical disciplines of psychoanalysis and anthropology; by the dismantling of traditional accounts of 'meaning' within structuralism and ix

x

Preface

post-structuralism; and by the radical perspectives of feminism and Marxism. The institution of classical literary criticism is still deeply divided over how to react to and make use of the claims and practices of contemporary theoretical activity. It is still possible for a critic to invoke 'the author5 as sole source of a text's meaning and sole legitimate term of analysis (Kovacs 1987). Other classicists, however, such as Zeitlin and Segal (who have written at length on the Hippolytos), Foley, Pucci and Goldhill, recognise that modern theoretical debates can generate productive accounts of a text's relation to itself, its internal consistencies and inconsistencies, and also provide more sophisticated accounts than were previously available of a text's relation to the society and culture that produced it. The latter concern is particularly associated with Vernant, VidalNaquet and Loraux. My own allegiances will be evident in my writing; I hope that they will render my work on the Hippolytos useful to those outside the discipline who have an interest in Greek tragedy as well as to classicists across the discipline. Similarly, I hope that I have contributed not only to the study of a single play, but also to the wider debate on what the project of classical literary criticism can and should be. Since this work is designed for readers who do not know Greek, as well as for classicists, I have tried to translate and transliterate throughout. For lengthy quotation from the Hippolytos, I have used the translation by David Grene in the Chicago series of translations of Greek tragedies, edited by Grene and Lattimore. Where it failed to make the point needed for my argument, I have resorted to the Penguin translation. For quotation of other Greek works I have used the Penguin editions, except in a very few cases that are noted in the text. The text of the Hippolytos used throughout is that of Barrett (Oxford 1964). I have tried to keep the use of Greek font to a minimum, and have translated any Greek words or short phrases that do remain in my text. Certain words appear only in transliteration; these are terms like polis and oikos that may be considered familiar even to the Greekless reader. A glossary of all such terms may be found after the acknowledgements. In transliterating Greek names, I have generally, although not always, preferred the Greek to the Latin spelling. It is a pleasure to thank all those associated with this work throughout its long and tedious gestation. My attachment to Euripides dates from myfinalyear as an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge, and it is to Geoffrey Lloyd, John Henderson and Michael Lynn-George that I owe my best conceptions of what work in classics can be. My PhD dissertation for the University of California at Berkeley, of which this book is the much-mangled remnant, was directed with patience and care by Donald Mastronarde, and encouraged in its initial stages by many friends and colleagues. On my return to King's as a Junior Research Fellow I profited on many occasions from conversations with Kostas Valakas, Simon Goldhill and Neil Croally. The Department of Classics at Dartmouth

Preface

xi

College, New Hampshire, extended hospitality to me during a period of intense revision. Special thanks go to Pat Easterling, who read much of the final typescript and who shared her time and insights at earlier stages with unfailing generosity, and to Stephen Hinds, who was not only a painstaking and sympathetic reader but also a devoted friend in a less than promising period. Thanks too to the officers of the Press, Pauline Hire, Nancy-Jane Thompson and Trudi Tate, for their hard work and encouragement. Leaving the best till last, I thank Michael Simpson, whose gaze was never absent. He has enthusiastically discussed my problems and clarified my ideas. He has read vast quantities of my typescript scrupulously and improved it out of all recognition. He has brought me coffee and lent me chewing gum. He has shown me the limitations of my work and taught me its strengths. In the last three years he has given a new meaning to everything I read and write. This book is dedicated to my parents, who knew I could do it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Quotations and translations in the text are taken from the following publications, and are reproduced here by permission of Penguin Books Ltd and the University of Chicago Press: 'The Women of Troy', from The Bacchae and other Plays by Euripides, translated by Philip Vellacott (Penguin Classics, Revised Edition, 1972). 'Hippolytus' from Three Plays by Euripides, translated by Philip Vellacott (Penguin Classics, Revised Edition, 1974). 'Medea' from Medea and other Plays by Euripides, translated by Philip Vellacott (Penguin Classics, 1963). 'Electra' from Medea and other Plays by Euripides, translated by Philip Vellacott (Penguin Classics, 1963). 'Heracles' fxomMedea and other Plays by Euripides, translated by Philip Vellacott (Penguin Classics, 1963). 'Ion', from The Bacchae and other Plays by Euripides, translated by Philip Vellacott (Penguin Classics, Revised Edition, 1972). 'Agamemnon' from The Oresteian Trilogy by Aeschylus, translated by Philip Vellacott (Penguin Classics, Revised Edition, 1959). 'Antigone' from The Theban Plays by Sophocles, translated by E. F. Watling (Penguin Classics, 1947). 'Aristotle: On the Art of Poetry' from Classical Literary Criticism, translated by T. S. Dorsch (Penguin Classics, 1965). The Republic by Plato, translated by Desmond Lee (Penguin Classics, Second Edition, 1974). 'Women of Trachis' from Electra and other Plays by Sophocles, translated by E. F. Watling (Penguin Classics, 1953). Euripides, 'Hippolytos', translated by David Grene, in The Complete Greek Tragedies ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, i960). Greek Lyrics, translated by Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, i960): 39-60.

xii

GLOSSARY OF GREEK TERMS

agon aidos

contest, scene of confrontation in a drama sense of shame, modesty, respect (untranslatable, and a problem for the play) bia violence, force mark, distinguishing sign charakter grace, favour charts ephebeia period of adolescence, particular Greek representation of adolescence love, desire, god of love and desire eros good repute eukleia letters of the alphabet, writing grammata graphe (pi. graphai) anything written or drawn, a letter homilia conversation, company kairos time, occasion, moment kakos (f. kake, pi. bad, evil kakoi) kalos (f. kale, pi. kaloi kaluptomenos kleos logos (pi. logoi) manteia mechane (pi. mechanai) mechanomai miasma muthos (pi. muthoi) nomos nosos oikos parodos

good, beautiful hidden, covered, veiled (title of the first Hippolytos) fame, reputation word, speech, story, argument divination device, machination I machinate pollution word, story, myth law, custom, convention disease household first song sung by Chorus Xlll

xiv

Glossary of Greek terms

parrhesia parthenos peitho phaino pharmakon (pi. pharmakd) philein phiHa philo philon tekmerion philos (pi. philoi) phronein polls saphes saphestatos semnos sophos (f. sophe, pi. sop hoi) sophron sophronein sophrosune tekmerion (pi. tekmeria) theoros time

freedom of speech, right of speech in Athenian assembly virgin, young girl persuasion verb 'show', in passive 'seem' drug, either healing or poisonous to love, be a friend of, be a relation of love, friendship, family relationship I love a test or proof of friends friend, family member, lover to think, to think rightly city, state clear clearest, very clear august, haughty (a problem for the play) wise, clever chaste, virtuous, prudent, self-controlled to be sophron

chastity, virtue, prudence, self-control (untranslatable, and a problem for the play) proof, test spectator or consulter of an oracle honour, eclorv

Speech and silence

At Hippolytos 293-6 the Nurse says to Phaidra, as part of her attempt to persuade her mistress to speak, 'and if you are sick with some one of the unspeakable [aporrheton] evils, these women [are here] to help with the disease; but if your condition [sumphora, also meaning misfortune, calamity] can be carried out towards the men [lit. if it is ekphoros], speak, so that it may be revealed to doctors'.1 Several pairs of oppositions are at work in these lines. Certain diseases are called 'unspeakable', and are said to be the concern exclusively of women. The unspeakable diseases may be dealt with only among women, in a place which we can define as the 'inside', as opposed to where the men are; others may be taken outside, to the men, and spoken of openly. Significantly, the word menuo which the Nurse uses when speaking of the doctors and which I have translated as 'reveal', is repeated by Phaidra at 520 when she expresses her fear that the Nurse will reveal all to Hippolytos. The masculine realm seems to be that of the exterior and of real speech; women and women's realm are defined as unspeakable, so that their speech among themselves can almost be considered a form of silence. If this seems an over-interpretation, I would argue that it is borne out later by Hippolytos' tirade, in which he deploys the same pairs of oppositions. At 645-50 he declares of women: We should not suffer servants to approach them, but give them as companions voiceless beasts, dumb, . . . but with teeth, that they might not converse, and hear another voice in answer. But now at home the mistress plots the mischief, and the maid carries it abroad.

The prescription that Hippolytos desires to make is a more drastic form of the status quo as described by the Nurse, in which women are confined and silent, while men are both 'outside' and vocal. Hippolytos imposes his perception of these polarities on a situation that has already reversed them; he suggests that Phaidra's attendant 'carries abroad', whereas in fact Phaidra 'plotted' outside 1

Line numbers refer to the Greek texts rather than to English translations.

2

Speech and silence

and the revelation of the plan took place inside the house. Such a transgression of the dominant structures underlines the paradox of a play which, as I shall argue, concerns itself with female silence and yet is motivated by female speech. The relation between speech and silence is set up by the play as an opposition analogous to that operating on a social and sexual level between male and female, on a spatial level between exterior and interior, and on a dramatic level between revelation and concealment. In this opening chapter I investigate how these polarities are articulated in action and how the play both confirms and confuses their lines of demarcation. I consider exterior and interior in terms of the house, and revelation and concealment in terms of sight as well as of speech. I also examine the role of witnesses and of the gaze of the other in its various manifestations throughout the play, as well as the role of the speech and silence of the other in bestowing or withholding eukleia (good repute). It will be evident at all points how central to my discussion is the underlying polarity male/female. In the course of the chapter I hope to show also that in its deployment of interior and exterior, concealment and revelation, and the gaze of the other, the text highlights the importance of its theatrical conditions as elements of its signifying resources; it can in part be read as a meditation on its own conditions of production. But it is the play's advertisement of its anxiety about its own speech that will be the chief concern of this study. T h e house I will consider first the dialectic of interior and exterior, which focuses on the figure of the house. The Greek for house, oikos, also means 'household', and encompasses not only the immediate family but also its dependants, slaves, moveable property and land. Slaves and land together constituted the Visible' property (phanera ousia) of the oikos, and ideally, the amount of land in the possession of the oikos was sufficient to support all its members. The oikos was a persistently powerful ideological formation not only in the fifth century; the correct behaviour of oikos members towards one another is a constant concern of the legal speeches of the fourth century, and Aristotle's Politics takes the oikos as the first term of the analysis of the polis. Aristotle's account lets us see that a significant feature of the oikos is the series of hierarchical relationships that constitute it, in which male takes precedence over female, parent over child and free citizen over slave. The oikos was crucial as the locus of patriarchal continuity; it functioned as the means whereby structures of authority reproduced themselves in the descent of material property from father to son. The other members of the oikos - women, children and slaves - had, of course, no recognised existence in the public sphere of the polis, so that their activities were confined almost entirely to the private sphere of the oikos. Religious and ritual practices, however, provided a context for the public participation of women, children and even slaves, and were also prominent among the activities of the

Speech and silence

3

oikos; cult observances and occasions brought all the members of the oikos together as a social group. Religious practices were also important in that they perpetuated the continuity between living and dead members of the oikos.2 Given the centrality of the oikos to the Greek understanding of society, it is perhaps not surprising that tragedy should ceaselessly represent it and investigate the conditions of its failure and deformation. The conflicts which might arise between the claims made on the citizen's loyalty by oikos and polis can also provide urgent subjects for tragic representation, most notoriously in Sophokles' Antigone, but also in other plays such as Euripides' Phoinissaiy but as the polis as such is absent from the action of Hippolytos, at least until the return of Theseus, the relation between polis and oikos will not form part of my present investigations. The oikos is present on the tragic stage both as a physical stage-building and as the 'brooding presence' of family history and anxiety. Taplin writes ofAgamemnon that 'Aeschylus exploits the association in Greek society between the house and the household, the family and the family property, to make the house itself a brooding presence, an integral and fixedly disturbing background to the drama' (1978: 32). Among troubled Euripidean oikoi, one could cite as examples of such 'background' the empty house of the Alkestis, the poverty-striken and infertile house of the Elektra, and the irretrievably shaken palace of the Bakchai. In plays such as these and the Hippolytos, the stage-building that dominates the acting area also has acute relevance for the working-out of the drama. One particular theatrical function of the oikos, in the works of all the tragedians, is to be the scene of violence; the climactic act always takes place off-stage, and usually inside the house. Tragedy can use this dramatised inner space to investigate the tension between seen and unseen, reality and appearance, which is also frequently the motivation of its plots. This tension between inside and outside can be related to the dramatisation of revelation that tragedy undertakes: 'the stage conventions . . . suggest an analogy to the tragic world itself, which in the course of its plot and actions inevitably reveals its hidden and unknown dimensions' (Zeitlin 1985b: 72). In the Hippolytos, as is made clear in my first two quotations from the speeches of the Nurse and Hippolytos, the house is depicted as the site of the struggle between the sexes. The struggle focuses here on the possession and appropriation of speech. This situation is complicated by the fact that, although each character has a socially defined relationship to and claims on the house, each is also estranged within it. The house seems not to belong to any of the visible characters, but rather to the absent Pittheus (24). Theseus is here only because he is exiled from the polis of Athens for the killing of the Pallantidae (325), and it is when he looks to the house to reflect and confirm his position of power and authority (792) that he is most betrayed. Hippolytos leaves the house before the beginning of the play to see the mysteries (24-5). As he is illegitimate and not the 2

On the various significances of the oikos, see Lacey 1968: 15-32. Humphreys 1983:1-21 provides a more detailed and critical account, but focuses on the relation between oikos and polis.

4

Speech and silence

heir, he has at best a tangential relationship with the paternal house; he is most closely associated with the outdoor spaces of the forest where he hunts, and with the meadow where he worships Artemis. These pursuits and places are central to the Greek understanding of the liminal condition of adolescence; by these practices, and especially the hunt, Hippolytos prolongs his pre-social and pre-sexual state, increasing his estrangement from the oikos and from the adult male responsibilities and occupations which it would enjoin on him.3 Phaidra is most closely identified with the house but also most estranged within it by the disjunction between her prescribed role and her proscribed desires. The centrality of the house and of interiority to the very conception of Greek womanhood has long been recognised, and the association between house and woman is one that operates on many levels. We may consider first the actual physical seclusion and invisibility of fifth-century Athenian women, which functioned as a means of controlling female sexuality and thus of ensuring a legitimate succession. Even if not all women were actually secluded, such as those who had to go out to work, seclusion was an integral part of the representation of women, and a respectable woman was perceived as one who kept to her house. Even on the tragic stage, where women are quite obviously not secluded since they are exposed to the public gaze, they make frequent reference to seclusion as an ideal state of affairs and an index of their respectability. Andromache in the Trojan Women says (647-50): First, since a woman, however high her reputation, Draws slander on herself by being seen abroad, I renounced restlessness and stayed in my own house; and Makaria in the Herakleidai expresses similar sentiments (476-7). Confinement inside the house not only ensures female respectability but actually signifies female identity, for the sexes are strictly differentiated in terms of inside and out.4 This differentiation is perhaps most clearly articulated in Xenophon's Oikonomika, where Isomachos explains at length to his new wife how their essential complementarity rests on the fact that one of them is suited to an indoor, the other to an outdoor life (7.21). The converse of this rigorous alignment is that men who stay inside or in the shade, for whatever reason, are considered effeminate and generally worthless (Oikonomika 4.2, 7.30; one might compare Euripides Bakchai 457-9 and Plato Phaedros 23o,c-d). Greek tragedies can often be read in terms of a transgression of this polarity, when the male exaggerates the claims of the polis so that the existence or security of the oikos is threatened; the woman then rushes to the defence of the oikos, 'intruding' into the public sphere and presenting a threat to the integrity of the 3

4

On the defining characteristics of Greek adolescence see Vidal-Naquet in Gordon 1981: 147—87. Hunting is a necessary activity in the Greek conception of male adolescence (its actual incidence may have been different), but it is necessary only as part of a transition; Hippolytos' perversity is displayed in his refusal to move on from hunting to the normal amatory and political pursuits that characterise the adult male. But see Easterling 1988 for important qualifications.

Speech and silence

5

man.5 This reading can be productive, but it may be overly schematic, particularly when one considers that women played a significant role in the public religious life of the community, if not in politics as such. It is also important to remember that men are strongly identified with the oikos as owners and heads of households; the woman inside is as much a part of the husband's property as is the interior itself. Moreover, the woman often seems to be considered an intruder not only into the polls but also into the oikos itself. A passage in the Oikonomika attributed to Aristotle (1,4,1 1-3 44a) instructs a husband not to wrong or injure (adikein) his wife but to treat her as a suppliant raised from his hearth, i.e. as a defenceless outsider. The bride from outside is necessarily a potentially disturbing presence, for it is impossible to know the extent of her loyalty to the husband's oikos, since her paternal oikos may still have claims on her. 6 In the Hippolytos, Phaidra's notional adultery constructs her as another kind of threat to the oikos and as a potentially dangerous intruder within it. Phaidra is described as inside (131-2), darkening her bright hair with her veil (132). This double seclusion within house and veil can be read, paradoxically, as a sign of Phaidra's proper position as modest matron, wife and mother, but it is also a symptom of her sickness, as are her silence and starvation. Seclusion and silence are here a form of withdrawal from interaction and speech, as starvation is a withdrawal from food. Once desire has entered her (like a weapon, 530-2), it is as if Phaidra blocks all the channels of her body that might connect her to the world outside, or allow her catastrophic desire to escape as speech or gesture. This 'blocking' corresponds to the Greek representation of woman as a being especially open to influences that attack or penetrate. The physical interiority or 'permeability' of woman is interpreted within Greek culture to mean that she is also particularly susceptible to other forms of possession, erotic, demonic, or prophetic.7 The Chorus indeed represents the possible causes of Phaidra's sickness as instances of invasion. She is vulnerable to attack on several fronts; from divine possession (141-50), from a rumour reaching her from her familial home (155-60), or from a secret affair of her husband's in her own house (151-4). The irony of this last reference is painfully evident; it is not her husband but herself who has the secret love in the house. Instead of becoming a victim of her more powerful and less accountable husband, such as Hektor is in Euripides* Andromache (222-5), Phaidra threatens the existence of the house as a potential adulteress. Yet conversely, the Chorus's phrasing shows that the house may present a threat to the woman placed inside it, despite the ideological associations between house and female. Moreover, the woman's own womb may menace her (161-9), a menace that is also expressed in terms of the house: 5 6 7

On the 'female intruder' see Shaw 1975. Foley 1982 provides a pertinent reply. On the wife's difficult relations to paternal and marital oikoi, see Vernant 1985: 127—75. On female vulnerability to possession, see Padel 1983. Plato Phaedros 2443-2450 lists four types of madness; the mantic, the Corybantic, the poetic and the erotic. Except for the poetic, women constantly appear in Greek sources as prone to all of these.

6

Speech and silence Unhappy is the compound of woman's nature; the torturing misery of helplessness, the helplessness of childbirth and its madness are linked to it for ever.

The word that is translated 'linked' is sunoikein (163), derived from oikos and meaning 4to dwell together5. A woman's interior and exterior are perceived as more discontinuous than a man's, and this discontinuity is understood to render her particularly fragile. The possession of an interior, a womb, defines the feminine, so that a woman may thus be constantly threatened by that which constitutes her as a woman.8 House, woman and womb appear as a set of Chinese boxes, as enclosed spaces that are the seats of potential violence and that become ever more unknowable and disturbing. The threat from within is thus several times duplicated - house to woman, woman to house, womb to woman - and all three are characterised by sexual treachery, darkness, silence and death. Phaidra's exit from the house sets the play in motion; Hippolytos' first scene, in contrast, seeks to deny the possibility of movement and plot (87). Since seclusion of women is the rule, the appearance of a female outside the house often heralds the fact that something is wrong inside.9 In the Hippolytos, what is wrong is the woman's psychic and physical inner space, which infects her house. Tragedy frequently seems conscious of its impropriety in bringing women into the open and before the public gaze; in this play Phaidra, as Medea in her play, is brought on stage only after a lengthy introduction which establishes their exotic and even monstrous natures. This is the first revelation of Phaidra's body, the seat of desire; the second will be when she is discovered dead. Once Phaidra is out, the Nurse complains, she wishes only to be in (179-82). The play will eventually ensure her complete containment in the interior - the suicide in the bedroom - as it ensures Hippolytos' complete exclusion in Theseus' order of banishment; the status quo will be restored but with fatal consequences. Phaidra's oscillation between exterior and interior can be read as one between life and death as well as between speech and silence, for while the interior of the house secures continued silence and secrecy, for Phaidra it also and ultimately spells death; conversely, the outside offers a suggestion of life but is dangerously provocative of speech. Phaidra's refusal to be confined in the house suggests that her speech, and hence her desire, will also resist containment. 8

9

In the Hippocratic writings this discontinuity is both disease and cure; the alarmingly mobile and destabilising womb can be tamed by being entered and fertilised. See e.g. Peri Parthenon and Plato Timaios gic-d. On hysteria generally, see Lefkowitz 1981:12-25, Lefkowitz and Fant 1982:94-6, and King 1983. The womb is represented in Greek culture as rendering the woman less stable, more liable to states of possession, and more suited to deal with those parts of religious practice that bear on darkness and concealment (Padel 1983). On the association of Greek women with all kinds of interiority see Zeitlin 1982: 143, 1985a: 68-79, a n d IO»85b: 69-74. For more general speculation see Erikson 1964. On this aspect of the female presence in tragedy see Padel 1983: 15.

Speech and silence

7

Similarly the loosening of her body (199) and of her veil (202) act as preludes to the 'loosening' of her language in the delirium. This physical loosening can be seen first and foremost as a manifestation of the power of Eros in his capacity of lusimeles, loosener of the limbs. As well as an erotic charge, the metaphor of loosening has a more general significance for female identity, since the woman 'loosened her girdle5 at the defining moments of defloration and childbirth. The 'loosening' of Phaidra precedes, and eventually necessitates, the defining female death which is that of strangulation or hanging.10 In the erotically suggestive loosening of her language, Phaidra finds the compromise between speech and silence that is the delirium. In this delirium she goes even further 'out', in that she longs for spaces that are far beyond the house, the asocial spaces of Hippolytos' adolescent pursuits. Zeitlin (1985a: 74) writes that the delirium 'demonstrates how far from domestic territory is the site assigned to female desire', but we might want to add that there can be no site for female desire, just as in the Hippolytos there can be no coherent language for its expression. Phaidra's denial of her place and role within the oikos is reflected in the consequent temerity of her speech; her return to her veil (243-6) signifies an attempt to correct both derelictions, of status and of speech. The Nurse is only able to break down Phaidra's obstinately renewed silence by referring to Hippolytos (310). The context in which she mentions him is one of power and property; if Phaidra chooses to die, warns the Nurse, she will betray her children by leaving them a master (despotes) in the shape of the Amazon's son and by not passing on to them their paternal house (305-10). The children, unprotected by any mother, will have their rights usurped and be deprived of their inheritance. Phaidra's position here with regard to the house is one shared with fifth-century Athenian women; without any economic stake in the house herself, she is nonetheless vital for its transmission to the children.11 Like Alkestis, in Admetos' words, she is 68veiog, aMooc; . . . avayxaia 66umc;, 'foreign, but necessary to the house' (533). Later on, she describes herself as being in an analogous position with regard to speech. At 421-4 her children will inhabit the city, flourishing in parrhesia, because of her good name. Phaidra will be the means for passing on to them parrhesia, the political right to free speech, which is exactly what she herself does not possess; she is excluded from speech within the polis by her gender and within the oikos by her secret. The same point is made in Euripides' Ion, where Kreousa, who like Phaidra is forced into silence or evasive language by her impossible position, is still crucial to Ion's political identity as possessor of parrhesia (672). While language eventually comes to pose 10

11

On these lines see Zeitlin 1985a: 59; on loosening and binding as metaphors for female life-processes see King 1983; on male and female deaths, see Loraux 1981b and 1987. See also Zeitlin 1985a: 60 where she analyses the binding and loosening imagery of the play in terms of Aristotle's metaphors of plot construction. On actual legal practice see Gould 1980: 44-5, Lefkowitz and Fant 1982: 33-40.

8

Speech and silence

problems for all the characters of the Hippolytos, the contradictions of Phaidra's position are compounded by her sex.12 The house continues to play a prominent role in this opening scene. The plot is presented as its history: the Chorus sing TeXeuxfiaexai xi xaivov 56(ioig, 'some new thing will befall the house' (370). At 386 aidos (shame or modesty), which Phaidra speaks of as problematic for both morality and language, is an achthos oikon, a burden to houses. Phaidra also describes and condemns adultery in terms of the house (407-18): Destruction light upon the wife who herself plays the tempter and strains her loyalty to her husband's bed by dalliance with strangers. In the wives of noble houses first this taint begins: when wickedness approves itself to those of noble birth, it will surely be approved by their inferiors. Truly, too, I hate lip-worshippers of chastity who own a lecherous daring when they have privacy. O Cypris, Sea-Born Goddess, how can they look frankly in the faces of their husbands and never shiver with fear lest their accomplice, the darkness, and the rafters of the house take voice and cry aloud?

Thuraios (409), translated 'strangers', is a word that suggests a range of meanings that concern doors, such as 'at the door', 'out of doors', 'beyond the doors', 'strange' and 'foreign'; combined with the phrase ex 5e yevvaicov 56juov 'out of noble houses' (409), it seems to define the adulteress chiefly as one who leaves her house. This is what Phaidra has done in this scene. Her speech about her desire, especially when interpreted and translated to Hippolytos by the Nurse, will stand in place of the deed of adultery; there is no way for Phaidra to be sophron (chaste) in words (413), like the 'lip-worshippers of chastity', because her words, despite her virtuous intentions to conquer desire (399), are not those of a sophron woman. The only way for her to claim sophrosune would have been by silence. Yet even silence, it seems, cannot protect the adulteress, for 'the rafters of the house/take voice and cry aloud' (418). Since she has wronged the house by deserting it, either physically or in disloyalty, the adulteress' fear of the house's accusing voice is well founded. Phaidra is in an analogous position; the denunciatory voice she fears, however, is in the first place her own, and is then duplicated throughout the play by those of the Nurse and Hippolytos. This denunciatory voice is the opposite of the one she needs, the one that would allot her eukleia and time (honour). 12

Padel 1983 argues that the tragedians deploy their female figures solely for the purpose of investigating the male condition. Zeitlin takes this argument further both in her specific study of the Hippolytos (1985a) and more generally in 1985b.

Speech and silence

9

As well as having its history supplied by the plot, the house also appears as part of the Nurse's speech of persuasion, in which she presses the homology, already discussed, between house and woman to its logical conclusion by comparing Phaidra herself to a house (467-9): It's not for us to struggle after Tiresome perfection. Does a builder plane and polish The rafters in the roof? Unfortunately, as well as being highly evocative, these lines are also much disputed. An alternative translation of the lines reads We should not in the conduct of our lives be too exacting. Look, see this roof here these overarching beams that span your house could builders with all their skill lay them dead straight? I read with the first translation, and with Barrett (1964: 244-5), w n o ta kes the lines to refer to an unseen part of the house that is not laboriously constructed, rather than to a house that cannot be built accurately because of the lack of appropriate technology. This interpretation seems to take account of the preceding lines (464-5): It is the wise man's part to leave in darkness everything that is ugly. Such an interpretation also registers the general emphasis in Phaidra's language on the regard, literal and metaphorical, of others. Phaidra is thus likened by the Nurse not to a house that is necessarily faulty, but to one in which a deliberate act of neglect and concealment has taken place. The house, like Phaidra, is divided within itself. The comparison appeals to a correct state of affairs in which woman and house are alike, a situation celebrated for instance in the Odyssey, where Odysseus regains both house and woman and the rooted bed that is the symbol of their unity. But the Nurse's comparison also encourages the subversion of that very propriety, by suggesting that Phaidra and the house are alike chiefly in their failure. The comparison ignores, for its own rhetorical purposes, the ways in which the woman has been estranged from the house and, furthermore, the similarity that it then proposes is a dangerous complicity of concealment. The relationship between woman and house is further extended in Phaidra's language when she states that 01 xaXoi Xiav Xoyoi, 'words too handsome' (486—7) destroy well-built cities and houses; they will also be the instrument of her own downfall, and through her, of Hippolytos'. The Nurse's crucial words to Hippolytos, which will prove to be the precise form of Phaidra's destruction, are introduced in the form of'charms and spells inside the house' ((^iXxQa xal 9eXxTf|Qia xax 5 oixoug 509). This association between charms, the house-interior, and female desire can also be read in Sophokles' Trachiniai. Deianeira at 578-9 and 686 is represented as guarding

io

Speech and silence

the dangerous pharmakon that she received from the Centaur in the muchos, the innermost part of the house that is often identified with the women's quarters. Although the pharmakon is originally a sign of the Centaur's desire for Deianeira, she is driven to employ it by her own desire for Herakles. In the Hippolytos, the efficacy of the Nurse's charms is dependent on her finding philoi inside (524), but the inside has become estranged from the women who usually inhabit it, and the pharmaka will prove poisons that destroy all relationships of philia. Furthermore, the Nurse goes inside with the intention of speaking (as Phaidra fears, 520), thereby reversing the relationship set up on Phaidra's first appearance between the interior and silence. This speech thus constitutes a transgression which will endanger Hippolytos, and which his tirade will endeavour to correct. The transgression operates on many levels; the Nurse, a woman, finds the man inside, speaks to him on an intimate female subject, and moreover binds him to anomalous silence. The prohibitions in Hippolytos' tirade accordingly deny females access to the outside as well as to speech, speech not only to men but also among themselves. Phaidra takes part in the transgression or reversal when she tries to institute silence on the stage, outside the house and therefore in the space where previously speech had been possible (565). Although it is she whom the terrible sounds within the house concern, she tries to involve the Chorus in listening at the door (575-8): I am lost. Go, women, stand and listen there yourselves and hear the tumult that falls on the house. Mistress, you stand at the door. It is you who can tell us best what happens within the house. The Chorus, by the conventions of Greek theatrical practice, cannot leave the orchestra to enter the acting space, so Phaidra's request is futile. But Phaidra refuses to translate the noise into explicit words for them (585), delaying the moment when she will have to speak. Hippolytos' entrance on to the stage is thus heralded by agitation about his speech, as Phaidra's was about her silence. But the obfuscation brought about by the speech still enclosed in the house is dispelled by Hippolytos' brutal clarity. The Nurse's words have driven him into the open air and sunlight (601), the realm of masculinity and decent speech - not speech about what is unspeakable {arrheton 293 and 602). His whole tirade is articulated principally in terms of the house. As we saw before, he conceives of the house very much as the site of male control of women's speech and women's desire, a two-fold control that for him defines female sophrosune. The seclusion that he proposes will further control their movement, for at present they can still act through their attendants. Although the woman's place is thus set firmly within the house, the discussion above has shown her to be also inimical to it, the dangerous intruder discussed above; Hippolytos can therefore claim that men will only be 'free' in their houses when they are without women (623-4).

Speech and silence

11

Although Hippolytos refers to 'my house' (640), the man who figures in the tirade has little control over what happens in his own house. The father of a woman makes haste to get her out of the house (629), but the husband is eager to receive her (630) and empties his house on her behalf (633, and 625-6 if we retain the line with Murray). This misogynist discourse concerning the effects of female greed, rapacity and destructiveness on male property can be traced back to the archaic poets Hesiod and Semonides.13 Neither a stupid (638) nor a sophe (640) woman will Hippolytos have in his house, yet there exists no kind of woman other than these two undesirable extremes. The woman who would avoid the extremes would be sophron> and the women of the tirade are by definition not sophron, not secluded, chaste or silent. Hippolytos finally agrees to leave the house (659) and to remain silent (660). Eventually, he will be forced to withdraw even further, in exile, and be even more effectively silenced by Phaidra's letter as well as by the oath imposed on him by the Nurse in the dark interior of the house (611). Despite the absence of Hippolytos, Phaidra can no longer relate to the house except as a tomb, which is what it threatened to be from the outset. She invokes as reason for her death not only Theseus (720), but also her Cretan house (719). It is this Cretan house, and the movement from it to the Troizenian house, that dominate the subsequent ode. The Troizenian house takes on its role as scene of violence, exacting from the errant female the penalty for betrayal, as it narrows down to the single bedroom where Phaidra hangs herself (769-70). Her very death is spoken of as a 'bitter housekeeping' {pikron oikourema, 787). The terms are now especially resonant, for neither Phaidra nor the Nurse has 'kept house' properly for Theseus, who now appears (and is obliquely heralded in 787). Nor, once the delinquent female is properly contained, in both the physical and the social senses, is the house thereby restored to health. The house does not open its gates to welcome Theseus (792-3) but only to reveal Phaidra's corpse. It takes on the aspect of Hades, as described at the opening of the play by Aphrodite (56-7) and at the end by Hippolytos (1447).14 The house in the Hippolytos is then the site of the transgression and punishment of its female members and the betrayal of its male. For if the house has destroyed Phaidra, she has equally well destroyed the house. Henceforth the vocabulary associated with the house is that of pain and suffering (813,819,845, 847, 852, 870, 871). Phaidra's letter is opened, like the gates of the house, but before he reads it Theseus imagines that his wife asks him not to bring another woman into his house (860—1); he should keep and protect what was her space as he presumes she dutifully kept and protected his spaces, the interior of the house and of her own body. What he discovers is that far from guarding against a 13

14

On the laziness of the female, see Hesiod Works and Days 704—5 and Theogony 590—612; on the connections between profligacy and general destructiveness, greed and sexual voracity see Semonides 24,46—9, 53—6. The faults of the female usually have threatening sexual implications. On this misogynist discourse, see especially Loraux 1978 and Vernant 1980: 168-85. The idea of 'house' is implicit in that of'Hades', as is shown by the phrases ev, eig AiSov (sc.

12

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potential female intruder, he is dealing with the consequences of a previous masculine penetration. Since Hippolytos has allegedly entered where he should not, the logical response is to send him away, to banish him utterly. The house, like Phaidra, is both object and site of the hypothetical masculine struggles for power that make up the agon (IOIO). But Hippolytos can no longer attain to his father's house by any means, legitimate or otherwise. The terms of his oath call down on him, if he is guilty, a death without polls or oikos (1029, retaining the line with Murray): If I have been a villain, may I die unfamed, unknown, a homeless stateless beggar, an exile! These terms have already been fulfilled by his father's speech. The house is prominent even in the figures that the two men employ. When Hippolytos describes his exile's plight in terms of strangers' houses (1066-7) Theseus replies in terms that confound adultery with housekeeping (1069, cf. 787). As Phaidra, estranged within the house, earlier feared the voice of its walls (418), so Hippolytos, exiled from it, longs for that voice (1074-5). He who had not needed the voice of other people, only that of the goddess Artemis, is reduced to calling on inanimate objects. The evocation of Phaidra's fear of the voice of the walls demonstrates how exactly he reproduces her position, for he too is unable to produce socially acceptable speech; like her, he knows but does not know how to speak (1091). Previously he stated that it was not right for him to speak (1033); what he speaks, after this earlier declaration, is the two lines on sophrosune (1034-5): Virtuous she was in deed, although not virtuous: I that have virtue used it to my ruin. This riddling form of utterance achieves by its opacity the paradox of both speaking and not speaking, a state that I shall later claim for Phaidra's letter. In this way Hippolytos shares in Phaidra's disease and learns how to be sophron, or silenced (730-1). The house, too, with Hippolytos' departure, falls silent (1136). Hippolytos leaves the stage, and Theseus goes into the irredeemably empty and alienated house. At 1340-1 Artemis claims that only the evil, with their children and houses, are destroyed by the gods; she speaks of just such a destruction as the play has displayed.

Concealment and revelation The house, and the tension that it constitutes between inside and outside, are heavily implicated not only in the logic of the drama but also in its theatrical articulation; the staging of the play can be read as one of the ways in which it produces meaning. The same is true of the tension, or opposition, between concealment and revelation, which is part of the play's dynamic. The play can be read as an overall structure of blocked revelations and failed attempts at

Speech and silence

13

concealment.15 The associated vocabulary is not only active within each speech act but can also be read in each gesture and tableau, and every time the opposition is mobilised, it can be seen to constitute a reference to the working-out of the drama as much as to the immediate event. Concealment and revelation necessarily have significance for the visible elements of theatre as well as for the verbal, and discussion of the opposition in the sphere of sight will lead us to consider the play's insistent images of'witnessing' and 'looking in the face'. The opposition between concealment and revelation that I propose as a model for reading the play can be related to some of the political and cultural concerns of fifth-century Athens, and to its growing awareness of the possible tensions between the public and private lives of its citizens.16 Politics took place entirely in the public, male sphere, and physically in the open spaces of Athens such as the Areopagus and the Pnyx. The phrase es meson (in the middle), which is the defining term for the foundation of democracy in Herodotos 3.80 and 3.142, has a cultural as well as a political meaning. In the public male sphere, it was important that a man should be available for inspection by his fellow-citizens; for instance Humphreys 1983:10, writing on the role of wealth, makes the point that: 'Visible property... was related to openly acknowledged social position and commitments. Its owner's wealth and status could easily be assessed, he could not evade tax obligations, his kin knew what they could expect from him . . . Hidden wealth meant hidden power, suspicion, unease.' Generally speaking, in Athenian society men could be publicly known, whereas women could not, although tragedy itself might be considered as an exceptional means by which they might be known.17 This seclusion could be so extreme that fourth-century writers of legal speeches had to prove the existence of certain women whose traces the speaker's opponents had managed to conceal (Lacey 1968: 168). Those tragedies which investigate the role of the oikos seem frequently to exploit the tension between the privacy possible for households understood to be aristocratic and archaic, and the publicity enforced on them both by the physical requirements of theatre and by the presence of a civic chorus. In Euripidean tragedies, however, this tension is further complicated by the fact that the choruses often cannot be described simply as civic, since they are composed of women, slaves and foreigners. The opposition between concealment and revelation in the Hippolytos is often articulated by forms of the verb phaino. This verb is doubly inscribed in the text, both as 'show' (active) and as 'appear' or 'seem' (passive). The word marks the confusion that is possible between revealing and concealing, seen and unseen, reality and appearance; contemporary philosophical writings seem to construct a similar phenomenon, notably in the discussions of perception and relativism that 15

16

17

Zeitlin 1985 a: 199 n.70 notes the vocabulary of concealment (not of revelation) but does not study it at length. See Humphreys 1983: 22-32 on the increasing tension between public and private in fifth-century Athens. It is true to say that priestesses were also publicly known figures.

14

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are associated with the Sophists.18 In a drama, the word phaino can reverberate even more problematically, since the conventions of the theatre render it structurally preoccupied with problems of reality and appearance. An extreme of this preoccupation can be read in Euripides' Helen. The Hippolytos, however, is concerned less with any general categories of reality and appearance than with concealment and revelation as specific acts in the dramatic process. Aphrodite introduces the play as a twofold revelation, of the truth of her words (9) and of Phaidra's love to Theseus (42). The first revelation provides the impetus for the play; the second is being blocked at the beginning by Phaidra's silence (40), but will provide the denouement. The theme takes a firmer hold on Phaidra's first scene as the secrecy of what is happening to her is emphasised in thtparodos (139,153). Phaidra is said to be twice hidden, in the house and in the veil (131-4). Later on in this scene she will attempt to hide herself again beneath her veil when she is out on the stage, already exposed to the public gaze. Phaidra's veiling of the head is a gesture appropriated from Hippolytos in the first play to bear his name, where its importance can be judged by the fact that he is called kaluptomenos (veiled). But the self-conscious repetition of the gesture here draws attention to the differences between the two plays, one in which the male hides so as not to see the threat to his purity, one in which the female hides so as not to be seen in her erotic distress.19 But the veil can always be an erotic signifier, suggesting what it ostensibly hides: 'one encounters the veil as projector of sexual charis [grace] . . . as hider of those attractive qualities for purposes of modesty . . . and in various combinations and syntheses of these polar opposites' (Nagler 1974: 59-60). The veil as it is written in the text here (134) allows Phaidra's xantha kephala (golden head) to be seen; it both hides and reveals. Furthermore, what it thus hides and reveals is an attribute of feminine beauty, something which constitutes the female as desirable and thus as a potentially disruptive element even when not herself in the grip of eros. At the same time the words 'darkening her golden head' (134) set up a play between light and dark that will frequently reverberate in the course of the drama, and that mirrors Phaidra's irresolution about whether to come 'out' or not. As previously suggested, the irresolution is 'resolved' by the delirium, a confused discourse that sites itself between revelation and concealment, between speech and silence. But as far as the Nurse is concerned it still reveals too much, being uttered in front of a crowd (213). After this abortive speech, then, both Phaidra and the Nurse turn towards silence and reserve, expressed in terms of hiding (245, 250). The Nurse's words take up the theme when she asks when death will hide her body (251). This is a double irony, since it is Phaidra's death that concerns the play rather than the Nurse's, but also because death will not hide Phaidra at all. Her death will be the object of the most theatrical revelation within the play, when the doors of the house are opened to show her hanging body. 18 19

On these debates see especially Kerferd 1981 and Goldhill 1986: 222-43. On the first Hippolytos, see Barrett 1964: 10-11 and 18-22.

Speech and silence

15

With the encouragement of the Chorus, the Nurse makes another assault on Phaidra's defences (286-7). Phaidra intends to hide her trouble in silence, but if she does not speak, there can be no play. The pressure of her desire will combine with the scene's dramatic obligations to ensure that she breaks her silence. The Nurse shifts her position, appealing to Phaidra as a woman (293-6), as a friend (297-300) and as a mother (305-6), and it is in this final context that the name of Hippolytos is uttered (310). Phaidra begs for silence about him (312), but she herself can no longer keep silent. Her desire enters coherent speech when the first non-delirious word she utters is philo (315), but the object of the verb is tekna, children, as if she fights to affirm her essential respectability even while she is being led to deny it. Instead of keeping silent, she teases the Nurse with a series of partial confessions (323, 327). But she is finally trapped into explicit speech, paradoxically enough, by her longing for time (329). Within the society represented here, the acquisition of time and eukleia, honour and glory, depends in large part on the readiness of others to grant them; they are not something which can be enjoyed as it were internally, by a private self. Eukleia and the associated term kleos (fame or reputation) derive ultimately from kaleo (I call); this etymology announces that honour and glory exist in a public sphere, as a result of the speech of others. As we have already seen, women have very little part in the public sphere of Greek society; that Phaidra's desire to be spoken of approvingly by others is anomalous is vividly demonstrated by Perikles' speech in Thucydides, which states that 'the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising . . . or criticizing' (2.46). Phaidra's silence, if it is to bring her glory, must be spoken. In the same way as her attempt to die silently is made physical in her starved body, so she needs that attempt to be made public in her reputation. This is the weak point in Phaidra's defences at which the Nurse can press her attack home. Phaidra claims, by her silence, to be working honourable things out of shameful (ex xcov yaq aio%Q(bv toQXa ur]xava)u.£9a, 331); hence the Nurse can exhort her not to hide (330) but to speak and thus be revealed as more honourable (Xiyovoa xifxicaxeQa (j)avf), 332). To be revealed (in truth) or to appear (falsely); the possibilities of this use of phaino sum up Phaidra's dilemma, in that her attempt to secure the reality will leave her with only the appearance.20 Phaidra accepts the Nurse's fateful logic ('I yield', 335) and her acceptance is marked by the Nurse's silence: 'I will say no more. Yours is the word from now' (336). Her silence does not last long, for she is soon roused to speech again by Phaidra's 'word' (logos). Phaidra's logos (336) is one that 'goes forward' (probesetai, 342) and overtakes all the characters, wrecking their attempts to contain it in silence and sophrosune as it proliferates in ever more powerful and uncontrollable versions of itself. Yet at this point in the play Phaidra's logos is still aphanes 20

Loraux 1979 is an excellent exposition of the anomalies of Phaidra's position. She writes that Phaidra's death is a silence 'entouree de discours'; Phaidra thus 'vient perturber l'ordre regie du discours grec sur la mort des femmes' and installs 'sur le scene tragique la contradiction feminine du silence et de la parole' (52-3). See also Loraux 1987: 26-30.

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(hidden, from phaino, 346). Its dreadful clarity emerges only when it is given to someone else (345. 35 2 ) : PHAIDRA:

If you could say for me what I must say for myself

NURSE: YOU PHAIDRA:

mean Hippolytos? You

have spoken it, not I. These exchanges seem to be a parody of the reciprocity of 'normal' conversation, which is underlined by the stichomythic dialogue's reliance on a regular exchange of initiative between speakers. Before the Nurse reenters the house to reveal Phaidra's desire to Hippolytos, the revelation that Phaidra has to make is enacted several times; in her delirium, in the Nurse's accidental naming of Hippolytos, and finally in Phaidra's long speech to the women of Troizen. This speech is a history of attempts at concealment, namely silence and secrecy (394), sophrosune (399) and suicide (401), but it ends with the image of revelation by time and the mirror (exephene, from phaino, 428-30). The Nurse picks up this last word when, with ostensibly helpful intent, she speaks of the pharmakon for Phaidra's nosos (disease) that will appear (phanesetai from phaino, 479); the connotations of disastrous exposure remain, and undermine the Nurse's attempt to retrieve the situation. Now it is the Nurse's words, not Phaidra's, which go too far (peraprobeis 504, cf. 342). Pera is also the word used for Hippolytos' silence at 1033, and for the sentence of exile pronounced by Theseus at 1053. Hippolytos is the only character in the play who knows how to keep silent, how not to let the logos go too far, yet his attempts at concealment ensure his doom no less than Phaidra's do hers. Phaidra fears that the Nurse will appear (phaneis, from phaino, 518) too wise, which in this context connotes the fear that she will speak (520). Once the Nurse's logos is out, beyond the purely female sphere, Hippolytos too feels compelled to speak (604). His tirade is a substitute for an infringement of the oath of silence imposed in the house by the Nurse (611) but also appears to Phaidra as just such an infringement. For once he has spoken Phaidra does not believe he will not speak again, even though so far he had spoken merely among women, not to his father (690) or grandfather (retaining 691 with Murray). Yet even though he speaks only in the private female sphere, his words will still count against him. The boundaries that mark the differences between inside and outside, public and private, have been confused, and this confusion extends to the spheres of activity of male and female. Phaidra's speech in the open, and the Nurse's speech inside, have endangered the identity of both the house and Hippolytos, who in his tirade represents himself as almost physically threatened (606, 653-4). Hippolytos' speech still within the house conversely threatens its women. Even outside, Hippolytos' speech cannot find its proper place; his speech has the excessive freedom previously associated with Phaidra's delirium,

Speech and silence

17

and it results in encouraging female initiative (Phaidra's kainoi logoi, new words, 688) rather than repressing it as he had intended. The Nurse, who spoke to him only inside, in the female domain, tries to ensure that she did not thereby let the logos get out; she pretends that by speaking to him she has not already made the story public (muthos koinos, 609). To her attempts to circumscribe the publicity of the muthos Hippolytos responds just as she had to Phaidra, with the ironic suggestion that further speech will improve the situation: xd xoi xdX5 ev nolXoioi xaKkiov Xeyetv (noble things are nobler spoken among many, 610). In the end, however, Hippolytos contents himself with the tirade as a denunciatory speech and leaves intending to watch (661) rather than to speak (660). Hippolytos' promise of silence, however, has already been undermined by his threat of further angry speech (668). His tirade enjoins controlled speech and enforced silence for women, not for himself. Phaidra is driven to conclude that she can no longer hide (674) her trouble; as no friend will appear (phaneie, from phaino, 677) she has to pre-empt Hippolytos' revelation with her own, a revelation that will conceal the true nature of her distress. Two different oaths of silence conspire in Hippolytos' death. Phaidra silences the Nurse (706) and swears the Chorus to secrecy ('wrap in silence', 712) in preparation for silencing herself in death. The Chorus will not break their oath; since to do so would have saved Hippolytos (if not Phaidra) they too, like the central characters, can be accused of not knowing timely speech, and their oath, like Hippolytos' to the Nurse, will share responsibility for his death. As well as silencing them, Phaidra also reveals to the Chorus her (second) decision to die (723); they cry 'be euphemos' (724), shocked by her inauspicious words. Euphemos is a term that means not only 'using auspicious speech', but also simply 'silent'. Phaidra will simultaneously fulfil and break the Chorus's injunction; she will silence herself in death but continue, by means of the letter, to employ deadly speech. Phaidra disappears (aphantos, from phaino, 828) halfway through the play; in the second half the anomalous activity of her delirium, both revealing and concealing, is continued by her letter. The opening of the tablet is represented as a revelation, rehearsing that of Phaidra's body behind the doors, but it also functions as a concealment, distorting the narrative that led up to her death.21 Theseus' first reaction to Phaidra's death is the wish to hide himself beneath the ground (836-7), an image that Artemis echoes with approval at 1290. The letter, which Theseus expected to reflect his assumptions about his family (858-61), instead discloses a very different state of affairs. Theseus does not content himself with revealing (ekphaineis) the 'prelude of ruin' (881), nor does he long hide his grievance in silence as Hippolytos complains (911-15). Despite his awareness of the fragility of human understanding, which leads to his wish for a philon tekmerion (a test or proof of friends) and for a second truthful voice (925-31), Theseus is nonetheless able to believe that Hippolytos has been plainly (emphanos^ 945) exposed as a hypocrite, the object of clear sight and unobstructed knowledge. The death of Phaidra outweighs even the most 21

See also Zeitlin 1985a: 76 on the homologies between letter and woman.

18

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powerful words (960-1), including the oaths and prophecies that Hippolytos will appeal to in the agon, and allows credence only to her own words in the letter. No matter how far Hippolytos 'unfolds' (985) the matter, he cannot reveal the truth, since he is silenced by his own oath. He endeavours several times to complicate his father's understanding by referring to this silence and making it active in his defence, in the phrases 'you have heard now all I have to say, except one thing' (1021);22 'to speak further than this I have no right' (1033); 'why do I not unlock my lips' (1060). But his efforts are unavailing. Suggesting the gaps in his father's narrative ('it is for you to show what cause corrupted me', 1008) only exposes his own painful inability to take account of others' pride and self-esteem (1014-15). Theseus allows neither the time (1051), which would reveal the truth about Hippolytos as it will about Phaidra (428), nor the various forms of language such as oaths, pledges and the words of prophets (1055), which could override the equivocating letter. Hippolytos is reduced to the words ei kakos.. .phainomai ('if I am seen as/seem evil', 1071). Like Phaidra before him, he is caught in the paradox of the play's language of revelation. There is a short ode between the end of the agon and the appearance of the Messenger. The Messenger's speech reworks the theme of revelation and concealment in the description of the huge wave that blots out the landscape (1207-8) and the bull that disappears along with Hippolytos' horses (1247-8). The play's concern with language is made material in, and at the same time reduced to, the monstrous apparition which in place of speech and silence produces a threatening roar (1201, 1215) and a menacing quiet (1231). The final revelation is that of Artemis. She makes all things clear; the obscure (aphane 1289, cf. 346) words of Theseus' wife have led to his all too evident doom (phaneran aten, 1289). She comes to redeem Hippolytos, to 'show' (ekdeixai, 1298) him rather than to let him merely 'seem', and to restore to him the acclamation of others that is eukleia (1299). Although later in her speech Artemis admits that his guilt is mitigated by his circumstances (1326, 1335, 1433), Theseus is revealed (phainei fromphaino, 1320) as kakos (evil). Hippolytos is finally revealed as gennaios (noble, 1452), but the play ends with him concealing himself, withdrawing into his garments (1458) as Phaidra had shrouded herself in her veil on her first appearance. Phaidra usurps the gesture of the first Hippolytos (Kaluptomenos), hiding in response to her own shameless words, while the first Hippolytos had veiled himself in response to another's (that first Phaidra's). This second Hippolytos now reclaims the gesture, hiding himself not in shame but in death. The closing lines of the Nurse's first speech (191-7), which make a particularly resonant use of the language of concealment and revelation, can be read as a synthesis of the play's themes and a prophecy of its development. The Nurse suggests that we do not know what may be better than this life because darkness shrouds possible alternatives in clouds (192) and there is no apodeixis (show, proof, 196) of what is under the earth. Because of this cloud of 22

Barrett 1964 reads this 'one thing' as referring solely to the oath which Hippolytos is about to take.

Speech and silence

19

unknowing we are carried away by muthoi, bywords: 'Idly we drift, on idle stories carried.5 In the course of these explorations of the Hippolytos we shall see how this line can be read to represent the experience of every character. The Nurse's words quoted above also suggest that concealment may be aligned with darkness and revelation with light. For instance, revelation is often described as 'showing to the light'. Such revelation to the light can be disastrous, as at 368 and 714. However, it is also true that to 'see the light' is a synonym for being alive (907, 1023, 1163, 1193). The phrase is often used almost ironically, to refer to the dead or dying (as at 57 and 355). The choice presented to Phaidra in 178, the choice between the brightness outside and the shade within, can thus again be seen to translate as between life or death as well as between revelation and concealment. These connections between light and dark and life and death lend further significance to Hippolytos' accusation against Zeus, the charge that he brought women 'into the light of the sun' (617). Women are brought to life and light, but their appearance, according to Hippolytos, has the disastrous results of the other revelations to the light in the play. Moreover, their creation 'into the light' assigns them to what is according to the divisions of the play the wrong sphere, that of masculinity and speech. As in the archaic discourse that is associated with the works of Hesiod and Semonides, the second, belated creation of women has the effect of disrupting the certainties of masculinity and of language that supposedly existed before their appearance.23 Hippolytos endeavours to speak as if from a time and a place before the creation of women when he uses anthropoi, the word for humans in general, to mean andres, males, as if there were no women to complicate his usage (616); he denies sexual differentiation in language as he deplores it in life. The light of the sun is invoked as a witness to various acts and speeches. Hippolytos calls on the rays of the sun to introduce his tirade (601), Phaidra to witness her lack of speech or other means of salvation (672). At 993 Hippolytos again calls on the earth and the light, claiming that there is nobody within them more sophron than he. Later, at 1100—1, he makes a similar claim when he tells his followers that they will never see a more sophron man. Hippolytos' pronouncements on his sophrosune always take the form of a categorical statement (cf. 1365); he imagines his sophrosune as transparent and self-evident, in no way reliant on or constituted by relations with others. The gaze of others is absent from his conception of himself, while it is a continuous presence for Phaidra. Yet it is Hippolytos who is reduced to a seeming (1071) when others' perception of his worth overrides his own. The gaze of others appears at many significant junctures in the play, particularly in the form of'witnessing' or of'looking in the 23

On the second, belated creation of women see Loraux 1978 and 1981a. Pucci 1976: 100-1 suggests that with woman (Pandora) was born the possibility of speech, specifically of rhetoric; presumably before Pandora men spoke a univocal language identical to the world it described. On the archaic understanding of the relationship between women and language, see Bergren 1985.

20

Speech and silence

face'.24 It is intimately connected with the speech of others, which as we have seen constitutes reputation or eukleia, both for Greek society in general and for this particular play.

The gaze Hippolytos' career as object of desire begins, according to Aphrodite's account in the prologue, when he leaves his grandfather's house to go to see the mysteries (25). While he is there, Phaidra's gaze falls on him (idousa, 27) and she falls in love. The eye was for the Greeks the seat of desire, and the gaze was always responsible for the instant of erotic capitulation. In a play which actively concerns itself with the nature and effects of desire (these will be further investigated in chapter 2), the gaze will be significant, a marker of the moments of shame and transgression as well as of the onset of passion. The gaze in the Hippolytos is never transparent or incidental; in the encounters between male and female and between father and son it can be seen to dramatise the relations of power that structure these exchanges. In this way it reproduces the polarities and hierarchies that I am already investigating in this chapter. It can also be argued that if the gaze is a basic theatrical resource, like staging and plot, its textual articulation in the Hippolytos transforms it into a bearer of meaning as well. The theatre is the location of an institutionalised exchange of gazes {theasomai, I watch, gaze), which can implicate not only the characters on stage in their relations to one another but also the audience who watch. The little narrative of eyes and desire that Aphrodite tells is significant for its setting; religious events are typically the scenes of romantic beginnings, as they furnish the only occasions when Athenian women can respectably be seen outdoors. The fourth-century New Comedy's plots of thwarted romance always begin with a sighting of a woman by a man at a festival. The important difference in this story is that the woman is source and not object of the gaze; the temple that Phaidra builds is a monument to her gaze as it 'looks across' (katopsion, 30), annihilating the distance between Phaidra in Athens and Hippolytos in Troizen. In contrast, the gaze is specifically described as absent from Hippolytos' relationship with Artemis (85-6): I am with you and to your words can answer words. True, I may only hear: I may not see God face to face. Its absence is especially marked if, as is possible, Hippolytos faces a statue of Artemis as he makes this claim. His overvaluation of this incomplete relationship points up his corresponding undervaluation of relations with ordinary mortals. 24

On witnesses, see Segal 1970: 291, Turato 1976: 161, 164 and i73ff., Luschnig 1980: 96, and Zeitlin 1985a: 91-2. Among ancient writers on the possibility of practising virtue even when unseen, Segal cites Antiphon fr. 44DK, Kritias fr. 5-15DK and Plato Republic 359d~36oe (the Gyges narrative). Avery 1968: 27 points out that 'looking in the face' is equivalent to looking on the surface, and links the theme to that of the preoccupation with inside and outside.

Speech and silence

21

His gesture of withdrawal to communion with another world is answered in the next scene by Phaidra's withdrawal from this world's transactions of food and language.25 Phaidra's solitude is given voice in the delirium; she imagines herself in solitary places far from the normal sites of the female role. Yet even so she cannot completely withdraw; her words are too public, witnessed by too many (213)-

The gaze is further at issue in the scene between Phaidra and the Nurse. The veiling of Phaidra's head is a withdrawal from the gaze of others. The eyes that she must especially avoid are those of Theseus, the husband and father whose gaze could find out her illness even if she were unwilling to speak (280). At present he is away from the scene and so discovery is prevented (281), but later she will speak more deliberately about hiding from his sight (414-21, 720-1). At 280 Theseus is described as looking into Phaidra's face; further on in the play his is the face before which all have to appear (416, 662, 720, 946-7). The gaze of the husband and father is represented as especially powerful and piercing; everything becomes transparent before it, and it possesses a uniquely immediate access to the truth. In the agon, Theseus himself will rely, mistakenly, on the supposed power and accuracy of his gaze (943, 946-7), which will form the basis for his claim to judge Hippolytos and will prevent him from seeking further testimony. In the same way as Theseus perceives himself to possess an unmediated gaze, so he will wish for an unmediated language, the second truthful voice which is to be aphilon tekmerion, a test or proof of friends, but he will receive instead the immediate power of Poseidon's curse. Now, since Theseus is not present to comprehend Phaidra's illness with his gaze, the Nurse calls on the Chorus instead to witness her attempt on Phaidra's silence. The emphasis in the play on the sight and voice of others has often been explained in the critical literature in terms of the analysis of character, as a personal fault in Phaidra and an index of her unthinking adherence to convention; the claim is that she is too willing to value reputation over all else and too eager to confound reality and appearance.26 Yet the separation that she can make in 317 between her hands, which are unsullied, and her heart, which is not, ought to show that she is free from that particular error. But that is not the point. Although Phaidra's desire for honour and glory are, as we have seen, anomalous, her consciousness of the gaze of others, especially of males, is part of her adult female's understanding of herself. As Berger writes (1977: 46-7): A woman must continually watch herself... Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women, but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male, the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object. 25

26

Phaidra's decision to withdraw from speech and food perhaps recalls that of the mourning Achilles. Patrokles accuses Achilles of being born of the sea at Iliad 16.33-5, a n d the Nurse accuses Phaidra of being harder than the sea (304-5). Strictures on Phaidra's conventionality are many; see e.g. Pohlenz 1954, Conacher 1961, Segal 1970, Reckford 1974 and Rivier 1975.

22

Speech and silence

Phaidra's preoccupation with the ubiquitous gaze arises from the fact that she is constructed as the object of male sight and speech, and can have no existence that is autonomous, without reference to a male. Fifth-century Athenian women were perpetual minors, in the guardianship at the different periods of their lives of father, husband, and son. Even the extreme seclusion of Athenian women defines them as objects of sight, namely as object of one man's gaze as they are properly objects only of one man's desire. Conversely, women may look only at one man; Medea cries (Medea, 244-47) If a man grows tired Of the company at home, he can go out, and find A cure for tediousness. We wives are forced to look To one man only. The woman herself does not possess a gaze except in so far as she hides it (e.g. 246) or falls impermissibly in love. We have seen how Phaidra is trapped into confession by the paradox that her silence must be made speech if she is to gain time, despite the Periklean prohibition on speech about women. In some ways she needs to be spoken about specifically by men, in spite of Perikles; only male speech can legitimise a woman, as it can also powerfully condemn.27 If the nobility of Phaidra's silence had been known only to women, there would have been no play; a male has to be introduced for women's speech to matter, to make a difference.28 After falling into the trap set by the Nurse, Phaidra is again trapped in her speech to the women of Troizen; she wishes not to escape notice when doing noble deeds, nor to have many witnesses when she acts shamefully (403-4). Ultimately, despite her manifold attempts, the control of others' gazes as well as of others' speech escapes her. The gaze, and especially the male gaze, continues to inform Phaidra's long speech. When, describing herself as a woman, she claims that she is a misema pasin (object of hatred to all, 407), she seems thereby to speak as if men were all there is, as we have seen Hippolytos try to do in the tirade. Phaidra reserves her hatred specifically for the adulteress (413), with whom she can be seen to identify. Even though Phaidra/the adulteress has avoided having many witnesses, she cannot meet her husband's gaze without the fear that a voiceless witness may emerge in the house walls (417-18): how can they look frankly in the faces of their husbands and never shiver with fear lest their accomplice, the darkness, and the rafters of the house take voice and cry aloud? 27 28

See Loraux 1979, particularly the epitaphs to wives that she cites. While I was writing this, I happened to see a copy of Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers. T h e passage on p . 68 is remarkably apposite: 'A play with only women? I don't understand how that could work. I mean, what could h a p p e n ? ' . . . 'Well, you could have a play about two women who had only just met sitting

Speech and silence

23

We may note that all the characters at some point invoke voiceless witnesses, witnesses that manage to confound silence and speech. The voice of the house walls is impersonal, the voice of an inhuman other, and is perhaps related to the second, truthful voice of which Theseus dreams in the agon. In the absence of the accusing voice of the walls, Phaidra can transmit eukleia to her children (423). The woman can thus hand on eukleia, the approving language of others, to men, who in speech or silence remain the final authority on a woman's worth. Eukleia, parrhesia and the paternal house are thus three properties that Phaidra can transmit but cannot herself possess. Phaidra has difficulty not only with the gaze of others but also with her own. Her speech to the women of Troizen closes with the strange lines on time and the mirror: 'time reveals the evil among mortals, holding up a mirror as to a young girl; among which may I never be seen'. I offer this awkward translation in order to bring out the difficulty of the passage; published translations smooth out the lines and render them less complex. So at one point in her speech Phaidra is the adulteress transfixed by her husband's gaze (415-17), but at the next moment she looks in the mirror and sees - what? A kake (428) or & parthenos nea (young girl/virgin, 429)? Phaidra's lines on the mirror are, appropriately, a point of opacity in the text; they do not yield to a final analysis but set up an endless play of reflections. Time reveals the kakoi, but it does its work of revelation by holding up a mirror, as to a young girl. Phaidra does not wish to be seen among the kakoi (430), but her words 'may I never be seen', UJIJTOT' 6(()6eir]v, are problematic, for they beg the question by whom Phaidra is to be seen. For while time reveals the kakoi to others, the mirror reveals the parthenos, who may also be a kake, to herself. Even Phaidra's own gaze becomes that of the other when it constructs her image of herself as she looks in the mirror. Moreover, neither time nor the mirror can show her as she is, for she is neither a fully fledged kake (adulteress?), nor any longer a parthenos nea. If time shows the parthenos to herself as a kake, she is by definition no longer a parthenos, but spoiled by the work of time. But alternatively, if time inevitably reduces the parthenos to a kake, then the appearance of the parthenos here will be Phaidra's nostalgia for the innocence which she has lost. The parthenos is the supreme object of desire, as the wife, the gune, is not. Phaidra's gaze cannot find her among the choices that the mirror presents; it cannot reveal her to herself.29 Phaidra's gaze in the mirror is the opposite of Theseus' powerful gaze; instead of obtaining direct access to the truth she suffers further confusion. But she is herself an unstable, ultimately unknown object; the ending of the play cannot decide between her madness and her nobility (oistros and gennaiotes, 1300-1). Veiling her head, she appears in the second of two plays, in the first of which she was unveiled, clearly seen and judged, if we can accept the Aristophanic 29

on a balcony talking,' ... 'Oh yes. But they're probably waiting for a man ... When he arrives they'll stop talking and go indoors. Something will happen.' On the mirror see especially Willink 1968: 26, Pigeaud 1976: 14-16, and Zeitlin 1985a: 95 and 99-100. Pigeaud and Zeitlin seek to associate the mirror and time with the female's access to self-knowledge, but Phaidra seems to me to experience here more confusion than clarity.

24

Speech and silence

reactions, as a kake. The difficulty that Phaidra has recognising herself in the mirror is here displaced into the audience that seeks to comprehend her. The disturbing resonances set up by time and the mirror show that Phaidra can control her own gaze no more than she can that of others. Unlike the Nurse's sophoi (463, 466) she cannot ensure when she will have witnesses and when not. In his tirade, Hippolytos represents himself as more firmly in control. He would cut women off from the transactions of language and desire (645-50) and arrogate to himself the function of speech (658). Instead of speaking, however, on this occasion he will watch, and he will watch how Phaidra and the Nurse meet Theseus' gaze (661-2). Hippolytos will take on the role of silent witness; the women are to become the object of a doubled male gaze, that of Hippolytos as well as that of Theseus, and in the play of gazes their guilt is to be revealed. In the event, however, Hippolytos' staging of this confrontation will be usurped and reversed by Phaidra. Not only his oath but her letter too will silence him. He will become, not the subject but the object of a knowing gaze (943), and this gaze will be not his but Theseus'. Phaidra will be the silent but all-powerful witness (972), as well as the 'sight' (thea> 809) that will compel both men. Phaidra initiates this reversal of power relations in the speech that follows Hippolytos' tirade. Since she does not believe in Hippolytos' promise of silence at 660 (as Theseus will later disbelieve his second oath), she prepares to pre-empt his denunciation with her own. Since he has removed the possibility of eukleia for herself and her children (687, 717), she will deprive him similarly. Her words will prove more eloquent than Hippolytos or his silence, reversing the usual relations of power between the sexes, and the bull's voice, not his, will fill the land (692, 1215). Finally Theseus enters, a theoros who expects the voice of others, here the house at 792-3, to confirm him in his position of superiority. Theoros can mean both one who consults an oracle and one who attends a festival or performance; Theseus sheds his theoric garland on receipt of the tragic news but remains a 'spectator' of his wife's body. In the complex encounter that she has constructed, she is enabled both to speak to him and to remain silent, to meet his gaze and to avoid it. Hippolytos has sinned and dishonoured the eye of Zeus (886), the most powerful father of all; the paternal gaze will later confirm Hippolytos in his subordinate position as suitably punished incestuous sinner (1265).30 Hippolytos is also punished by the voice of the father, here doubled in both Theseus' sentence and Poseidon's curse. With good reason, then, does he fear the denunciatory voice of the other (932-4) and call it a disease. Hippolytos suddenly becomes the cynosure of all eyes (943). He is examined in the presence, or sight, of his victim (jiQog xfjg 0avcvuar]c; 944-5) and required to meet his father's gaze (947), that gaze which so far has only been described, in its absence, as something to be shunned, but which is now made unavoidably physical and present on the stage. In Theseus' eyes Hippolytos has been definitively 'seen through'; Theseus posits for him the disjunction between 30

The paternal gaze is sometimes cited in Greek sources, such as SoyhoWts Ajax 462-5 and Plato Symposium i78d, as a marker of the son's acute shame.

Speech and silence

25

appearance and reality, between language and self, that has in fact produced Phaidra's letter. Hippolytos threatened such a separation at 612 when he said to the Nurse, repudiating her claims on him: 'My tongue swore, but my mind was still unpledged', but he did not carry out his threat. Hippolytos repeatedly claims that he is one (monos, 12, 84) and the same (hautos, 1001), sophron all the way through, but here his father's accusations can split and double him, to the extent that he desires such a doubling or separation himself (1078-9). Oh, I could wish to stand apart and view myself, To shed tears for this hopeless fate that crushes me! These lines are a striking invocation of a gaze that, by doubling its subject, would achieve the reciprocity and equality that is denied to the forbiddingly unilateral gazes in the rest of the play. This impossible gaze would also be the opposite of the one that Phaidra found in the mirror, where her gaze could not return her to herself but seemed to present her with an unresolvable choice between the kake and the parthenos. The claims that Hippolytos makes for himself in the agon are without the benefit of the voice of others, and so Theseus can call them empty boasts (950). Theseus, on the other hand, does not have to boast, for he enjoys the acclamation of further voiceless witnesses in the locations of his heroic deeds (976-80). But Phaidra is the central witness to which he appeals; hers is the denunciatory Voice' and accusing 'gaze' of the martus saphestatos (clearest witness, 972). At this point in the play the terms that Theseus uses have become heavily charged. To call a corpse to witness is obviously and painfully ironic, but it is the logical conclusion of Hippolytos' proposed staging of the encounter and of Phaidra's inversion of his plan. The corpse can also be counted among the several inanimate objects that are called upon as witnesses in the course of the play. Saphestatos, in this context, is also highly perverse; no communication could be more complex and obscure than the conjunction of Phaidra and her mendacious letter. Furthermore, the word has a significant history within the play. The Nurse first uses it in connection with Phaidra's delirium (346), and Phaidra laments that the ambiguous word aidos is not saphes (386). The Chorus, in the scene of eavesdropping outside the door, cry iav \ikv xWw, oacj>8c; 6' crux 8xco (I hear the sound, but nothing clearly, 585), so that the word here marks the distinction between sound and meaning that remains a recurrent problem for all the characters. Finally, Theseus longs for a tekmerion saphes (925-6) that would enable him to distinguish between true and false friends; the tekmerion is to work by introducing a distinction between voices. All of these uses of the term saphes, then, involve a wish for special distinctions in language, which in the course of the play prove to be untenable. Hippolytos' defence against the martus saphestatos is to appeal repeatedly to his sophrosune, for which he claims a self-sufficiency beyond the voice of others (cf. 995). He has denied the gaze in his rejection of sexuality and his excessive autonomy, and he pays in the agon for this omission. He further describes his

26

Speech and silence

gaze at 1004-5, m language that draws the transactions of sexuality into the sphere of those of speech and sight: Save what I have heard or what I have seen in pictures, I'm ignorant of the deed. Nor do I wish to see such things, for I've a maiden soul. Because of his previous self-sufficiency, Hippolytos can call on no 'other' that is not himself; the witness that he wants is one like himself (1022). In the absence of this voice he too is forced to call on inanimate objects, the house walls that are to witness for his character as they did his oath (1074-5). Theseus blindly accuses him of calling on voiceless witnesses, unable to see that he himself relies on the testimony of a corpse and a letter. Hippolytos' final wish, as we have seen, is to look himself in the face (1078). At 1028 Hippolytos prays that his guilt, if such it is, be proved by a death that occurs without the acclamation of others: 'may I die/unfamed, unknown, a homeless stateless beggar'. The only voices that will in fact speak to Theseus on Hippolytos' behalf are those of the Messenger and of Artemis, whose final intervention will ironically underline his estrangement from humankind. As Artemis vindicates him and confirms his maligned virtue, Hippolytos calls on the eye of Zeus (1363; Theseus at 886 accused him of dishonouring this eye). He has no nearer eye to invoke. Artemis awards him eukleia in the song of the brides, in a justification both of his reputation and of female speech. What she awards Theseus and Phaidra remains doubtful, since she gives an ambiguous assessment of both; Phaidra is both mad and noble (1300-1), Theseus is guilty but pardonable (1325-6). The gaze of the goddess, by which Hippolytos feels his suffering lightened (1391-2), is gradually withdrawn (1396, 1437-8); instead Hippolytos calls her to witness his reconciliation with his father (1451) and finally withdraws from sight into his cloak (1458).

Desire

In the previous chapter I investigated the ways in which speech and silence correspond to other polarities which can be seen to structure the Hippolytos and to produce its dense and complex verbal texture. In this chapter I elaborate a tension between speech and silence in the play's discourse on the nature and effects of desire. Some of the most significant theoretical work of this century has been the construction of a theory of desire; I refer of course to Freud, whose writings established the centrality of desire in a theory of the development and structure of the individual subject. Lacan, in his rereading of Freud, argues that accession to desire (through the successful negotiation of the Oedipal crisis) and accession to language are linked parts of that submission to the 'symbolic order' that is necessary for the formation of the individual. Here the 'symbolic order' is understood as the societal demands and expectations that antedate the subject and determine the subject's existence: 'even before his birth, the individual is caught up in and completely assimilated into a causal chain of which he can never be any more than an effect' (Lemaire 1977: 182). The work of Girard is also in large part a theory of desire, specifically of the mimesis of desire that leads to violence. Such violence finds its simultaneous repression and expression in various cultural forms and representations (see further chapter 3). Barthes, in A Lover's Discourse (1978), submitted the workings of desire to a semiotic analysis such as he had already deployed to investigate fashion, cookery and other apparently 'natural' practices. Many of the prominent theorists of this century have thus taken on the task of denaturalising desire and of analysing what we might call the 'desiring subject'; this is the term used by Foucault in The Use ofPleasure (1987), his study of the moral 'problematisation' of desire in the fourth century BC. Foucault's work is somewhat tangential to the study I am undertaking here, both because of its historical termini and because he is concerned with 'an activity in the exercise of its power and the practice of its liberty' (1987: 23). To this end he mainly analyses prescriptive rather than figurative texts such as the tragedies. His work can be seen as the logical outcome of the earlier theorising, even though his specific project is to reconstruct and site the desiring subject in history. 27

28

Desire

For the Greeks, desire, or eros, was placed under the sign of Aphrodite, like the Hippolytos itself, and the activities of desire were known as ta aphrodisia. Desire was thus in some sense divine, and the gods were represented as being among its most energetic practitioners. The divine status of desire made it available for celebration in various contexts, for instance in the civic activities of festivals and the graphic representations on ceramics. But as a divine entity, desire is not exclusively a cause for celebration; it is perceived as something outside the individual subject, which can be violent and hostile and, as in this play, can take hold forcefully and, in the end, irresistibly. Desire is frequently referred to in Greek sources as a pain, disease or madness.1 Aphrodite is more powerful even than Zeus, a fact to which speakers on both tragic and comic stage frequently draw attention. Zeus memorably succumbs to the power of desire in the Seduction scene of Iliad 14 and, significantly, the Iliad and Odyssey were the most important sources of moral instruction for the fifth century. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite again celebrates the goddess's power over the gods and all other living creatures; its vocabulary, especially 1-6, can be seen to be reproduced in the Hippolytos by the Nurse. At lines 252-5 of the Homeric Hymn even Aphrodite laments that she has been afflicted by her own proprietary madness, and the terrifying aspect of the goddess, the potential violence of her onslaught, is also suggested by her birth in Hesiod's Theogony, where she is said to spring from the severed genitals of Ouranos (190-206). In this poem Eros appears as one of the oldest gods; 'fairest among the deathless gods, [he] unnerves the limbs and overcomes the minds and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them' (120-2, Loeb translation). With the latter lyric poets desire becomes a more personal theme, although it need not lose any of its terrors. Segal writes of the lyric eros as 'an amoral force heedless of social and moral order, constancy, or tenderness, cruelly shattering lives' (1981: 81). Sappho's best-known poem takes the form of a description of the terrors of eros: but my lips are stricken to silence, underneath my skin the tenuous flame suffuses; nothing shows in front of my eyes, my ears are muted in thunder. And the sweat breaks running upon me, fever shakes my body, paler I turn than grass is; I can feel that I have been changed, I feel that death has come near me. (trans. Lattimore) The work of Sappho can serve to remind us that desire in the Greek understanding was the same force, for good or bad, whether its object was homo- or heterosexual. But Sappho's poetry also displays desire in its educative 1

As in Prodikos' definition, fragment B7 in Diels-Kranz. See also Dodds 1951: 41 and Dover 1974:77, 125,205-13.

Desire

29

role, as a means to draw together people of different ages and statuses.2 This perception of desire is usually confined to relationships between people of the same sex, and reaches its apotheosis in the erotic theorising of Plato, as in the Phaedros. Plato is antiquity's most indefatigable theorist of desire; in the Symposium, which has a dramatic date of 416, he reproduces several different discourses on desire, among which Aristophanes' definition - desire as a nostalgic longing for a lost and impossible plenitude - reminds us forcefully of the similar images mobilised by twentieth-century theorists. In the Symposium, however, Plato ultimately assigns to eros a creative and productive role which is strikingly at odds with the perceptions more commonly represented in our sources, especially in tragedy. The fifth-century tragic stage is the site of the enacted transgression and disruption of many of its society's explicit norms and expectations. The tragedies constitute a relentless display of the dislocation and destruction of individual, oikos and even on occasion polis, together with the modes of thought that sustain them. This celebration of disaster often gives prominence to eros as a disruptive motive force, and specifically to the female as the incarnation of asociality. Hymns in praise and in fear of Aphrodite appear as a frequent refrain in the tragedies. In the Suppliant Women of Aischylos, the Danaids, daughters of Danaos, flee from the violent pursuit of the Egyptians who want to marry them by force, but are warned (1034-42) not to deny the claims of Aphrodite; a fragment indicates that the goddess herself appears, at the end of the trilogy, to eulogise the power of eros? In Sophokles' Antigone an ode to eros heralds Antigone's departure to her death (781-801), claiming that the grip of his [eros'] madness Spares not god or man, Marring therighteousman, Driving his soul into mazes of sin And strife, dividing a house. (788-94) In Sophokles' Trachiniai, desire is responsible not only for Herakles' infatuation with Iole and the subsequent destruction of her city (354-65, 431-3), but also for Deianeira's unwitting murder of her husband. Hence the Chorus's song at 497-506, of which the opening lines are: Oh great and unconquerable Aphrodite Hers is the power and hers the victory In every battlefield. Perhaps the insistence on the power and inevitability of eros is most marked in the Euripidean plays, which also give corresponding prominence to the other irrational forces in human existence, to madness itself, and to the social and political institutions that these forces are bound to destroy. The Euripidean preoccupation with the desiring female is frequently the ground for the com2

See also Calame 1977: 411-19.

3

See Seaford 1987: 116.

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plaints voiced in Aristophanes, by the assembled women of the Thesmophoriazousai (e.g. 383-417) and by Aischylos in the Frogs (1043-55). I*1 t n e Medea there are frequent references to Medea's earlier love for Jason, to the marital bed and to women's attachment to it (265-6, 527-31, 567-73), and the Chorus pray to be spared the onslaughts of desire that led to Medea's dependence on Jason and have eventually proved her downfall (627-30): Visitations of love that come Raging and violent on a man Bring him neither good repute nor goodness. The anxiety about desire that such texts register can be seen to extend at times to anxiety about the terms in which desire is to be articulated. In the Trojan Women Helen invokes the power of Aphrodite in order to exonerate herself from the charge of adultery, claiming that she cannot have been at fault in yielding to a force stronger than herself (946-50): What happened in my heart, to make me leave my home And my own land, to follow where a stranger led? Rail at the goddess; be more resolute than Zeus, Who holds power over all other divinities But is himself the slave of love. Show Aphrodite Your indignation; me, pardon and sympathy. Helen speaks a traditional discourse on desire, but Hekabe seizes the opportunity to demolish her definitions, and denies that desire has any divine sanction (987-90): No; Paris was an extremely handsome man - one look, And your appetite became your Aphrodite. Why, Men's lawless lusts are all called love - it's a confusion Easily made. The figure of Helen is again the site of an argument about the relation between desire and language in another contemporary source, Gorgias' Encomium of Helen. 'Force majeure' is again invoked in Helen's favour, but the irresistible forces operating in Gorgias' account are not only desire but also the word, the language of persuasion. This chapter will be concerned to investigate the relationships between desire and language that can be read in the Hippolytos, itself perhaps the most elaborate anatomy of desire in the Euripidean corpus.

Desire speaking and speaking desire A central feature of desire in the Hippolytos is its propensity to perpetuate itself irresistibly in speech, which then escapes the control of the speaker.4 My analysis will concentrate on the aspects of desire that make it into a generator of narrative 4

As Knox notes (1952: 16), '[speech] is presented ... as an explosive force, which, once released, cannot be restrained and which creates universal destruction'. This observation has aroused

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and a threat to any form of institutional containment or closure. As we have seen, desire was considered by the Greeks as a form of violence, and the following chapter proceeds with an analysis of the representation of violence within the play. I intend to establish that the play's related discourses on desire and violence are articulated in terms of silence and speech, which come to stand for containment and escape, for closure and denial of closure. In the fourth chapter I shall consider how the play offers various models of language that are structured by conflict between stability and instability of meaning and communication. These investigations will enable us, in the final chapter, to explore the ending of the Hippolytos, which reformulates these questions of desire, violence and language as problems for the play itself as well as for the society within which it is produced. Desire has been largely silenced in the critical literature on the play; for instance Glenn, when analysing the specifically erotic content of Phaidra's delirium, writes 'The sexual symbolism of the passage, though casually touched upon by Knox (1952) and Segal (1964), has otherwise been ignored or rejected' (1976: 435-6). 5 In the play itself, however, desire continually appears as an active initiating force. In Aphrodite's prologue, two references to Phaidra's passion frame one to Hippolytos' death. The fates of the two protagonists are equally prominent in Aprodite's speech, which breaks down as follows: 1-9 the nature of the goddess; 10-23 Hippolytos' crime and the plans for his punishment; 24-42 the history and present state of Phaidra's passion; 43-6 how Hippolytos will die; 47-50 how Phaidra will die; 51-7 Aphrodite sees Hippolytos approaching and describes his entrance. The two protagonists thus occupy an almost identical number of lines in the prologue, and Phaidra's desire is established from the beginning as an element of as much importance to the 'subject' or 'plot' of the play as is Hippolytos' downfall. The career of this desire manifests itself in instances of speech, silence, and of a tension between the two. When characters speak, they speak, either directly or indirectly, of Phaidra's desire; when they are silent, it is that desire which they suppress. A brief synopsis of the play can bear out this claim. Phaidra speaks first in a delirium brought into being by the conflict between the urgency of her desire

5

surprisingly little interest in subsequent commentators. While recent studies have taken note of the importance of'communication' and its absence in the Hippolytos (e.g. Murray 1965: 89; Stahl 1977: 166—8), little work has been done on the nature of speech itself except for the studies of Turato 1976, Zeitlin 1985a and now Rabinowitz 1987. This is not to say that critics fail to recognise Phaidra's desire or to examine its workings. More frequently, however, discussion of the role of desire has been limited to identifying the poles of passion and chastity which the divine and human characters supposedly embody and between which the play supposedly turns; see e.g. the analyses of Wilamowitz 1889, Meridier 1931 and Pohlenz 1954. To remove the conflict between these forces from the play as a whole and to place it within Phaidra, as do Crocker 1957 and Winnington-Ingram i960, is perhaps psychologically more plausible but has the disadvantage of producing a lopsided play. In any case, discussion of the language generated by desire is usually confined to the delirium scene. I regret that I did not see Nancy Rabinowitz's article (1987) until this study was in the final stages of completion. Her work gives a good account of the relations between Phaidra's speech and her sexuality, but her conclusions finally differ from mine.

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which demands to be expressed in speech, and the equally strong constraints that require shame and silence. Once her desire enters into speech, the Nurse takes it up and communicates it to Hippolytos; the effect of this is at once to compel him to go into the open air and to break into speech - speech about (female) desire (604). Phaidra then fears his further speech, the revelation of her desire to Theseus (689-92) and thus takes steps to pre-empt this revelation by substituting for the true story of her desire the fiction of Hippolytos' passion. This fiction, as represented in the letter, attributes to Hippolytos a mirror-image of her own transgression, in which the active and passive roles are inverted. Phaidra's desire is thus suppressed both by this distortion and by Hippolytos' oath of silence, which he refuses to break (1062-3) despite earlier threats (604). The 'true story' thus lies dormant until Artemis resurrects it. Meanwhile the false story becomes the subject of the agon between Theseus and Hippolytos, so that both men conspire, the one knowingly, the other not, to preserve the silence surrounding Phaidra's desire. The play can thus be read as a series of articulations of desire in speech and of attempts to silence it. From this brief synopsis it is further evident that desire not only manifests itself through speech but also actively generates it. Desire is represented as restless and mobile; it sets narratives into motion and resists attempts at silencing and suppression.6 Even after the end of the play, Phaidra's desire will inspire the song of the brides and will be neither silent nor nameless (1429-30). Within the play, at the end of his tirade, Hippolytos claims that unless women learn sophronein (to be chaste, 667) he will never stop talking about them. Their desire will ceaselessly generate his speech, which, in the tirade at least, is itself characterised by a lack of control. Desire is characterised in this play by a tension between speech and silence; the impulse to revelation must be constantly counteracted by the need for concealment. The exigencies of drama evidently require that narratives be generated by an imbalance in favour of speech; the result is that silence appears in the play less as an absence of words than as a distortion and displacement of language.7 Zeitlin writes (1985a: 85) 'the secret of Aphrodite ... arousing simultaneous desire for its fulfillment and its repression, necessarily recodes language into the double entendre . . . it, like desire itself, cannot be contained but instead finds devious paths of language . . . ' This phenomenon can best be observed in the delirium scene. Phaidra's delirium is a highly complex speech act; Zeitlin writes of its 'impossible ambiguities' (1985a: 110). The first thing to note is that by its own imperatives it must not be analysed; it actively resists interpretation, for its 6

7

See Padel 1983: 14-15 and her references on desire, particularly adulterous or otherwise illegitimate desire, as a generator of narrative. Knox, I think, falls into a trap of presenting speech and silence as always and only alternatives, rather than considering their interaction. Hence he cannot sustain his analysis into the 'second halP of the play, after Phaidra's death, but is led to write (1952: 15 n.16) 'though the choice between speech and silence has no further significance for the action ... it still recurs as a reminiscent theme in the second half of the play'.

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content is unspeakable. Phaidra's audience, however, must find some response to it. On the level at which the Nurse is compelled to operate, without prior knowledge of Phaidra's passion, it is unintelligible and makes no sense. Most critics have read on a second level, taking Phaidra's words as an expression of her longing to be with Hippolytos and share in his pursuits; they insert, as it were, their knowledge of her desire into their reading, but continue to take the words literally, so that Phaidra really does want to be among springs, meadows and mountains.8 Dodds argues that Phaidra's desire, which is really for Hippolytos, is translated into various other desires under pressure from the need to sublimate.9 Glenn attempts a reading on a further level, one that takes all Phaidra's fantasies to be oblique references to physical desire and to the sexual act. The point, I would suggest, is not to read backwards in a reductive way to 'find the hidden meaning' behind the words as these critics do, unpacking the language to supply exact referents, but rather to read 'forwards', to read a process by which desire is forced to take refuge in the indirect figures of metaphor and metonymy in order to preserve its anonymity. Phaidra's delirium can almost be read to dramatise Rousseau's contention that because man's first motives for speaking were the passions, his first utterances, like Phaidra's first words here, were tropes. 10 The figure of metaphor is uppermost when the delirium treats of objects or places which are like Hippolytos, that of metonymy when not similarity but association is dominant; or both tropes may coalesce in one image, as with the phallic spear of 221. Thus desire can be seen not only forcing an entry into language but also simultaneously producing distortions within it. Phaidra is enabled to gesture constantly towards Hippolytos without ever explicitly naming him; her speech becomes a tissue of connotations that do not denote. Desire can once again be seen as responsible for a lack of finality or stability in speech, an absence of or resistance to closure. The delirium is open to yet another reading. What Phaidra describes are all activities Hippolytos practises, and places he frequents, to share in which she would have to renounce all vestiges of her confined female role. The implicit contrast is with the description of her life, characterised by idleness and passivity, 8

9

10

For example, Barlow 1971: 146 n.46; Conacher 1967: 33-4; Lesley 1958: 194. Lattimore 1962: 13 goes one better and suggests that Phaidra, being a wild 'Cretan girP, really does want to run and ride in the woods. Dodds 1925: 102 writes: 'Phaedra's hidden love translates itself into a series of cravings; and it is no accident that these cravings are for scenes intimately associated with Hippolytos.' Erotic desire, on this model, is translated into other desires which are openly expressed; the delirium is not, on this reading, a covert expression of a desire utterly different and not in the least directed towards trees, springs etc. Earlier on, however, Dodds does say that desire is 'vainly seeking in symbolic acts the satisfaction denied it in literal reality' (1925: 102). Knox 1952: 6 calls the delirium a 'hysterical expression' of desire for Hippolytos. Segal 1965: 124 states that Phaidra's longing 'is of itself seeking release and expression in these cryptic desires'. Despite the reiteration of'expression', these analyses do not refer to the linguistic character of the delirium or the power of desire to distort language through silence, absence and difference. Phaidra's metaphor and metonymy can also be compared to the condensation and displacement of the Freudian dreamwork.

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which she gives in her speech to the women of Troizen (383-5). n She longs not only to be with Hippolytos but even more to be him, to exchange her helplessness, caused in part by her silence and inarticulateness, for his virile activity. Phaidra's syntax in the delirium traces her helplessness as it moves from optatives (209-11) to imperatives (215) to plain future and present tenses (215, 219) back to wishful optatives (230). In chapter 3 I will investigate the ways in which the play suggests that Phaidra and Hippolytos do exchange roles. The lack of closure in Phaidra's speech is facilitated by the central absence to which the Nurse's words at 184-5 refer. She says of Phaidra that she is not content with what is present, to pawn, but thinks 'dearer' what is absent, to apon. 'What is absent' is Hippolytos, the object of desire, for desire must have as its object an absence or lack. The necessary relation between desire and absence, as a poetic trope in Greek literature, can be traced back to a fragment of Sappho (1.21) xai yaq ai (petiyei ta^eoag oicb^ei - 'though she now escape you, she soon will follow' (trans. Lattimore), a fragment which is frequently recalled in later literature.12 Barthes writes i n ^ Lover's Discourse in the same vein 'But isn't desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn't the object always absent?' (1978: 17) The Nurse cannot 'read' the absence in Phaidra's speech, and so is forced to take Phaidra's words literally; she offers Phaidra real water (226-7) f° r a thirst that is purely erotic in origin. The central absence or silence in Phaidra's speech continues to take effect in her stichomythic dialogue with the Nurse. Her language here again constantly gestures beyond itself to something still left as yet unsaid. Her tyche (misfortune) is alle (other, 315); herphren (mind) has a miasma (pollution) that is, however, not that of murder (317);13 the source of her trouble is aphilos who is not Theseus and who does not even wish her harm (319). These suggestive opacities cry out for further questioning; they preserve silence while intimating always the possibility of more lucid speech. The tension thus produced culminates in the reference to Phaidra's time and eukleia (329-32): PHAIDRA: YOU will kill me. My honor lies in silence. NURSE: And then you will hide this honor, though I beseech you? PHAIDRA: Yes, for I seek to win good out of shame. NURSE: Where honor is, speech will make you more honorable.

The good name, as we have seen, can only be granted by the voice and the speech of others. Phaidra's good name is made problematic by the play itself which, by speaking the unspeakable, both gives it and takes it away. Phaidra's final attempts to preserve her own good name while evading the name of 1]

12

13

I follow Winnington- Ingram i960: 176-7 in identifying 383-5 as a description of Phaidra's life in the palace. This fragment of Sappho (or another similar one) is echoed in Kallimachos Epigrams 33, Horace Satires 1.2.105-8, and Ovid Amores 2.9.9. See also Theokritos Idylls 6.11. In prose, the idea is stated by Sokrates in Symposium i99d-2Oic, especially 200c These lines suggest a striking alteration in usage, in that the connotations of the term for pollution {miasma) here extend to cover moral guilt. See on these lines Barrett 1964 and Adkins 1975: 114 n.29.

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Hippolytos consist in subsuming her particular desire under a discourse on love in general (347). This is a point to which I shall return. While the delirium scene is the play's most striking instance of the power of silenced desire to distort and displace speech, the same structure can be read in the second half of the play. If Hippolytos is the absence in Phaidra's delirium, she is the corresponding absence in his speech in the agon. Hippolytos, defending himself before Theseus, describes what he understands by sophrosune as an ordering principle in life (996-1001): I have learnt To revere the gods, and to choose friends who undertake No villainy, whose honour will forbid them make Vicious requests to those who know them, or respond With shameful favours; nor am I one, father, to mock Those that I live with - I am the same man to my friends Absent or near. His description functions as an inverted account of what he perceives to be Phaidra's attack on him; the terms in which he praises himself suggest corresponding condemnations of her. In Hippolytos' eyes, Phaidra did precisely 'undertake villainy' (997); she did not possess honour (aidos, 998, a grotesque irony given Phaidra's speech on aidos at 385); she did 'make vicious requests' (epaggellein);14 and she was not 'the same' (1001) in the presence and absence of her philoi, for the absence of Theseus was one factor that facilitated her attempt to die and thus the eventual exposure of her desire (280-1). The distortion in the account of her vices corresponds to that which Phaidra practises in the letter (885-6). Hippolytos ostensibly describes himself, but he is also engaged in describing his stepmother; she remains absent from his explicit speech because her desire, and hence she herself, must be silenced. Desire - and Phaidra who personifies desire - constitute the absence towards which the whole speech gestures. Desire is the 'one thing' by which Hippolytos is untouched (1002); it is the 'one thing' left unsaid at the end of the speech (1021). Hippolytos points not only towards this central lack, but also towards a possible alternative ending for the whole narrative of desire and death (1022-4), when he says 'If I had one more witness to my character/if I were tried when she still saw the light.' As we saw in chapter 1, he seeks to direct Theseus' attention to the gap, the lacuna, at which the act of comprehension needs to be concentrated.15 Thus the speech of both Phaidra in the delirium and Hippolytos in the agon is rendered unintelligible to their interlocutors by the presence, within speech, of silenced desire. 14

15

Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ) offer in their lexicon, as translations for eppaggellein, 'tell', 'proclaim', 'announce', 'order' (Herodotos 1.70); 'promise' or 'offer' (Pindar Pythian 4.31, Aischylos Choephoroi 213); 'demand' (Dionysos of Halicarnassus 5.65). Barrett gives only 'instruct'. Evidently all these shades of meaning have application to Phaidra's situation. This insistence on the lacuna corresponds to the psychoanalytic model of reading elaborated by Lacan: 'psychoanalysis practises a planned and diffuse listening and stresses only certain points in the discourse, points known as "nodal points" which are particularly dense or on the contrary, essentially lacunary' (Lemaire 1977: 136).

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Desire generates speech, as the women who are not sophron provide endless material for Hippolytos' tirades (667-8), and as Phaidra's desire initiates not only the play itself but even the brides' commemoration of the events of the play, long after its end (1428-30). At the same time, however, desire operates as a silence or absence within speech that distorts and displaces it. Most significantly, that very absence allows speech to continue, to perpetuate itself, for it transforms speech into a series of gestures that do not name and connotations that do not denote. The delirium scene ends, in a quite literal sense, with the name of the beloved (352); the Nurse names Hippolytos and the stichomythic dialogue collapses into the lamentations of Nurse and Chorus. Once the name is out, desire has no more tropes to hide in, but is instead displaced into the speech of the Nurse to Hippolytos. In both its manifestations, then, as source and as distortion of language, desire militates against stability of meaning and against the end of speech. In a movement that is separate but connected, we are also invited to see desire as a cultural product generated by speech. Desire in the play is indeed oud' exo logou (not outside speech, 437), for it is rather the subject of several socially sanctioned logoi, all designed to promote or exonerate it. This aspect of desire too can be read in the scene between Phaidra and the Nurse. At 336 the Nurse consigns herself to silence and tells Phaidra oog y&Q OVVTEVQEV hoyoc, (the logos is henceforth yours). Yet Phaidra begins not with her own story but with that of her mother and sister (337, 339), in an apparent attempt to mitigate her participation in the story and to shed responsibility for her desire. She appends herself to the story as the unwilling but inevitable third, who has the thankless task of conforming the narrative to traditional and inescapable patterns.16 But the story of her female relatives does turn out to be hers too; beginning with her mother the story goes forward (probesetai, 342) and catches her up in its toils. In like manner the story of the adulteress, down to the dreaded revelation, proves to be her own (415-18). The adulteress' desire transforms her into a narrative and a generator of speech - compare Helen's vision of her storied future at Iliad 6. 357—8 - much as Phaidra herself becomes a synonym for whoring and, as such, comes to be cited frequently in the text of Aristophanes (Frogs 1043 a n ^ 1052, Thesmophoriazousai 497, 547 and 550). When the Nurse still cannot supply the ending for the story of Phaidra's female relatives, Phaidra proceeds to a conventional, generalising discourse on love (345-52), which ends, however, in disastrous specificity. In her scene of persuasion, which follows Phaidra's speech to the women of Troizen, the Nurse too insists on subsuming Phaidra's desire within a number of generalised logoi, always eliding its scandalous particularity. The Nurse employs language like that of the opening to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, but to a very different end. 16

The requisite third appears at other points in the play; the third day of Phaidra's fast (275), her third plan (400), Theseus' three wishes (44-6, 887-8), and Aphrodite's triads of victims (361, 1403—4). Such repetition forces an awareness of the play's intricate structure and even more complex self-consciousness.

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Aphrodite is first represented as a pseudo-philosophy, an all-embracing life force (443-50). This is a description that seems to preclude that Phaidra should die as a result of her intervention. Secondly, desire is presented as the subject of graphai ton palaiteron (writings of the ancients, 451). This is the point at which the play seems to admit the social and literary genesis of desire, when desire and language can be seen to be constantly generating one another. Although the desires of the gods inform the myths and graphai (writings) that articulate them, as Phaidra's desire informs this play, the myths and graphai on the other hand are part of the cultural equipment of every Greek and teach precisely the nature of desire, its onslaughts and its management. The graphai are concerned exclusively with divinities, but the Nurse also has a fund of culturally shared stories that relate to the human world. Her tales almost recall Boccaccio's Decameron: Tell me, how many of the wise ones of the earth do you suppose see with averted eyes their wives turned faithless; how many erring sons have fathers helped with secret loves? (462-5) Such stories are meant to encourage Phaidra in the pursuit of her object, but in fact the husband and father of the Nurse's speech are diametrically opposed to those of the play. In the Hippolytos, husband and father meet in the figure of Theseus, who cannot be conceived of as turning a blind eye to his wife's adultery with his son, or assisting his son to his wife's bed. Desire can be seen as pre-eminently a cultural product, generated by, and itself generating, language. The characters can exploit this culturally constructed nature of desire by inserting themselves and one another into culturally shared narrative models that already assume certain kinds of response in others. Phaidra does this when she invokes the 'story' of her family to mitigate her responsibility, and the Nurse does this when she invokes myth to encourage Phaidra's pursuit of her own desire. Both of these narratives have a kind of inevitability about them; Phaidra is already written or 'inscribed' into a story that has but one possible ending. I should like now to pursue further the notion of 'inscription', by which I mean to suggest how the narrative structure conditions the responses of the characters within the narrative. Such 'inscription' is a frequent figure within the play. Phaidra's letter is the extreme example of the phenomenon. It inscribes both herself and Hippolytos into a narrative of rape which is recognisable and plausible, as Theseus demonstrates when he speaks of the normal sexual relations between men and women (967-70). The letter gains further strength from its manipulations of literary conventions. It can be read as a legal deposition, as testimony leading to a conviction (a grotesque parody of the 'witnesses' that are invoked elsewhere, as we saw in chapter 1). It can also be a letter to her husband informing him of her last instructions, such as Alkestis gives Admetos (Alkestis 281-325). Theseus 'reads' it as such even before he has

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broken the seal (858-61). For him, as well as for Phaidra, certain stories have only one ending. Last but not least it is undoubtedly a love letter, a fantasy of the reciprocation by Hippolytos of Phaidra's passion, which amounts to a further declaration on her part. As Barthes writes (1978: 43) 'Every passion, ultimately, has its spectator: at the moment of his death, Captain Paz cannot keep from writing to the woman he has loved in silence: no amorous oblation without a final theater: the sign is always victorious.' As well as drawing on these contradictory conventions, the letter also contains within itself the contradiction between speech and silence. By exploiting its ambivalent status, Phaidra is enabled to keep silent and to meet her husband's gaze without flinching, as Hippolytos had prescribed (661-2, cf. 720); yet the letter itself speaks and shouts (877), surrounding the silent death with a welter of noise. It speaks for Phaidra, in a grotesque fulfilment of her wish at 345 and a foreshadowing of Hippolytos' at 1074-5. As Loraux notes (1979: 53-4) it reproduces Phaidra's position of eloquent silence, hanging from her wrist as she hangs from the beams of her bedroom (ertemene, 857). Phaidra sites herself within powerfully persuasive cultural and literary conventions not only by means of the letter but also by her chosen mode of death. The bloodless death which is that of hanging held a gender-specific position within Greek culture as an avoidance of the bloodshed of rape and defloration, and hence as a denial of active sexuality. 'As a form of human death, strangulation or hanging evoked horror . . . but as a means of suicide it can again be related to shedding no blood. To avoid the bloodshed of rape or unwanted defloration a bloodless suicide is appropriate' (King 1983: 119; see also Loraux 1987: 7-30). Thus the Danaids threaten to hang themselves to escape the hated marriage with the Egyptians, and Iokaste hangs herself when the monstrous nature of her sexual relationship with Oidipous becomes clear. Deianeira chooses the masculine death of falling upon a sword, a death that mimes the sexual act and seems to admit that her sexuality lay at the root of her disaster.17 Phaidra's mode of death and her letter mutually reinforce each other; 'the action of Phaidra is not merely a negative gesture performed from fear that Hippolytos will tell Theseus the truth... it is a positive action, for by choosing this death she inserts herself into an established tradition and thus strengthens her false claim that Hippolytos had raped her' (King 1983: 119). In the agon the narratives of desire abound as Hippolytos and Theseus each insert the deed in question, Hippolytos' alleged rape of Phaidra, into a number of different models designed to make it seem more or less plausible. The structure of each speech is identical, so that each pre-empts the arguments of the other and there is no possibility of progress; Theseus even calls attention to this point at 971. Each stereotypical story is invoked in a brief allusive fashion which indicates that it is already known to and available within the culture; what is at stake is its plausibility as explanation for the present case. This stereotyped 17

In a later text Dido also dies in this overtly erotic manner. In Apollodorus 2.7.7, however, Deianeira hangs herself. See also Lucretia in Livy 1.58.2; Seneca Oedipus 1036—9.

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quality itself prevents any communication, and since Theseus is deafened by the letter and Hippolytos silenced by his oath, the two antagonists are not able to engage each other seriously. Theseus cites in support of his case the figures of the archetypal hypocrite (948-51) and lustful youth (966-70), and rejects as inapplicable the figure of the archetypal jealous stepmother (962-5). Hippolytos counters with the naive youth (986-1006) and repudiates the Herodotean tales which would make him the aspirant to the bed (1009-10), the house (1011-12) or the throne (1013).18 A final example of'inscription' may be read in Hippolytos' oath at 1025-31. Hippolytos deploys phrases which appear more to condemn than to exonerate him; the terms of his oath are likely to be employed in a curse on one who has committed the kind of crimes, incest and patricide, that Hippolytos denies, as Segal notes (1972: 167-8, 170). Hippolytos inscribes himself into a literary or linguistic convention that runs counter to his real needs in this situation. A similar irony is present in Hippolytos' opening song, to which I will return in the next chapter. Sophrosune Desire in the Hippolytos is a subject for constant speech, for the evocation of the culturally shared narratives of desire that support each character in his or her notion of the world. At the same time, desire in the play constantly provokes speech that is characterised by lack of restraint, by absences and lacunae that allow it to become a tissue of connotations that do not denote and gestures that do not arrive. One of the terms in the play that most acutely focuses the problems of the relation between desire and speech is sophrosune. The women who are not sophrones will provoke further tirades from Hippolytos; their sophrosune then will produce his silence. Women's sophrosune is related to their own silence throughout the tragic corpus, for instance atAjax 586 'Ask me no questions./ Possess yourself in patience [sophrosune]\ Herakleidai 476-7 and Andromache 645. In the Hippolytos, Phaidra's speech to the Chorus on her attempts to contain her desire describes an ascending tricolon of silence, sophrosune and suicide (394-402). As to give way to her desire is to speak, so to combat her desire is to be both silent and sophron. The play exploits this relation between silence and sophrosune, so that 'silence' can function as a gloss for 'sophrosune' at several points. The Nurse says ouk esophronoun ego (I was not sophron) at 704. She is correct, for she has managed neither Phaidra's desire nor her own speech to Hippolytos. 'Silence' can plausibly be read for sophrosune in the riddling lines at 18

Whitman (1951: 50) calls these lines 'a readymade sophistic argument in defense of a charge of conspiracy . . . [which] occurs again and again in Euripides'. Many critics compare Euripidean agones to contemporary judicial rhetoric (e.g. Meridier 1931: 147 and Havelock 1984: 53), and all unite in condemning the rhetorical qualities of this particular agon, but none endeavours to suggest reasons for their presence, except that Euripides was possessed of an incorrigible love of rhetoric for its own sake. In this vein see Grene 1939; Duchemin 1945: 119-23; Lucas 1950: 208, 262 and Collard 1975: 12.

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the end of Hippolytos' defence (1034-5). What he says, literally, is 'She was sophron, not being able to be sophron; I had sophrosune but did not use it properly/ We can read the lines in terms of silence as follows: Phaidra managed one act of silence, her death and accompanying letter, although she was otherwise incapable of silence; Hippolytos who is capable of silence was not able to use that silence properly, but at one time took an inappropriate oath of silence to the Nurse and at another made an inappropriate speech, the tirade. The innumerable attempts by critics to translate these lines definitively should warn us not to be dogmatic;19 the lines are one of the points in the play where desire renders language unintelligible. Hippolytos' inability to speak coherently about desire in these lines can be seen to reproduce Phaidra's earlier delirious state; Phaidra and Hippolytos are further linked, through the riddling utterance, by their reciprocal insistence that the other learn sophrosune. Hippolytos closes his tirade with the injunction that women learn sophronein (665-8) and Phaidra departs for death with the lines (73O-i): he will have his share in this my mortal sickness and learn of chastity [sophrosune] in moderation. In these passages sophrosune seems to be a type of violence, inflicted by one person on another, despite the connotations that it ought to possess of silence and restraint. Within the play, the word can represent either a claim made for oneself or a control exercised upon others. In Hippolytos' tirade, sophrosune is imposed by force on the sophe woman, the woman who is predisposed to desire and speech. Hippolytos would compel her to both silence and chastity by 'shutting her up' and depriving her of any form of human intercourse (642-8): Lust breeds mischief in the clever ones ... We should not suffer servants to approach them, but give them as companions voiceless beasts, dumb, ... but with teeth, that they might not converse, and hear another voice in answer. The sophron woman, who does not need compulsion, is absent from the tirade as she presumably is from Hippolytos' ontology. Phaidra conversely imposes silence, or sophrosune, upon Hippolytos by forcing him to share her nosos (730-1), a nosos that is perhaps not so much the affliction of illegitimate desire as it is that of being forced into an impossible position between the imperatives of speech and those of silence. In this position, where both bring equally disastrous 19

The scholiast paraphrases sophronein by siopan, to be silent, which is favourable to my interpretation. Other translations include 'discretion' (Paley), 'recht' (Wilamowitz), 'purity' (Matthaei), 'vertu' (Meridier), 'modesty' (Grube) and 'chastity' (Norwood). Others find their way out of the knot by proposing emendation.

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consequences, the speaker is finally forced to betray her/himself and to be judged as other than s/he is. While sophrosune is traditionally understood as an inner-directed virtue, it has necessary ramifications for one's behaviour with others; in the fifth century it was available as a description of political virtue, used to commend the correct workings of a polis.20 But if sophrosune should connote primarily a form of self-control or restraint, of desire or speech about desire, then the sophrosune within the play that is a form of violence exercised against others is anomalous. It has long been recognised that sophrosune is a site of ambiguity in the text of the Hippolytos, and that the characters tend to use the term in ways that conflict with one another, so that consensus about its meaning is in danger of disappearing.21 But the practice of Hippolytos is particularly idiosyncratic. His model of sophrosune is one that resolutely ignores social relations with other people. His entrance song to Artemis indicates the exclusivity of his conception of sophrosune (79-85): Not those who by instruction have profited to learn, but in whose very soul the seed of Chastity [sophrosune] toward all things alike nature has deeply rooted, they alone may gatherflowersthere! the wicked may not. Loved mistress, here I offer you this coronal; it is a true worshipper's hand that gives it you to crown the golden glory of your hair. With no man else I share this privilege that I am with you and to your words can answer words. The passage could conceivably be construed as dividing people into three, those who have true sophrosune, those who have it didakton (by instruction, 79), and those who do not have it at all and are therefore kakoi. But what is at stake is whether people may or may not enter the meadow and gather flowers, and between a group that is included and a group that is excluded there can be no middle term. The first few lines seem therefore to collapse those with sophrosune 'by instruction' with those who do not have sophrosune and who are kakoi. Similarly in the next lines 'this privilege' in 84, while properly prospective to 85, could plausibly be heard or read as referring back to 79-83; thus the permission to enter the meadow and gather flowers would be a privilege exclusive to Hippolytos, a privilege that would set him apart as the only one with sophrosune 20

21

O n the political uses of the word sophrosune, which was claimed by both oligarchic and democratic factions, see North 1966: 8 5 - 1 2 0 . See particularly North's study of sophrosune and her chapter on the tragedians. O n Euripides she writes (1966: 69—70): 'Euripides was the first tragic poet to exploit fully and deliberately the dramatic possibilities inherent in the manifold connotations of sophrosune... [especially] in those tragedies that illustrate the danger of taking a one-sided view of the virtue.' See also Goldhill

1986: 132-5.

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amid a mass of kakoi. His claim to sophrosune would thus become part of a larger claim to an exclusive moral superiority, a claim that runs counter to the traditional concept of sophrosune as restraint. Similarly at the close of the play, in Hippolytos' cries to Zeus, the claim to sophrosune is linked to a claim to superiority (1363-5): Zeus, do you see this, see me that worshipped God in piety, me that excelled all men in sophrosune. It is perhaps logical that Hippolytos' tirade shows no restraint either in speech or in revelation of sexual apprehensions. Hippolytos attempts to circumscribe the meaning of the word sophrosune', by assigning it to himself and nobody else, but the riddling lines 1034-5 demonstrate the impossibility of such restricted usage, since Hippolytos is forced to use the word of Phaidra when he is denying her the substance. This central moral term is thus in danger of being emptied of content; in uttering the lines Hippolytos does indeed succeed in saying nothing, as he says he will at 1033; 'I may not speak/further than this.' It is inadequate to suggest that the riddle is a sign that Hippolytos has learnt from his trials; he does not recognise how the word he is employing has been compromised by his usage but unreflectingly continues to call himself sophron at 1100 and 1365. Artemis also calls him sophron at 1402, which suggests that the problems of moral terms are not solved but rather heightened by divine usage. This is a point to which I shall return in the fourth chapter. The term sophrosune is important, then, for the play's discussion of the relations between desire and speech. The deployment of the word sophia is also bound up with the tension between speech and silence, and with the management of desire. The sophoi at 465 know, in the matter of the illegitimate desire of others, when to look and when to look away. At 518 Phaidra's fear that the Nurse may prove too sophe translates into a fear that she will speak to Hippolytos. A more significant use of the term is made by Hippolytos in the agon. At 986-9, when Hippolytos begins his defence before Theseus, he describes his relations to the required social mode of speech, rhetoric, in terms of sophia. He is apparently sophoteros (more sophos) when addressing a few of his own age (987), and this, he claims, is as it should be, for those who are more accomplished before the mob appear base among the sophoi (988-9). On this model the sophoi are necessarily few, as opposed to the mob, and they are apparently silenced, unable to comply with what their society demands of an orator. This passage both refers to and validates itself, for if Hippolytos is one of the few sophoi and cannot speak before his audience, his audience must consequently be many and stupid, the mob that cannot appreciate the sophos. This instant alienation of his audience both dramatises and proves Hippolytos' point, that he cannot speak in this context. The lines are hardly an auspicious beginning to his defence, and critics have been unanimous in condemning either the lines themselves or what

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they say about Hippolytos.22 As might be expected, given the relations between desire and speech that we are elaborating, this passage on Hippolytos' rhetorical incapacity is followed by one (1002-6) declaring his corresponding inability to deal with the modes in which his society represents desire, in word and picture. Neither of Hippolytos' denials of experience persuades Theseus (1007); on the contrary, he believes that Hippolytos is feigning naivete in both areas, desire and speech. Theseus describes him in terms (956-7) that Phaidra reserves for the similar shamelessness of the adultress (413-15). But Hippolytos' supposed hypocrisy extends beyond the sexual to the linguistic sphere. At 1038 Theseus calls his son an epodos and a goes, an enchanter and a sorcerer, names for those who misuse the art of speech to beguile and deceive their audience. These words appear in conjunction at one other point in the extant Euripidean plays, at Bakchai 234 where Pentheus describes Dionysos in these terms, accusing him of a specifically erotic persuasion. Plato in Republic 10. 6o2d uses the words for professional deceivers like the scene-painter. Since Hippolytos' denial of rhetorical technique has made language into an issue between the two men, their confrontation in the agon turns entirely on the status of their words weighed one against the other. The whole conflict is couched in linguistic terms: by this I mean not just that the agon proceeds by speech rather than by open violence, but also that the very concern of the protagonists is with the status of their own and one another's speech. This claim can be borne out by analysis of the agon. Theseus asserts that if he does not best Hippolytos (976) in this contest for Phaidra's bed (1009-10) and for the dynastic power to which it is the key (1010-13), the scenes of his previous victories will no longer testify to his superiority (976-80): If I should take this injury at your hands and pardon you, then Sinis of the Isthmus, whom once I killed, would vow I never killed him, but only bragged of the deed. And Sciron's rocks washed by the sea would call me liar when I swore I was a terror to ill-doers. The consequences of defeat are represented as linguistic events; Theseus will lose the all-important voices of the others, there will be no witnesses (n,aQTUQf|O8L 977) nor anyone to speak for him (cpf|GOUGi 980). His language will be reduced to the status of empty boasts (978), which is how he has previously characterised Hippolytos' speech (950). One of the two men must therefore come out of the agon exposed as a boaster. Those terms which Hippolytos had appropriated for himself, sophron and akeratos (untouched), Theseus now uses against him in mockery and condemnation (949). Hippolytos, who insists in his opening song on his solitary uniqueness, finds that he now has a public role as an awful example, who is put on show before his father's subjects ('Look at this 22

See e.g. Grube 1941: 188; Conacher 1967: 4 and Barrett 1964. For a different approach to the speech see Carter 1986: 54-6.

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man!' 943). Theseus' status and command of a large audience are very much in evidence, not only in this address but also in the public quality of his speech at 956, 'I tell you all/avoid such men as he.' Hippolytos cannot invoke this public context for his language, for, as we have already seen, he cannot speak before a crowd (986-9). He tries and exhausts the various types of potentially compelling language which are available to him - oath (which the Chorus thinks must command belief, 1036-7) and prophecy (1055-6) - without making any impression on his father. Instead, Theseus relegates him to an obscure and incomprehensible cult which worships not the direct openness of speech but the intangible smoke of grammata (letters, 954). When Hippolytos calls on dumb witnesses (1074-5), we must realise that he himself has been forced to become just such a witness. Theseus' speech on Hippolytos' hypocrisy about desire and language comes to a head in 925-31 with the lines on the second truthful voice. The meaning of this passage has generated a certain amount of critical controversy,23 but the work of interpretation is assisted by comparison with analogous pleas in other texts of Euripides. At Medea 516-19, Medea longs for a charakter (mark) to distinguish good men from base in the same way gold can be judged by external tekmeria: O Zeus! Why have you given us clear signs to tell True gold from counterfeit; but when we need to know Bad men from good, thefleshbears no revealing mark? In lines that recall even more closely Theseus' lines on the second truthful voice, at Herakles Mainomenos 655-68, the Chorus lament that good men are not blessed with a second youth, which would once again ensure that moral distinctions among people could be made immediately and unmistakably: If the gods had understanding And wisdom, as men conceive it, A second youth should be awarded To distinguish those whose lives were virtuous. All these longings, in the Medea, Herakles and Hippolytos, are for certainty in moral measurements, for means of removing moral judgements to the realm of episteme (knowledge) rather than that of doxa (opinion). It will not, however, be possible to come to terms with the passage in the Hippolytos without comparing it to a similar one earlier on in the play. At 616-17 Hippolytos opens his tirade with a rhetorical question addressed to Zeus, followed by a suggestion for the amelioration of the human lot, in 618-24: 23

Jones 1962: 252 calls this and the other comparable expressions in Euripides 'the nearest approach to a characteristic attitude in this most diverse writer'. The particular formulation here, however, has caused critics a good deal of confusion. See Musurillo 1974 for bibliography and his own interpretation, surely the most extravagant among many, which suggests that the just voice rises from the stomach in the manner of ventriloquism. Barrett 1964: 21 draws attention to the parallel in fragment N of the first Hippolytos.

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O Zeus! Why have you established in the sunlit world This counterfeit coin, woman, to curse the human race? If you desired to plant a mortal stock, why must The means for this be women? A better plan would be For men to come to your temples and put down a price In bronze, or iron, or weight of gold, and buy their sons In embryo, for a sum befitting each man's wealth. Jason at Medea 573-5 expresses a similar wish for the abolition of women, but does not go on to provide an alternative. Theseus, in the passage at issue, addresses his rhetorical question to anthropoi (human kind), and proceeds with his suggestion for improving human life by the addition of the second voice: There should be somewhere a touchstone of human hearts Which men could trust to sift the thoughts of friends, and show Which one is a true friend and which is treacherous. Each man should have two voices: the one an honest voice, The other - natural; so that his lying voice might be Refuted by the true; and we should not be duped. The two passages are alike in that they open with a rhetorical question and proceed with a suggestion. Once the structural similarity between the two speeches is established, it remains to see what the similarity or otherwise of the contents signifies. I hope to show that the speeches refer to desire and language respectively, and represent them as bearers of difference that intrude upon and disrupt what would otherwise be harmonious equivalences. At 616 Hippolytos calls women a kibdelon kakon. Kibdelos is a word frequently applied to coinage, with the meaning of false, adulterated and debased. As such it is employed by Medea in the passage quoted above about the true and the counterfeit man. At Elektra 550 the Old Man uses the same word, again in a context of judging the truly noble man: They have nobility; but it may be counterfeit. Many that are nobly born belie it. Woman, as Hippolytos demonstrates at 629-30, is a means of exchange among men, and thus can be represented by metaphors of coinage; but she is false and adulterated, bringing want (633) instead of wealth. Hippolytos wants to replace this false coinage with a true, and so, instead of woman as a means of reproduction, he suggests that each man place within the temple a weight of metal - bronze, iron or gold (621) - which would correspond to his own worth, and in return for which he would receive a child that would correspond both to the metal and to the man. The three terms, man, metal and child, are thus all the same and equivalent, members of a perfectly balanced equation. The necessity of'children like their fathers' is familiar from the description of the Golden Age in Hesiod's Works and Days, where such children are a sign of the right ordering

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of all social relationships (23 5). 24 In Hippolytos' tirade, the possibility of adultery, of illegitimate desire, is shown to be the threat of a difference which will upset the perfect equivalences. Both coinage and family are vulnerable to 'adulteration'. Theseus, on the other hand, is concerned with speech. He craves two voices, the one to be the voice as we know it, 'normal5 and hence capable of deceiving, and the other to be capable only of truth, enabled when necessary to contradict and expose the normal voice. The second truthful voice would achieve a unity with reality, with the world as it is, that can always be evaded by the normal voice. At the same time, however, the second voice would institute a split within the speaking subject. Theseus wants to replace and supplement the necessary opacities of actual language - which can never be identical to the world - with a medium that would be transparent and that would thus offer direct and unmediated access to a reality underlying the words. This transparent medium of which he dreams would have to be the same as the reality it would seek to convey; actual language is perceived as the difference that vitiates the possibility of perfect equivalence. The opposite of this transparent voice and the absence of it can be seen in linguistic events such as Phaidra's letter, or the gulf between word and intent that Hippolytos threatens when he tells the Nurse that his tongue swore but his mind remains unsworn (612). These examples suggest that the second, transparent voice is an adunaton, an impossibility; there is no point at which language can achieve such an identity with the world as would exclude the possibilities of fiction. The 'deviations' that Theseus seeks to abolish are the very conditions of the existence of language. The analysis must be refined; no longer do we have a model of desire distorting and displacing language, but rather language itself appears as a distortion and displacement. As desire intrudes between the man and his child, so language intrudes between reality and the possibility of reproducing reality. Both desire and language introduce disruptive differences and thwart human longings for stability and containment. This longing is so extreme in Hippolytos' tirade that what he dreads is not only adultery, but even marriage itself, the regular and legitimate exchange of females for reproductive purposes. Not only the adulteress, but the female itself, endangers Hippolytos' system. The female is the difference that Hippolytos is unable to accept. In the passage on the two voices, Theseus wishes for control of the voice because he fears that he cannot always interpret language correctly; in the tirade, Hippolytos dreams of control24

Anxiety about unlike children is not confined to the Greeks; see e.g. the quotation in Culler 1982: 60: Men's powerful 'impulse to affirm and tighten by cultural inventions their unsatisfactorily loose mammalian connection with children' leads them to value highly cultural inventions of a symbolic nature . . . One might predict an inclination to value what are generally termed metaphorical relations - relations of resemblance between separate items that can be substituted for one another, such as obtain between the father and the miniature replica with the same name, the child — over metonymical, maternal relationships based on contiguity.

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ling women's language, as he would their part in reproduction, because he knows only too well what their language means. We may note the further point that Theseus' discourse on language arises from his concern with the recognition specifically of friends (philoi). The difference in voices is to reproduce, clarify, and thus render harmless the difference in philoi between the true and the false. Theseus identifies an important source of difficulty in relationships as he does in language, but, as we have seen, his proposed solution is impossible. After the alleged rape, Theseus believes that Hippolytos is no longer 2L philos, a friend, although he cannot help but continue to recognise the tie of philia, blood-relationship, with him, as he does at 1259 after the Messenger reports Hippolytos' suffering. So for Theseus the meaning of the word philos, and its application to Hippolytos, is problematic. But it is Phaidra's desire that has already complicated the meaning of the word by making Hippolytos, who is a relative and thus a philos, into a beloved and thus a completely different and impermissible philos. Female desire has disrupted family relations and thus also introduced an intractable ambiguity into language, and all the characters struggle with the semantic consequences. When the Nurse at 318 asks Phaidra if some enemy (echthros) harms her, she replies that a philos is destroying her, against his will and hers. Hippolytos, speaking to the Nurse at 614, endeavours to circumscribe and redefine the meaning of the word, as he does with sophrosune. When the Nurse implores him not to destroy his philoi, he 'spit[s] the word away', claiming that no wicked person is a philos of his. But he cannot so easily abolish his ties with Phaidra. The difficulty of such ties ensures that each character becomes in turn diphilon diaphthoreus, a destroyer of philoi (682).25 The confusion surrounding the word philos in the play is a particular instance of a more pervasive problem. Desire, especially illegitimate female desire, and language are both represented as bearers of a difference that can be a sign of falsification and failure. This negative association between woman and language can be read in the archaic poets; in the texts of Hesiod and Semonides, the creation of woman is explicitly the sign of a fall that can also be read to include the fall of language from an original irretrievable transparency.26 Fifth-century tragedies can also be seen to register this misogynist reconstruction. Hippolytos' misogynist discourse actively refuses difference and is always of the same: he wishes his life would continue as it is (87), he remains the same in the presence or absence of his philoi (1001), and wishes only for friends that are like him (997-9). He must reject desire, because it can alter the self; Hippolytos' model of the subject is of a self-sufficient monolith to which external influences can present only a threat. This is why he insists on his untouchability and unwillingness to touch (14, 606, 1002, 1026, 1086). But Hippolytos' illusions of self-sufficiency and identity prove untenable. He too is subject to change, and 25 26

O n the whole question of philia and its shades of meaning, see Goldhill 1986: 7 9 - 1 0 6 . O n Pandora in Hesiod see Pucci 1976 and Bergren 1985; on Semonides see Loraux 1978: 6 5 . See also Zeitlin 1985a: 7 0 .

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by the end of the play he is reduced to accepting touch from others (1358-63). He is also reduced from the assurance of his selfhood to a mere seeming (1071). Most significantly, he is reduced to the position of the despised other, the female. He is forced to share in Phaidra's nosos and to be judged as other than his true self. Like a woman, he is silenced and forced into a position where he cannot speak for himself. Like a woman, he is shunted as an evil from house to house (629 and 1066-9). In the next chapter I shall demonstrate how his exile and death are described in terms that further assimilate him to the hated female.

The pharmakon So far in this chapter I have been examining the various sites in the play at which its anxiety about desire and language can be seen to be concentrated. The distortions of desire and of language also combine in the play to produce the phenomenon of persuasion (peitho). Persuasion was revered in the Athenian political context as a democratic, civic alternative to force (bid), but it nonetheless held an unmistakable aura of seduction, for if persuasion is to succeed, the desire of the speaker must be transmitted to and shared by the audience. Buxton in his study of the subject goes so far as to claim that 'all peitho is seduction' (1982: 31). One of the earliest texts to analyse explicitly the nature and power of persuasion, Gorgias' Encomium of Helen, assimilates the two activities in that Paris' persuasion of Helen has seduction as its goal. The connection between persuasion and seduction is obviously applicable to the scene of persuasion between the Nurse and Phaidra in the Hippolytos. Once the similarity of persuasion and seduction is suggested, we can mark the traces of a substitution; if we had the first Hippolytos in full it would probably be even clearer that the Nurse's successful 'seduction' of Phaidra is a substitute for Phaidra's earlier unsuccessful attempt on Hippolytos' virtue.27 The absence or silence that is central to desire is a necessary element in the structure of persuasion. The Nurse's generalising logoi, in her long speech to Phaidra, suppress the particular scandal of Phaidra's desire and speak of a desire without an object. Phaidra's own words in the letter persuade Theseus only because she has absented herself from the elegchos (examination) as Artemis explains at 1310-12 and again at 1336-7 (cf. 1023). In the agon Theseus invokes Phaidra's presence as witness (972) but it is her absence in death, which reduces her presence to that of a corpse, that finally commands his belief. The crucial term in the scene of persuasion between Phaidra and the Nurse, the fulcrum on which it turns, is the pharmakon. This can be read as the very word for 'persuasion' within the play. The pharmakon is situated within two different discourses, that of medicine and that of love-magic. Within love-magic, the pharmakon signifies a charm; within medicine, it signifies either a healing drug or a poison. The Nurse exploits these multiple ambiguities to achieve her 27

Solmsen 1975: 55 claims that only in Euripides can we speak of true 'psychagogia', where the speaker guides the other to an unspoken end, a hidden agenda.

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persuasion of Phaidra. Within the Nurse's speech a third meaning ofpharmakon therefore emerges; it is the name for the Nurse's language of persuasion itself. The pharmakon as metaphor for language appears explicitly in Gorgias' Encomium of Helen, where he compares its effect on the body with that of language on the soul, and in Plato's Phaedros, where the pharmakon is a metaphor for writing rather than for speech.28 Both these texts are later than the Hippolytos; in the Euripidean text we can, so to speak, trace the process by which the pharmakon becomes that metaphor. The text is not explicit about the creation of the metaphor, unlike the two later texts mentioned above; nor could one expect explicitness when the inexplicit nature of the pharmakon is what enables it to function. The Nurse speaks of medicinal pharmaka and o£pharmaka drawn from the domain of love-magic, but the charms and enchantments to which she refers (philtra, epodai, logoi thelkterioi) can be seen to be merely oblique references to the words of persuasion and seduction that she intends to use on Hippolytos and is at present using on Phaidra. The pharmakon is both the subject of her discourse and that discourse itself, which has exactly the weakening and disorienting effect of a drug or love-potion. Her speech, which is itself a pharmakon, thus constantly hides, in order to conceal its own operations, behind the other possible pharmaka that the speech foregrounds. The pharmakon becomes a metaphor for the self-consciously evasive possibilities of language, enacting as it does so precisely such an evasion. Phaidra introduces the pharmakon at 389-90 in her speech to the Chorus: Since, then, this is in fact my view, there is no spell [pharmakon] That could induce me to be false to it, or fall Into a pose which contradicts my own judgement. Phaidra speaks of virtue as a product of the conscious, rational will, but at the same time admits the possibility of something that could destroy that will. That the pharmakon is introduced in the midst of a denial of its power points even more attention to it, for a denial or negative statement can always be on some level a 'return of the repressed' that foregrounds the very thing it negates. Phaidra seems to imagine herself as drugged so that she can no longer resist her passion; she is the passive victim of an attack and her will is no longer engaged. The word translated above as 'to be false' is diaphtherein, which literally means to forget, corrupt or destroy. Gunaika diaphtherein is a legal phrase for seducing or corrupting a woman (e.g. Bakchai 318, Lysias 1.16). In her evocation of this phrase, it is almost as if Phaidra fantasises the desired assault by Hippolytos on her person or her will. Or does she dream of corrupting Hippolytos with a love-potion? As the association of the pharmakon with the Nurse's words of persuasion becomes clearer, we are enabled also to read in these lines a prophecy of Phaidra's downfall, for Phaidra will indeed be destroyed {diaphtherein) by the pharmakon of persuasive words. 28

On Gorgias see Segal 1962: 104, 115-16; on the implications of the pharmakon in Plato see Derrida 1981: 95-117.

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The ground for the Nurse's use of the pharmakon is prepared not only by Phaidra's reference to it but also by the imagery of disease, nosos, that pervades the first half of the play. Nosos at first connotes Phaidra's physical sickness, but this meaning is then supplemented by the meaning 'desire'. Both meanings remain available, since in Phaidra's case they can be considered synonymous. Her 'disease' spreads throughout the play; although it is indeed unspeakable (293), once it is spoken it becomes ever more communicable and contaminates the beds of those outside Theseus' family (462-3). Phaidra explicitly wishes Hippolytos to share her disease at 730-1, which he duly does at 933. The pharmakon, prepared for in the above ways, dominates the passage of persuasion between 477 and 524, lines that mark the turning-point of the plot and ensure its continuation. The Nurse at 476 encourages Phaidra to dare to love, since it is a god's will that she do so. She then speaks of Phaidra's nosos (477), using the word that in the course of the play comes to refer both to the ostensible sickness that the Chorus arrived to enquire about and to the desire which is its hidden cause. Phaidra's physical sickness is, however, absent throughout the passage, for the Nurse is referring quite clearly to the seduction of Hippolytos by pharmaka as a 'cure' for Phaidra's disease of desire (476-81). Her words meet with the Chorus's doubt (482-5) and Phaidra's outrage (486-9). Since physical sickness is no longer at issue, the pharmakon at 479 draws closer to the meaning of'love-potion' than of'medicine'. The epodai and logoi thelkterioi, spells and enchanting words, of 478 similarly seem to refer to the same field of activity, namely love-magic. But they can also be read as referring to persuasion, both that which the Nurse intends to use against Hippolytos and that which she is at present using against Phaidra. The dangerous instability of the word pharmakon, as it shifts among different discourses, makes it possible for Phaidra to misread the Nurse's intentions and weakens her resistance. A further effect of the pharmakon is to throw into confusion the moral vocabulary of the passage. The debate in the play over the meaning of sophrosune indicates that such a vocabulary may already be unstable; the action of the pharmakon here further focuses attention on this confusion. At 484 the praise that the Chorus bestows on Phaidra is hard and painful to hear (484-5), and not useful (chresimotera) to her, unlike the Nurse's words of persuasion. The praise, the good name, that Phaidra craves is thus in a sense found to be inadequate to her present needs. Yet on the other hand the remedy that the Nurse proposes, the swift consummation of her desire, would bring disastrous consequences. The incestuous relationship that would ensue is equated in the agon with patricide; Hippolytos' supposed assault on Theseus' sexual authority is presumed to be a prelude to his bid to replace Theseus completely as head of house and as ruler (1010—13). Thus would the Nurse's proposal destroy the oikos (487) and polls (486). Phaidra exclaims in these terms against the proposal, but in the words 01 xaXoi Xiav Xoyoi (fair speech, too fair by far, 487) she pays, despite herself, a tribute to the Nurse's persuasive skill and

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reveals to what extent it has worked on her. Similarly in 488 she admits that the Nurse's words give pleasure: It's not the wordsringingdelight in the ear that one should speak, but those that have the power to save their hearer's honorable name. The Nurse's reply to Phaidra's strictures is also concerned with the right kind of speech to use about Phaidra's desire. The Nurse denies that her words have any rhetorical skill, and attributes that only to the logoi euschemones (elegant words, 490), which are presumably those that others might speak and that would bring Phaidra eukleia. The Nurse thus represents herself as an advocate and practitioner of plain speech, claiming that her language is transparent and that it gives direct access to its content - the man (491-2). Thus the Nurse, who was careful in her previous long speech of persuasion not to name the object of Phaidra's desire, now insists that her language is straightforward and that Phaidra's is evasive. Again in 501-2 the Nurse's language, she claims, is that which leads to an ergon (which means something tangible and substantial, as well as being a reference to the sexual act) whereas Phaidra's language stops at the stage of being a mere insubstantial onoma (the good name) which will be poor comfort for her, the Nurse suggests, when she is dead. We may note that the model of language that the Nurse proposes and claims here is one that is contradicted in all the encounters of the play, in all of which the various characters refuse to name explicitly their concerns. The name of Hippolytos in particular is fatal, as at 353 and especially 310-11: NURSE: Hippolytos ... So that has touched you? PHAIDRA: YOU have killed me, nurse.

Hippolytos is also the character most named, often at the beginning of the line (11, 53, 310, 352, 581, 885, 900, 1162, 1436); but his is also the name most frequently avoided or rephrased (10-11, 307-9, 351, 513, 689, 728). Theseus refuses to name him explicitly in the agon, making general statements instead, as Hippolytos refuses to name Phaidra in his tirade and Aphrodite in the scene with the Servant. This latter scene is itself concerned with naming, as at 88 and 100. The play as a whole can be read as a pun on the name Hippolytos, looser of horses, as he moves from being one who unyokes horses after the hunt to one who is undone by horses on the seashore; the play in its plot thus commemorates his name as does Phaidra's temple (30-3) and the song and rite that Artemis institutes (1425-30), which we shall investigate in chapter 5. The Nurse, then, makes a profession of plain speaking and explicit naming which the other characters scrupulously avoid. But her language continues to confound the terms of moral approval (500-5): NURSE

O, they are shameful! But they are better than your noble-sounding moral sentiments. 'The deed' is better if it saves your life: than your 'good name' in which you die exulting.

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For God's sake, do not press me any further! What you say is true, but terrible!

In the lines that follow this exchange, the Nurse embarks on the final deception that the pharmakon makes possible. She puts before Phaidra the prospect of another pharmakon^ this time explicitly intended for her and not for Hippolytos, unlike the previous pharmaka (510-11). Phaidra can now understand the pharmakon as a potion designed to dampen rather than to arouse passion, and may thus legitimately accept it. But there are still several hints in the speech that the Nurse is merely reiterating her first suggestion of seduction in a new guise.29 Thephiltra and thelkteria, potions and enchantments, of 509 recall the epodai and logoi thelkterioi, spells and enchanting words, of 488, and thus suggest that what is being proposed to Phaidra is once again logoi, a speech designed to persuade and seduce Hippolytos. The Nurse's earlier speech is also recalled by her instruction to Phaidra to 'be brave' (512). In the earlier speech the Nurse was 'cowardly' (phaulos, 435). Now Phaidra, like the Nurse, should overcome her 'cowardly' revulsion at the thought of incest. In 513-15 the Nurse roots her speech more firmly in the discourse of love-magic: We need to get some token from the man desired A lock of hair, some scrap of clothing. Obtaining a tangible souvenir of the beloved is standard magical practice. In Theokritos Idylls 2.53-4, Simaitha works sympathetic magic on the fringe of her beloved's cloak. However, there is a complication. Some manuscripts of these lines read 'logon* in 514, which editors have emended to 'plokori*, lock of hair. But a 'word', a verbal sign of assent and not a material token, is exactly what the Nurse hopes to elicit by her persuasion.30 However we read these lines, Phaidra's response to them suggests that the pharmakon has worked; the Nurse's speech, which claimed to offer a remedy, has proved a poison. Phaidra at 516 seems to accept the pharmakon as a purely beneficial substance and to give up the attempt to read between the lines of the Nurse's speech. But she continues to doubt the Nurse's integrity and suspects that the philtra and thelkteria (509) may still prove to be aphrodisiac words rather than anaphrodisiac medicines (518, 520). Phaidra is in fact able at this point to read the Nurse's ultimate intention 29

30

Criticism concentrates on allotting responsibility for Phaidra's change of heart and on determining whether or not she understood that the Nurse's new plan was her old, and if not, whether she should have (see Conacher 1961: 3 7 - 4 4 and his references). Critics thus fail to see that the persuasiveness of the Nurse's words lies precisely in their ambiguous status, so that they can justly be called a pharmakon^ that is, simultaneously a remedy and a poison, and always an insidiously weakening drug. While it is hard to imagine that the Nurse's true intentions here break through the carefully constructed surface of her speech, a logos or word from the beloved is precisely what she wants. T h e mss. reading is perhaps not so much 'absurd' (Barrett 1964) as too obvious, determined not only by its immediate context but also by the overall concerns of the play. Murray retains the reading of the mss. in his edition; Barrett favours the conjecture iplokon) of Reiske. Conacher 1967: 40 also reads logon.

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correctly, but she is no longer prepared to fight against the pharmakon, the persuasive words that the Nurse has both employed on her and offered to her as a solution. The scene closes on a final ambiguity; when the triumphant Nurse exits, she uses against Phaidra exactly the evasive language with which Phaidra had formerly endeavoured to elude her at 337-52, even including the final word-play on the philos who is too near to be too dear. The pharmakon of persuasion thus accomplishes the seduction of Phaidra. Seduction is not the only association of persuasion, for persuasion can also appear in Greek sources as a form of violence. Although peitho and bia are regularly contrasted in political contexts, they can also be aligned with one another. In Gorgias' Helen, the word is a powerful master, and although small and invisible, has great material force (^oyog Swdcrcr]c; jieyac; eoxiv, 6g a^iixQOTocxq) acbfiaxi xai acpaveoraTq) Beioxaxa egya djcoxe^el, Helen, 8). It can thus be perceived as a threat. At Thucydides 3.36 Kleon is both the most persuasive (pithanotatos) and the most violent (biaiotatos) of men: 'He was remarkable among the Athenians for the violence of his character, and at this time he exercised far the greatest influence over the people.' Rhetoric, as the technique of the spoken word in a public context, was central to the operation of Athenian democracy, in both the assembly and the lawcourts. But the growing influence of the sophists in the later fifth century, and their claims to teach rhetorical, and therefore political, success, made the new status ofpeitho, as part of a self-conscious theory of speech and rhetoric, into a source of pervasive anxiety. In particular, the power to persuade was seen to be the equivalent of the power to make the worse (weaker) argument seem the better (stronger). The Chorus in the Trojan Women exhort Hekabe (967-8): Demolish this persuasiveness. Plausible speech Combined with such immorality is sinister. The fear of persuasion that such texts evince is relevant to the case of the Hippolytos. When the Nurse urges Phaidra to yield to a stronger force (443-6), she proves to be referring to herself.31 Relations between desire, violence and the difference or absence that, I have argued, characterises language in the Hippolytos, can be seen to be mobilised to produce the pharmakon of persuasion. Desire itself is represented in the play as inherently violent, as when it is described as a weapon let loose from the hand of Eros (530-2). Moreover, speech itself is violent and destructive throughout the play and is debated always in terms of a material force and presence. Barthes' formulation (1963: 32) could apply to this play: 'tragedy implies a desperate 31

Buxton claims that peitho is usually opposed to bia, force or compulsion (1982: 53 and citations there). On the other side of the argument are the texts I have cited (Buxton makes no reference to the Thucydides passage in this context) and such phrases as Pindar Pythian 4. 219, Aischylos Agamemnon 385 and Plato Sophist 263d. The Oresteia as a whole offers a meditation on the transformation ofpeitho from a noxious to a benign influence; see Goldhill 1984 and 1986: 1-32. Buxton also offers as a translation ofpeithein 'get to acquiesce' (1982: 49), which has an element of force in it while it need not be accompanied by open violence; see especially 58-63.

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reliance on speech; speech here possesses an objective power, according to a code familiar in so-called primitive societies: it is a whiplash'. In the Hippolytos there are many instances of such negative power. Speech touches (310), strikes (342, 934) and bites (1313). Tongues trip their owners (100, 395-7). The sailor's putative message destroys Phaidra's tranquillity (115-60). Phaidra's words destroy (353) the Nurse as hers did Phaidra at 312. Makrai leschai, long gossips, are one of the pernicious pleasures of life (384). Speeches that are too kaloi destroy cities and homes (486-7). Phaidra is destroyed by the Nurse's words to Hippolytos (575, 596). The Nurse's speech defiles Hippolytos almost in a physical sense (654-5). Hippolytos' shameful words fill the land (692; cf. the bull at 1215). Theseus is destroyed by the words of the letter (878). The material force of language is also evident in the repeatedly expressed anxiety that speech is always striving to get out, to get beyond (perd) the control of the speaking subject. The Nurse speaks at 214 and 232 of Phaidra's 'throwing' her words out (rhiptousa logon). At 342 she asks poi probesetai logos, 'where will the logos go

forward to', as if the logos had a will and initiative of its own. Hippolytos cannot contain his tirade (604), and neither can Theseus restrain his imprecations once impelled by the words of the letter (882-3). At 991 to speak is to 'send out the tongue'. Conversely, to close the mouth is to contain the words, as at 498-9 and 1412. But both these references speak of a failure to be silent. Desire and speech are mutually generating and threaten to perpetuate themselves and each other without end. Both desire and speech, moreover, can be represented as forms of violence, so that the three forces are intimately connected. The interrelations of these three forces, and their threat of endless self-perpetuation, can be read at three points in the play. In his tirade Hippolytos says that women's unrestrained desire will give rise to his unrestrained speech (667-8). At 938-42 in the agon, Theseus imagines the exponential expansion of crime until the gods have to establish a new land to house the malefactors. At 1252-4 the Messenger says that he would not believe Hippolytos unchaste if the whole race of women hung itself and filled Ida with writings. The forces that generate these threats are insistently bound together both in these specific examples and in the play as a whole, but my analysis must provisionally at least elaborate each separately. This chapter has concentrated on desire; the following chapters will discuss violence and language.

Violence

In the last chapter I elaborated the interaction within the play between the representations of desire and language. In this chapter I examine first some connections which the play makes between desire and violence by means of a significant cluster of images; I proceed to an analysis of some of the play's structuring movements, along the lines suggested by the work on violence undertaken by Girard. Girard is one of this century's influential theoreticians of violence and its place within culture. His work remains controversial, important for many but vitiated for others by two aspects; its insistence on positing a historical, but necessarily irretrievable, origin for the patterns and systems that it investigates, and its sweeping claims to be a theory of the foundations of all culture, without reference to specific time and place.1 This ahistorical transcendence can be seen to be necessary to a theory of violence that is first and foremost the theory of a concealment of violence, and of a denial that is systematically enacted by all cultural forms and representations. The theory claims to make visible this invisibility of violence. Similarly, the theory's cross-cultural claims are explicable and again, perhaps even necessary, because it takes as its ground of enquiry a state characterised as pre-cultural and pre-historical. But these transcendental aspects of Girard's work do not mean that we cannot use it to investigate specific cultures and their products. Some classicists have already appropriated Girard's work as a theory ofrepresentations of violence, primarily a literary theory, and the present chapter is conceived as an attempt in a similar vein. An analysis of the Hippolytos may provide an interesting control on Girard's work, since, unlike those plays that Girard himself investigates and those that Foley (1985) has analysed, it is not structured around an instance of sacrificial violence. Furthermore, the Hippolytos does not take as its explicit subject the violence of war, as do the Euripidean war plays, or the origin of crucial cultural formations, as does for instance the Oresteia. Girard's theory necessarily bears the traces of his own time, with its specific experience of and fascination with violence both between states and within the 1

See Foley 1985: 49—64 for a good account of the possibilities and limitations of Girard's work.

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state. The experience of fifth-century Athens was necessarily different. Violent struggle within the Athenian state seems to have been relatively, although not totally, absent from the period in which most of the extant tragedies were produced and performed. This seems appropriate, for it can be argued that democracy is, among other things, a claim to be able to regulate the relations between citizens and their transferences of power without recourse to violence. But its account of its institutions and their history is thus perhaps likely to gloss over or transform the elements of violent struggle that may have been present at inception and during development. Of Aischylos' tragedies, the Oresteia registers the civil strife of the 450s in that it commemorates the reform of the Areopagus and the consequent assassination of Ephialtes. The ending of the trilogy, in the speech of Athene (681-710), claims to have found a way to check violent strife within the polis by conducting business through the lawcourt instead of the private feud. But the site of this salvation is the Hill of Ares, where Theseus overcame the Amazons in bloody conflict, and the means of salvation include the incorporation into the polis of the Erinyes, who as chastisers of civil strife (858-63, 976-87) retain their terrifying and vengeful aspect (930-7). 2 At the other end of the period during which the extant tragedies were produced, the oligarchic coup of 411 caused the temporary failure of democracy and initiated a period of intimidation and bloodshed. At least four of Euripides' most bleak and disturbing tragedies were written after these events, as were Sophokles' Philoktetes and Oidipous at Kolonos. Within states other than Athens during the period of the Peloponnesian War, civil violence could be frequent and deadly. The civil war in Corcyra, ofwhich Thucydides' Book 3 gives a particularly harrowing account, took place in the year following the production of the Hippolytos. On the external as opposed to the internal front, the Greek states, including Athens, were almost constantly at war. Whether war provided an experience of 'violence' pure and simple is hard to say, and it would be unwise to collapse the possible Greek views of military activity into the views that are available to us nowadays. Warfare was represented as a highly structured and intelligible activity, and moreover as a natural and correct part of the role of a man and citizen.3 The poetry of Homer, with its celebration of warfare, formed the basis of the future citizens' education. But Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1972) have suggested that tragedy takes the particular forms that it does because of a tension between the traditional Homeric models of behaviour and the civic, democratic ideals which the polis needed more urgently to inculcate. The Peloponnesian War, moreover, seems to have afforded an experience of war different from that which Athens had previously known. The testimony of both the Euripidean war plays and the History of Thucydides indicates that Athens suffered a progressive brutalisation in this period; Foley (1985: 59) even suggests that Thucydides writes of the Athenian plague and the civil war in Corcyra in terms that evoke a specifically Girardian 'crisis'. Part of this brutalisation, at least in the Thucy2 3

On the equivocal ending of the Oresteia see Goldhill 1984. On city-state warfare see Vernant 1980: 19-44.

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didean account, seems to stem from the fact that Athens was not just a polls at war, but an aggressively imperial power; the subjects of the Mytilenian Debate and the Melian Dialogue are, respectively, the punishment of a revolted ally and the forcible incorporation and destruction of a previously neutral island. Violence is also represented in Greek sources as the motor of history. For the Presocratic philosopher Herakleitos, 'polemos [violence or war] is the father and king of all' (fr. 53 Diels-Kranz). Empedokles in the fifth century argued that love iphilia) and strife (nelkos) were motive forces which alternately governed the world (fr. 17 Diels-Kranz). The Theogony of Hesiod narrates a series of acts of patricidal violence which prove to be necessary to the eventual evolution of the rule of Zeus, the only rule that can close the series and institute order among gods and mortals. The tragedies themselves provide the most extensive and systematic Greek meditation on violence. It is of course violence of a particular kind, since no violent act ever takes place on the tragic stage, and in some tragedies the act of violence never takes place at all but is narrowly averted. All the tragedies, however, are constructed around some kind of a violent climax. The violent act, when it happens, is always to be imagined as taking place off-stage, in some other location; it is subsequently narrated on-stage, and the final effects revealed in a tableau. Frequently, the act of violence takes the form of a perverted sacrifice or other ritual. While any actual act is represented as happening elsewhere, elements of violent activity are not absent from the stage; physical assault may be threatened, and there is a constant violence of language in argument, deception, insults, threats and curses, which foreshadows and prefigures the act that will inevitably take place. The dramas of Euripides hold a special place among the three tragedians because of their preoccupation with the effects of war. Euripides has therefore often been characterised as 'anti-war', although it is perhaps unlikely that this very general form of dissent was a possible political position in fifth-century Athens. The Hippolytos is earlier than the plays that deal explicitly with war, and so does not demonstrate exactly this preoccupation. However, it dramatises the violence of relations between the sexes, and the abuse of power, which are the two principal forms in which the brutality of war is often represented in the later plays. In the Hippolytos, the central act of violence is Hippolytos' death; I shall be concerned in the present chapter with violence not only in the account of his death but also in verbal exchanges and in certain structures of imagery. The play deploys a set of figures that relate desire, both legitimate and transgressive, to violence and death. In other words, violence in the play frequently makes its appearance in the terms of a discourse of desire. For Girard, the forces of desire and violence are linked in that violence arises from 'mimetic desire', a process in which each subject desires only that object which is already desired by another subject. The second subject thereby becomes a rival, and competition for the object generates violent conflict. Girard's model is obviously related to Freud's influential theory that the desiring subject comes

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into being only through a process of intrafamilial Oedipal conflict, and that the particular forms that desire then assumes in the individual are the result of a structuring Violence' inflicted on a putatively (and irretrievably) whole and undifferentiated subject. For Lacan, too, access to both desire and language is both the result and the trace of a loss, a past 'primal' violence that simultaneously makes and mars the individual subject.4 The forces of desire and violence were also intimately connected in Greek representations; Vernant (1980: 20-21) writes that: Ares and Aphrodite, Polemos and Philia, Neikos and Harmonia, Eris [strife] and Eros also appear in the organisation of the pantheon, in legends and in the theories of the philosophers, as pairs of powers which are opposed yet closely linked ... In the eyes of the Greeks it was not possible to isolate the forces of discord from those of union either in the web of human relationships or in the constitution of the world. We saw in the last chapter that desire can be represented as a form of violence, both in Greek culture generally and in the Hippolytos specifically; in the Hippolytos it is also particularly clear how the onset of desire leads to violence both of speech and of action.

Death in the meadow The specific images mobilised in the play to link desire and violence are the sacred meadow, the garland, the yoke and the departure from the paternal home. The first of these, the sacred meadow, is evoked in the hymn that Hippolytos sings to Artemis on his entrance to the stage and to the play (73-8): My Goddess Mistress, I bring you ready woven this garland. It was I that plucked and wove it, plucked it for you in your inviolate Meadow. No shepherd dares to feed hisflockwithin it: no reaper plies a busy scythe within it: only the bees in springtime haunt the inviolate Meadow. Its gardener is the spirit Reverence [aidos] who refreshes it with water from the river. Hippolytos has brought a 'woven garland' (plekton stephanon, 73) to Artemis from an 'untouched' or 'undefiled' meadow (akeratos, 73, 76) where no shepherd dares to pasture his flock (75) nor has any iron entered (76). The meadow houses instead the bee of spring (77), and aidos tends it with dewy streams (78). As we saw in chapter 2, the privilege of entering the meadow and picking flowers is available only to those who are sophron by nature (physis) and not by education (didakton) (79-81). The ending of Hippolytos' song moves from an account of 4

Lemaire writes 'Each stage in the process of becoming... is marked by a sacrifice bordering upon suicide' (1977: 181).

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the meadow to an account of his own life; he alone is privileged to converse with Artemis (84-6), and he wishes that he may end his life as he began it (87): So may I turn the post set at life's end even as I began the race. This sacred meadow and the details about it that are furnished by the hymn have been the focus of an abiding critical interest.5 Wilamowitz, followed by Meridier and Sechan, referred the meadow to a hypothetical temenos (sacred enclosure) of Artemis. But access to historical temena was not necessarily exclusive, as it is in this song. To supply a material referent for the lines is perhaps to restrict their significance; it is the metaphorical quality of the meadow that must claim attention. The meadow can be seen as a figure for Hippolytos' own untouched and undefiled (akeratos) condition, as an external representation of his inner sophrosune. Unfortunately, Hippolytos cannot control the connotations of this figure, for the isacred meadow' brings with it associations from representations of it in other, very different contexts, that make Hippolytos' evocation of it here into an anomaly. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter is the first known text to compose such a meadow, in the scene of the rape of Persephone. The meadow then becomes a topos or commonplace for subsequent literature. Kreousa in Euripides' Ion picks flowers in a similar setting just before she is raped by Apollo. In Hellenistic literature, the Medea of Apollonios of Rhodes plays with her maids in a flowery meadow while she awaits the meeting with Jason (Argonautica 3.897-9). 6 The sacred meadow, as it appears in these texts, is a place of erotic activity, or of the prelude to such activity; specifically, it is a place where desire takes the form of violent assault. The paradigmatic narrative set in the meadow provides a shared and available way of talking about access to sexuality. By his evocation of the meadow, therefore, Hippolytos inscribes himself, unwittingly and unwillingly, into a narrative of sexual violence. While he intends to describe something that is particular to him, his privileged access to Artemis' consecrated place and his extraordinary relationship with her, the figure that he uses takes away that singularity and reduces him to one in a series of doomed virgins. He will suffer the desire and violence of those who are not sophron, those who are precisely the figures that Hippolytos endeavours in his hymn to exclude from the meadow (81). But the context that he evokes ensures the presence of the not-sophron, because they are essential to the plot of sexual initiation that is generated by the image of the meadow. The very prohibition that he makes produces its own transgression. We recall from the previous chapter that the oath that Hippolytos takes before Theseus similarly inscribes him into a narrative pattern that leads in a direction opposed to his real needs. This oath, and Hippolytos' entrance song, 5

6

For particular studies see Motte 1973, Bremer 1975, Corelis 1978. See also Segal 1965, Turato 1974, and Pigeaud 1976. See also Ovid Fasti 4.417 and Metamorphoses 5.391, Horace Odes 3.27.29-32. Corelis 1978 makes the point that the association between the meadow and sexual violence is especially prominent in Euripides. For a different account of the meadow see Walsh 1984: 122-3.

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are very different from the other instances of the 'inscription' already observed, Phaidra's reference to her doomed family and the Nurse's speech of persuasion. In these examples the 'inscription' works to serve, rather than to subvert, the speaker's intentions. The sacred meadow can thus be seen to be a site of violent desire rather than ofsophrosune; it is also a site of violent death. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter the meadow leads directly to Hades, for Persephone is taken to the kingdom of death. In the Hippolytos too, the meadow can be seen to connote death, and indeed the other images that I have isolated - the garland, the yoke and the departure - are all pressed into service as figures of death. The meadow in Hippolytos' song is represented as separate and apart, remote from normal human concerns. Both pasturage and agriculture are explicitly excluded (75-6). Greek culture commonly represented marriage as a form of agriculture, in which the wife was the land to be 'ploughed' by the husband and to produce the harvest of children;7 Hippolytos' exclusion of agriculture from the meadow speaks of a resistance that elides the difference between legitimate union on the one hand and rape on the other. The absence of pasturage and agriculture suggests not only sanctity but also sterility, the end of life. The Chorus's description of Hippolytos' death again mobilises the figure of the meadow; Hippolytos' death is spoken of as absence from the meadow (1138-9). Within his entrance hymn, the deathly qualities of the meadow appear in Hippolytos' denial of any change or movement. He excludes the possibility of development and change from his own life when he wishes to round the turning (or end) point of his life as he began (87). The same desire for unalterability is voiced in the repetitions of the word akeratos (73, 76), one of the root meanings of which is 'unmixed'. Hippolytos fantasises that the meadow makes an absolute separation between the sophrones and the kakoi,8 just as in his tirade he speaks of an absolute separation between male and female that extends, in the image of the metal exchanged for the child, to the divorce of reproduction from sexuality. Hippolytos' insistence on unmixed purity is intimately connected to his rejection of learning, which is forcibly expressed in the hymn; only those who have sophrosune by nature and not by education are allowed into the meadow (79). To learn means to change, and both are often painful processes, but inevitable. The only way to avoid change and learning is to live the life that Hippolytos desires, a life that ends as it began (87). Such a life will be in Hippolytos' case synonymous with death. To reject change and learning is thus to embrace death, for the only real alternative to a loss of innocence is a loss of everything, including life itself. It is Hippolytos' peculiar misfortune that in his case the threat of one can be seen to lead directly to the fact of the other. The image of the meadow ensures that Hippolytos cannot help but speak of 7

8

See Vernant 1985: 171-3 on this representation of marriage and on the frequent similar references in tragedy. Barrett 1964 points out that historically, initiation into Greek mystery religions, e.g. the Eleusiniari Mysteries, was not as exclusive as Hippolytos would like it to be for his personal cult of Artemis.

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death and defilement by violent desire in the same breath as he endeavours to evoke a vision of pure serenity. The very negatives with which he introduces the shepherd and the sideros (iron tool, 75-6) serve to bring these intruders before the mind, and to evoke the very violation that Hippolytos ostensibly excludes. That violation, threatened in the hymn, is further foreshadowed in Phaidra's delirious language when Hippolytos' metaphors of purity, the meadow and the stream, are turned into Phaidra's metaphors of longing and desire (211, 208-9). In the Messenger's account of Hippolytos' death, meadow and stream are translated into those other spaces of shore and sea, and the violation is accomplished in reality. The image of the meadow is thus a figure for desire and death, which will disrupt the changelessness of which Hippolytos dreams. Hippolytos sings in the hymn of separation and exclusion, the separation between the sophrones and the kakoi, and the separation of Hippolytos himself from the many who may not enter the meadow, pick the flowers, or hold converse with the goddess. As the meadow ideally separates and excludes, so Hippolytos simultaneously endeavours to establish the significance of the meadow as a metaphor for his unmixed purity to the exclusion of all the other possible meanings that would embroil him in an ancient narrative of desire and death. We have already seen in chapter 2 how he tries to circumscribe the significance of other crucial terms like sophrosune and philos. Like Theseus in his dream of a second truthful voice, Hippolytos attempts to suppress or evade the ambiguity of the language he must use. At the same time as he tries to circumscribe the sign of the meadow, he claims that the relationship with Artemis, which the song of the meadow celebrates, is similarly free from possible ambiguities. He idealises the contact that he has with Artemis into a presence (xuneimi, I am together with, 85) and an equal exchange (ameibomai, I exchange with, 85). In this description of his communication with Artemis as presence and reciprocity, Hippolytos avoids all the possible sources of confusion that wreck the other encounters of the play and that are finally responsible for his death. All the other confrontations in the play are characterised by the absence, in one or more senses, of one of the participants, or by their inequality of status. Such encounters are thus rendered abortive or, alternatively, destructive. Hippolytos aspires to an immediate contact with his goddess, but the other exchanges in the play are characterised by insurmountable gulfs between the protagonists. But Hippolytos will prove ultimately unable to avoid absence and difference, in language as in life; his downfall will be caused by Phaidra's letter, a communication from which all presence has been erased, which structurally denies the possibility of reciprocal exchange between writer and reader, and which can be sustained only by the fictional potential of language. The meadow's narrative of desire and death will collapse the separations and exclusions that Hippolytos tries to construct, and he himself will prove subject to the time, change and ambiguity that he tries to avoid. The garland that Hippolytos picks, weaves and dedicates to Artemis bears connotations similar to those of the meadow. When Hippolytos picks flowers, he can be seen to align

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himself with the other mythical virgins who amuse themselves with the same innocent pastime in the moment before desire and death intrude. His action at the very beginning of the play, indeed before the beginning, thus foreshadows and prefigures his fate. The garland is also part of the imagery of marriage, since garlands were dedicated to Artemis by young girls before their marriage. Hippolytos dedicates both his garland and his person to the service of Artemis.9 But the garland connotes death as well as marriage. Artemis suggests an association between the garland and Hippolytos' death when she uses the word karpoumenos (reaping, 1427) to describe his suffering. The garland itself reappears as that which Theseus casts from his head when he enters to find his wife dead (806-7). If we accept an identification between Hippolytos and his own garland, as is suggested by the dedication of both to Artemis, Theseus' action becomes a proleptic enactment of his son's downfall. Plekton (woven, 72), the adjective with which Hippolytos introduces his garland and his song, can suggest the complexity that he strives in vain, especially in the hymn itself, to eradicate from his life and language alike. The woven, twisted aspect of the garland ties it to a series of woven or knotted objects that cross and bind the play. Plektos is the word that describes the hawsers with which Phaidra's ill-fated Cretan ship ties up on the beach at Mounichion (762). Such nautical imagery is prominent in the representation of marriage; sea-voyages appear in a similar context also at Iphigeneia atAulis 667-70 and Trojan Women 455-6. But the example here is especially loaded, for the hawsers can be seen to tie Phaidra not only to the physical land but also to her double destiny of marriage and suicide, desire and death. They can also be seen to foreshadow both the noose that strangles Phaidra (781) and the reins in which Hippolytos is entangled (1236). The imagery of knotting or twisting thus not only marks each separate death but also binds the two deaths together. The Nurse speaks of the 'knot of words' (kathamma... logon, 671), which foreshadows the noose (hamma, 781). She intends to refer only to Phaidra's confession and to Hippolytos' tirade, but the phrase can equally well apply to Hippolytos' downfall and to Theseus' despair, for each is trapped by the words he utters or leaves unsaid. Speaking of her relationship with Phaidra, the Nurse longs for euluta stergethra (easily loosed ties of affection, 256) instead of the tightly woven relationships that do in fact bind the characters. Such binding leads only to destruction, and each character, as we have seen, is proved in the end a philon diaphthoreus (destroyer of philoi, 682). Philia, which should be a productive force, leads instead to a closeness and a connectedness that are purely destructive. The imagery of tying and knotting thus speaks not only of each character's own predicament but also of the irresistible connections between them that lead ultimately to disaster.10 9

10

On dedication of garlands or hair at marriage see Corelis 1978: 135 and Burkert 1983: 63 n.20. On the equation between foliage and hair, see Corelis 1978: 133-5; Braund 1980: 185, and Reckford 1972: 41 n.13. For discussion of the 'knot', see especially Segal 1965: 133 and note 35; Vellacott 1975: 230; Fowler 1978: 18-20. See also the section in chapter 1 on the loosening of Phaidra's body and language.

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The garland, like the other knots in the play, ties together marriage and death, desire and violence, and thereby binds the figures of Hippolytos and Phaidra.11 The yoke is another element of this complex of imagery. The yoke can be seen to shift between Hippolytos and Phaidra and to articulate a link between their fates. The yoke is first invoked in connection with Iole, who is cited by the Chorus as an instance of the terrible power of Aphrodite, against whom Phaidra rashly attempts defiance. Iole is a colt previously unyoked (546). This common representation of the virgin as an unyoked animal is most explicitly articulated in the lines by the sixth-century lyric poet Anakreon (335 in Page's edition), where he addresses a Thracian colt (10), and threatens her with a bit (3) and reins (4), concluding that she is only free because she has not yet found a competent rider (6). Since the virgin is unyoked, yoking serves as a figure for sexual initiation. Iole is yoked (zeuxasa, 549) from her home, a victim of Herakles' lust. The language of this stanza buries the shedding of the hymeneal blood in a more general carnage (551) and the ritual marriage cries in a more tragic lament (554). If we admit that the terms of an ancient Greek wedding ceremony are a restrained imitation of the underlying violation, we can see that Iole's fate, as represented in the choral ode, reverses the process by denying those terms their metaphorical quality, so that they again describe unmediated aggression. The song of marriage is the song of the assault on both the virgin and her city. The narrative of virginity and violation, told in this ode for Phaidra, also has obvious relevance for Hippolytos' story. The choral songs, as here, frequently elaborate a relation between the fates of Hippolytos and Phaidra. While the mythical women of this ode, Iole and Semele, offer warnings explicitly only to Phaidra, the example of Semele (453-4) also has significance for Hippolytos. Semele, like Hippolytos, is an example of meizo broteias... homilia (company too high for mortal men, 19) in that she was a partner of Zeus. The term for her death (xaxrjijvcioev, Aphrodite laid her to bed, 562) is recalled by that for his (Sid x'etW&aoa TOY euov (3ioxov, lay me to sleep in death, 1377). The ode in which the yoke first appears thus provides a link between the two protagonists. The language of the Chorus's next ode (732-75), which follows Phaidra's exit to her bedchamber, similarly has significance for the fates of both Hippolytos and Phaidra.12 The Chorus's fantasy of escape from the scene of Phaidra's disaster takes them to the Eridanus, where the sisters of Phaethon weep for him, and their tears change into amber (738-41). The story of Phaethon can be closely related to that of Hippolytos; both are youths who resist marriage and who eventually die when their chariots crash.13 The tears of Phaethon's sisters foreshadow the laments of the brides who will commemorate Hippolytos' death (1428-9). Similarly, when the Chorus proceed to sing of a 11 12 13

On the yoke see particularly Reckford 1972. On this ode see especially Graham 1947; Parry 1966; Padel 1974 and Lawall 1975. On the connections between Hippolytos and Phaethon see Reckford 1972 and Zeitlin 1985a. Zeitlin (1985a: 67) suggests that the figure of Phaethon, because his name also recalls that of Phaidra ('the shining one'), acts as a link between the two antagonists. Padel 1974: 235 makes a similar comparison.

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further escape to the ends of the world, they unwittingly foretell Hippolytos' exile in their description of Poseidon forbidding further passage to the sailors (743-5)- 14 In the ode which follows Hippolytos' departure to death the yoke makes a further appearance, but in connection with Hippolytos alone. At 1133, in a stanza describing the negations ensuing on Hippolytos' death, the Chorus speak of his horses as yoked. The Chorus then address the yoked Graces and ask why they send him away (1148-50): Sister Graces, why did you let him go guiltless, out of his native land, out of his father's house? Hippolytos' exile is a prelude to his death, but these yoked Graces are closely connected with marriage,15 so that once again marriage and death emerge simultaneously in the language of the play. In this context it is appropriate that Hippolytos' death later be spoken of in terms of the marriageable young girls who will now have to end their supposed contest for his bed (1140-1); these girls are also recalled at the end of the play by the bridal rite that Artemis institutes to honour Hippolytos. The yoke, which had connoted marriage at 1148, is made material in its contribution to Hippolytos' death, recounted in the Messenger's speech; at 1389 Hippolytos is said to be yoked to catastrophe. The yoke, like the garland and the meadow, links marriage with death and Hippolytos with Phaidra. The departure from the paternal house is another element in the constellation of marriage imagery that the play mobilises as a figure for death and disaster. Greek marriage required that the bride move from her paternal to her new marital home. Phaidra's sea-voyage takes her 'from her royal home' (oXpicov cut3 oi'xoov, 755) to her marriage and subsequent downfall. Iole is 'yoked from her Eurytian home' (oixcov ^eij^aa3 out' EtJQimcov, 547-8), in a parody of the conventional marriage ceremony such as we have seen the entire ode sustain. The departure from the paternal house figures again, with the yoke and the sacred meadow, in the ode that heralds Hippolytos' death. Exile as departure from the paternal house, and at the command of the yoked Graces, seems to represent Hippolytos entirely as a bride, one of the play's series of doomed virgins (1148-50). Hippolytos' manner of death further assimilates him to the despised females whom he has rejected throughout the play. This is accomplished in two ways. His death is spoken of as a silencing of his music in his father's house (1135-6). These lines can suggest Iphigeneia in Aischylos' Agamemnon 243-7: for often in old days, When brave men feasted in her father's hall, 14

15

See Parry 1966: 322 on the western gardens as a reference to Hippolytos' exile. Barrett 1964 interprets pontomedon as the Old Man of the Sea, but the name can also refer to Poseidon, a reading which gives us a more sharply focused and sinister ode. See Bushala 1969 and Reckford 1972.

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With simple skill and pious praise Linked to the flute's pure tone Her virgin voice would melt the hearts of all. Iphigeneia's death, like Hippolytos', is accomplished in a silence that contrasts with her previous music. The second point is that Hippolytos' death takes the significant form of strangulation in the reins of the horses; such a death recalls Phaidra's suicide, and since as we have already seen, hanging was characterised in Greek culture as a specifically female death,16 Hippolytos' mode of dying can be seen as parodically feminine. Dissolutions I have been arguing that the play deploys the imagery of desire, of rape and marriage, in contexts of yiolent death and disaster. The images of meadow, garland, yoke and departure seem to work a process of violent 'feminisation' on Hippolytos.17 But this process does not only involve discrete images. Hippolytos is reduced, by Phaidra's letter and the agon with Theseus, to the female position of silence or ineffectual speech. During the agon, his own language seems to connive at this process of feminisation. He describes himself as possessing a Virgin souP (1006), using the term parthenos, virgin or maiden, which is more commonly employed as a predicate of females. The alpha-privatives (apolis aoikos, without polls or oikos) that he applies to himself in 1029 (retaining the line with Murray) are also more commonly found applied to women, especially in the texts of Euripides. Another term with feminine connotations that Theseus uses of Hippolytos in the agon is the verb mechanomai (machinate, 957). Up to this point in the play, the term has been deployed only in the context of women's activity. Mechanai in this play can be seen to represent the way in which women may endeavour to exert influence in the world; mechanai seem to constitute an illegitimate, debased form of power for those who are essentially powerless. When at 331 Phaidra desires to work (mechanomethd) noble things (esthla) out of shameful (aischra), the very language that she uses betrays her, for noble deeds (esthla) and mechanai presuppose two entirely different types of agent and are fundamentally incompatible with one another.18 The Nurse plans to use mechanai at 480-1: Men would take long to hunt devices out, if we the women did not find them first. 16 17

18

See Loraux 1981b and 1987 on masculine and feminine deaths. On the persistent and repeated 'feminisation' of men in tragedy see Zeitlin 1985b: 80, and on Hippolytos' particular feminisation see further Zeitlin 1985a: 65-7. She sees the function of the 'dissolution of differences' in this play as intimately connected with the growth of self-knowledge, the realisation that it is possible to possess a 'self only through the mediation of the other, in Hippolytos' case Phaidra. She suggests that the manner of his death draws on imagery of both sexual intercourse and childbirth (1985a: 78). Corelis 1978: 4 reads Hippolytos' final scene with his father as a tableau of childbirth with Hippolytos as the child. For Phaidra as child see Knox 1952: 11 and Norwood 1953: 214. See Loraux 1979: 55 on this aspect of mechanai.

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Her mechanai here seem to be identical to her speech to Hippolytos, and indeed speech can be one means to effectiveness that is open even to those, like women and slaves, who are deprived of others. But the mechanai that the Nurse uses do not work; they lead instead to a situation that is amechana (impossible, 598). Amechania (helplessness) is predicated of women in pregnancy by the Chorus (163) and of women of gnome bracheia ('lack of wit') by Hippolytos at 643. Women do not gain status in Hippolytos5 eyes if they do not employ mechanai; in the tirade woman is represented as necessarily constituting either an excess or a deficiency, for the amechanos woman is anopheles (useless, 638) and meden (nothing) as opposed to the phronousa pleiona (641), the woman who thinks too much. But this excess of devices, apparently characteristic of women, Theseus in the agon attributes to Hippolytos. In this feminisation of Hippolytos, the play stages a collapse of the very distinction between male and female that is so crucial to the dynamics of the play. But the processes of the play bring together not only Hippolytos and Phaidra but also Hippolytos and Theseus; while Phaidra and Hippolytos approach each other across lines of gender, Hippolytos and Theseus approach each other across lines of power and status. This collapse of distinctions in the Hippolytos can perhaps be read in terms of Girard's concept of 'crisis' or 'dissolution of differences', which is central to his theory of society and of tragedy. This concept Girard deploys in two ways. It denotes on the one hand the demolition of hierarchies and the transgression of boundaries that results from violence, and on the other the grotesque symmetry of enemies who necessarily mimic each other in their pursuit of identical and exactly reciprocal revenge. 'If the art of tragedy is to be defined in a single phase, we might do worse than call attention to one of its most characteristic traits: the opposition of symmetrical elements' (Girard 1977: 44). Girard's notion of symmetry is not the same as the idea of peripeteia, reversal, which has informed theories of tragedy since the Poetics of Aristotle, nor is it absolutely reducible to the category of dramatic (or tragic) irony, for it is fundamentally predicated on the violence of tragedy, as the result of that violence rather than as an incidental concomitant. Such a symmetry of violent enemies can perhaps be read especially in the plays of Euripides, which frequently exhibit the victim turned aggressor, who takes what seems an especially hideous revenge and thereby forfeits - perhaps - the approbation of the culture. This particular structuring movement seems to be especially prominent in the plays that concern themselves with the fate of women, such as the Medea, the Elektra, the Hekabe, and perhaps the Hippolytos. The sense of moral disorientation produced by such dramas may be responsible both for the immense attraction that the texts of Euripides seem to exert over modern critical writing, and for the odium which historically they have so often encountered. This conception of tragic structure renders superfluous, rightly I think, the endless debate in the critical literature about which is the central character, or the more sympathetic character, of the Hippolytos. Knox pointed out in his important article of 1952 that concentration on 'personality' had produced no

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consensus (and, he might have added, very little of any interest), but nonetheless, the history of criticism of the play has frequently been in danger of descending into a tedious chronicle of the personal preferences of commentators. More recently, however, some critics have come to see that preoccupation with 'character' is in part at least a product of our own culture's investment in the self-sufficient and self-consistent individual, and that it does not provide the only, or even the most productive, way of reading Greek tragedy. The Girardian concept of crisis and dissolution may provide another.19 We have outlined the process of Hippolytos' 'feminisation', but this is not the only way in which the play draws the main characters together and forces on them an exchange of position. While Phaidra does not exactly become a man, I have argued that she expresses a longing, in the delirium, to be Hippolytos. She does force him to participate in an exchange of power, in which she controls his destiny, inverting the proper relations between male and female. This exchange she engineers by the feminine mechane of the letter, by which she ensures that she ends as the 'witness' (972) to the confrontation of Hippolytos and Theseus rather than herself being watched by her stepson as she meets her husband's gaze (661-2), as Hippolytos had promised. Instead of his gaze revealing the truth about her, her testimony convicts him. But such power is predicated on her death, and it is perhaps more significant that the man and woman are also represented as alike in powerlessness. Both are accused of arrogance (6, 445) against Aphrodite, an arrogance that ensures their downfalls. Aphrodite's effects on them are also similar, so that Hippolytos' last entrance, when he is dying, can be seen to recall Phaidra's first. These brief observations suggest that the concept of 'dissolution of differences' tends to direct attention away from the protagonists' 'characters' as unified subjects and towards their position in the fatal partnership contrived by Aphrodite. The unity of the subject is in fact an issue for both Phaidra and Hippolytos. Phaidra makes a separation between her hand and heart (317), and Hippolytos between his heart and tongue (612). We could even say that Phaidra and Hippolytos are never more similar than when they speak of difference. Neither of them can sustain the separation, either between hand and heart or between heart and tongue, but far from restoring a putative unity, this failure specifically contributes to their respective disasters. Phaidra ends with her hand as defiled as her heart, in that she is responsible for Hippolytos' death, and Hippolytos finds in the agon that his tongue has in fact been silenced, as a 19

That being said, 'character' and characterisation in Greek tragedy remain vexed questions, and I do not suppose that Girard or anyone else has said the last word. The old schema, whereby the protagonists in some sense 'represented' chastity and desire, reason and passion, seems to have fallen out of favour; the psychological readings which place the conflict within one or more of the characters are also less prevalent than they once were. Many good recent studies of the play stress the similarities between the characters, although a preference for one or other of them is often prominent; many critics, again, are sympathetic or hostile to all the participants equally. Neither the 'morality' nor the meaning of a play can be exhausted by such personal judgements, and indeed the most powerful modern readings, such as Zeitlin 1985a, dispense completely with such methods.

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prelude to his silencing in death. The similarities and differences between them are repeatedly a source of anxiety and disruption for both. Hippolytos, when he wants to speak of the fundamental difference that he perceives between himself and Phaidra, is forced into the riddling use of one word only, the term sophron; while he struggles to establish differentiation, his language speaks, against his will, of identity (1033-5). 20 In contrast, Phaidra deliberately collapses distinctions when she says 'He shall share equally in my nosos' (730-1). Nosos-imagery, as we have seen, is rife throughout the play, and connotes not only the affliction of desire (e.g. 40) but also the physical ills which seem to trouble Phaidra (e.g. 179, 186) and the mental sufferings of Hippolytos (e.g. 933). The figure of disease is also crucial to Girard's theory, for he sees violence as a 'contagion'. In the Hippolytos, the contagion of violence provides a perverse form of alliance among all the characters and renders each in turn a victim of the other.21 Hippolytus and Phaidra take up similar positions with regard to language. Neither is self-sufficient as a speaker; Phaidra is forced to call on the Nurse (345) to speak for her, and Hippolytos later calls on the walls of the house to bear witness for him (1074-5). Phaidra has previously expressed a fear of precisely this voice of the housewalls (415-18). Both Hippolytos and Phaidra fear the treachery of the tongue, which is to say, of language (100, 395-7), but both make use of its treacherous qualities to obstruct the understanding of others, Phaidra in the delirium scene and Hippolytos in the agon. Both are inscribed into culturally shared narratives about desire, by the Nurse and by Theseus, but each also inscribes the other into such a narrative, Hippolytos in the tirade and Phaidra in the letter. Both end as figures who themselves generate narratives told by others, when Artemis decrees that their story shall be repeatedly told by the brides (1428-30). The positions taken up towards language, and specifically towards speech and silence, relate not only Hippolytos and Phaidra but all the characters. The Nurse supplicates Phaidra and persuades her to speak, despite Phaidra's efforts to maintain her silence. Conversely, the Nurse supplicates Hippolytos for silence, but she fails, or so it seems at the time, to persuade him. The Servant tries unsuccessfully to persuade Hippolytos to the correct form of speech, namely worshipful address to Aphrodite. The Servant is again unsuccessful in persuading Aphrodite to ignore Hippolytos at 119-20. Later on, Hippolytos successfully persuades his father to speak, with calamitous results for himself (911). All the examples of successful persuasion to speech in the play have pernicious effects. Silence is no less dangerous, since each character in turn enforces silence on another. The Servant is silenced by Hippolytos, the Nurse by Phaidra (706), Phaidra by Hippolytos, Hippolytos by Theseus (and by Phaidra's letter) and Theseus finally by Artemis. These examples of speech and silence can suggest that the dynamic of 20

21

See Zeitlin 1985a: 82 for a penetrating analysis of the 'identity in difference' of which this passage (1034-5) speaks. O n the contagion of violence see Girard 1977: 3 0 - 2 .

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'dissolution of differences' operates not only within the hierarchy of male and female but also within that of father and son. We recall that Hippolytos longs in the tirade for a society in which sons are identical to fathers, and in some ways the play seems to strive to bring about this precise situation. The exile that Theseus inflicts on Hippolytos is an image of his own (35), and the miasma that Theseus was fleeing (and that also afflicts Phaidra, 317) descends in due course to Hippolytos (946).22 The agon in particular is constructed around the similarity in the way the two men argue, so that they constantly pre-empt each other's possible positions and the actual argumentation of the agon achieves nothing. One is deafened, the other muted, by Phaidra's letter, and the result of both these lacks is to silence Phaidra's desire. The 'dissolution of differences' is especially marked when, as father and son, the hierarchical distance between them is great, and yet the two men argue from similarly helpless and deluded positions. This particular situation is not confined to the Hippolytos, as is demonstrated by Girard's analysis of the agon in the Alkestis between Admetos and Pheres. It is a commonplace of the critical literature that the Euripidean agon is always inconclusive, even illusory, and serves only to exacerbate the conflicts between the participants, in a parody of the judicial, rational rhetoric that it employs. Vernant's words on the language of Greek tragedy seem especially applicable to the agon; 'Les mots echanges sur l'espace scenique ont moins alors pour fonction d'etablir la communication entre les divers personnages que de marquer les blocages, les barrieres, l'impermeabilite des esprits, de cerner les points de conflit' (1972: 35) - 'The words exchanged on the scenic space have less the function of establishing communication among the different characters than of marking the blockages, the barriers, the impenetrability of characters' consciousness and of underlining the points of conflict' (my translation). The agon of the Hippolytos demonstrates this propensity very starkly. Since one participant is in complete ignorance and the other completely incapacitated, the actual arguments are abortive. The agon can be brought to a close only by the naked exercise of Theseus' kingly and paternal power.23 The similar positions that the different characters are forced to take up towards speech and silence are not only a sign of the dissolution of differences; while the effect of violence within the play is a levelling among the characters in terms of speech and silence, the means of violence are speech and silence themselves. The relations that the characters construct and enter into with their acts of speech and silence consist of different hierarchies of power, specifically those that obtain between male and female, father and son, free person and slave. We have already noted how each character is silenced by his or her superior; we can also argue that each of the play's central speech acts constitutes an attack by one character on another. We have already seen, at the end of chapter 2, that the 22

23

Hippolytos also later lifts a miasma from T h e s e u s . At this point Hippolytos perhaps becomes a 'scapegoat' or surrogate victim, one sacrificed for others' crimes. O n the model of generative sacrificial violence of which the scapegoat is the crux, see Girard 1977: 80—5 and 9 3 - 6 . O n the Euripidean agon see Duchemin 1945, Strohm 1957, and Collard 1975.

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play persistently represents speech as violence. We also saw in the second chapter that the Nurse exercises a kind of force on Phaidra in the scene of persuasion. Since peitho is usually represented as opposed to bia, the Nurse's attempts cannot unequivocally be called an attack, but the later instances of violent language in the play have no such mitigating qualities. Hippolytos' tirade, which responds to what he understands as Phaidra's attempt on his chastity, constitutes an attack upon her, even though he avoids specifically naming her. The letter, which replies to the tirade, is speech made material and external, so that its violence is yet more compelling. It is followed by and causes the confrontation of the agon, in which Theseus pronounces his curse and sentence of exile. These are words that take immediate and irrevocable effect in the world, and that are materially accomplished in the figure of the bull. Finally, and separately from the human speeches, Artemis' disclosure to Theseus is expressly designed to cause him pain (1297, 1313). While it is true of all Greek tragedy that the spoken and sung word must take the place of the violent act that is not staged, the above summary suggests that the violence of language is a particularly pressing issue for the Hippolytos. Each violent act of language generates its successor, for each utterance emerges in retaliation for the previous one. According to the argument of Girard, all violence is characterised by a mimetic quality that makes it self-perpetuating. In the very nature of violence lies the threat that it be without end. Such mimesis can be read in the Hippolytos. Each speech act in the Hippolytos mimics the preceding one, in the sense that it is a speech act, but it is also true that each act is more dangerous and less easily deflected than the one that occasioned it. Each retaliation mimics the preceding act and thus is its equivalent, but there is also a steady escalation in the severity of the revenge. This escalation, like the mimesis of which it is the result, articulates the propensity of violence to perpetuate itself. Speech and silence are not only the means of violence within the play but also the signs of the dissolution of differences produced by violence, for the characters reproduce one another's positions within speech and silence as they do within the complex of imagery that links desire and death. The symmetry and mimesis in the dissolution of differences ensure that violence, like desire and speech, perpetuates itself endlessly. The dissolution of differences that threatens to make the protagonists indistinguishable also renders them repeatedly substitutable one for another. The figure of'substitution' is explicitly invoked twice. In the agon (1042) Hippolytos speaks of a hypothetical substitution between himself and his father: 'If you were my son, I your father, I would not / Have corrected you with exile.' This is what Theseus thinks Hippolytos is attempting, namely the substitution of himself for his father on the throne of Troizen and in Phaidra's bed. But Theseus speaks at the end of the play (1410) of a further substitution, offering his own death for that of his son: 'If only, my son, I could die in place of you!'24 At the end of the play, Artemis speaks of a 24

We may note that in Racine, Phedre speaks of Hippolytos replacing Theseus in her affections; because they are so alike, the son calls the father to mind. Seneca's Phaedra similarly explains her

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further victim. The favourite of Aphrodite who shall repay Hippolytos' death is nameless; as a substitute for Hippolytos in Artemis' own play of revenge, his singularity is appropriately subsumed beneath the requirements of the narrative of violence. Further substitutions may be traced if we consider the relation of this play to the first Hippolytos, the Hippolytos Kaluptomenos. We have already noted the effect of substituting the seduction of Phaidra by the Nurse for that of Hippolytos by Phaidra. We may read Hippolytos' tirade as at once a substitution for his revelation to Theseus and a contrast to his shocked silence in the first play, a silence that led to his veiling his head. We have seen how the gesture of covering the head moves from Hippolytos in the first play to Phaidra in the second. If the agon in its particular form appears only with the second version of the play, as is most likely, we should probably think of the confrontation between Hippolytos and Theseus as in some sense replacing that between Hippolytos and Phaidra. Substitution thus operates not only among the characters but also between the first and second Hippolytos. The same phenomenon of substitution can be read in the figures of the two Olympians, Aphrodite and Artemis. At the end, the Chorus sing of Aphrodite (1268-81), arousing the expectation that she will appear again to close the play as she opened it. Instead, Artemis enters to institute her own movement of violent revenge. The two goddesses are symmetrically opposed, and their entrances are balanced by choral odes dedicated to them; Hippolytos and his companions sing to Artemis after Aphrodite has initiated the play, and the Chorus sing to Aphrodite before the epiphany of Artemis. The goddesses speak and are spoken of in the same terms (1 and 1429, 23 and 1297, 42 and 1298). The similarities and differences between them, as between Hippolytos and Phaidra, coexist in an uneasy tension, and the history of critical reaction reproduces this situation. Whereas at one time the significant differences between the two goddesses were the focus of critical attention, contemporary criticism emphasises the equally important ways in which each shares or even reproduces the position of the other. Once again, it may be appropriate to invoke the idea of a process of violent revenge that reduces an initial distance between them.25

25

desire for the son by his resemblance to the father (646-62). Evidently Hippolytos' world of ideal identifications has its drawbacks. Perhaps in no single tragedy other than the Hippolytos has the Olympian presence caused so much critical angst and controversy, much of it necessarily shaped by contemporary ideas of what theology and/or secular humanism should be. An indication of the difficulties that the goddesses present is that some commentators, such as Dodds 1925 and Winnington-Ingram i960, have held that the play is best read without them. Euripidean treatment of divinity has frequently been read as satire on the traditional anthropomorphic Olympian deities of myth, but this view is now much less prevalent. Many recent analyses read the goddesses as in some (usually undefined) sense 'symbols', whether of internal passions or external natural forces (e.g. Segal 1965 and Conacher 1967). Other readings, perhaps extensions of these, suggest that the goddesses are not anything in themselves, but are a way of representing the human predicament and the realities by which we must live. Berns remarks (1973: 187) that the gods in Euripides set and clear the tragic stage without ever redeeming it; the conflicts they 'resolve' remain for the human characters. While it is not within the scope of this study to give a full account of the Euripidean gods, we

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Such substitutions as I have elaborated above could also be read in terms of an inversion. The Chorus explicitly invoke such a figure when they sing xa yaQ 5f| JXQCOT' dveatQOUTTai JtdX.iv (the first things are turned back again, 982). The play constantly doubles and mirrors itself, turning back on itself so that its significant images, themes and actions are articulated again in an inverted form. The mirror itself makes a crucial appearance at the end of Phaidra's speech to the women of Troizen (428-30). I investigated this mirror in chapter 1, considering it within the problematic of concealment and revelation and the play's discourse on the nature of the gaze. It can also be sited within a discourse of desire and within the confusion of identity produced by the violent dissolution of differences. Barrett 1964 points out that while most 'Greek mythical mirrors' are 'other-revealing', there is a confusion here between other- and selfrevelation, for neither of the 'others', the kake or the parthenos, can properly represent Phaidra to herself. She is unable to construct a proper identity for herself in the mirror. The confusion among parthenos, Phaidra and kake may be seen as an attempt on Phaidra's part to resist self-knowledge, even while she speaks of it. Her inability to cope with the mirror's image of herself is followed by her attempt to construct a mirror-image of her story in the letter that incriminates Hippolytos and ensures his death. But her attempts to conceal herself within the letter's mirror will fail, and she will still ultimately be revealed, as the lines on the mirror threaten. The mirror is crucial at two other points in extant Euripides, on both occasions in a context of female desire and imminent female violence, as in the Hippolytos. At Elektra 1071 the mirror is a figure for adultery, as here, for Elektra berates her mother Klytaimestra for adorning herself before a mirror after her husband's departure. At Medea 1161 the princess Kreousa, arrayed in Medea's deadly gifts, admires herself in the mirror. These references can be seen to suggest the delusion and unawareness of the aggressor turned victim, at the moment when the erstwhile victim prepares to take revenge. The mirror can be seen to mark the moment when the play itself turns round and the action produces a mirror-image of itself. As the former aggressor mistakes the truth about herself in the mirror, so the former victim cannot see that she is another aggressor. The mirror is exploited for its ability not only to reflect but also simultaneously to distort. The Euripidean mirror can thus be seen to speak repeatedly of a lack of self-awareness.26 The violence of the play, articulated in its acts of speech and silence, can be read to produce among the characters a dissolution of differences. The mimetic symmetry of revenge ensures that the violence perpetuates itself and escalates

26

should note that the goddesses cannot be proposed as a solution to the challenges of the Hippolytos^ for they pose the same problems of morality and authority as does the rest of the play (see further chapters 4 and 5). We should note too that the best recent studies of Greek divinities demonstrate that the principles of coherence that animate them are different from ours; see e.g. Kahn 1978, Vernant 1985: 155-201. The mirror also appears atHekabe 925-6, where it seems to signify a similar oblivion, although in this instance the situation between victim and aggressor is different.

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through a series of substitutions, inversions and mirror-images. But the self-perpetuating series of reciprocal reprisals in the Hippolytos is finally closed, although not by a human act. The final act of violence is instead that of the bull from the sea. Girard examines at length the way in which a violent series both requires and produces a final, crushing, unanswerable act that ends the self-perpetuating mimesis simply by making further action impossible. He concludes that the chief distinguishing characteristic of such an act is that it is represented as superhuman, or divine, to differentiate it from the human series. 'Violence will come to an end only after it has had the last word and that word has been accepted as divine' (1977: 135). Girard argues that the significance of this transference of violence, from the human sphere to the divine, is to conceal from humankind its own collusion in the violent series, so that the fiction may be preserved that violence is something foreign and external to the human condition and thus beyond human control. All representations of violence, according to Girard, have this fiction and concealment at their heart. In the Hippolytos, the 'finalising' act is performed by the bull from the sea, although the play is not in fact brought to a close except by the intervention of Artemis. The duality of these two non-human interventions, the one 'final' for Hippolytos and the other for the play, parallels other doublings that appear throughout the play and that can be sited within a discourse on differences and dissolution of differences. The fact that the 'closing' intervention is doubled between the bull and Artemis also suggests a certain difficulty in achieving finality, which I will explore further in chapter 5. The doubled intervention is not the only double in the Hippolytos, but can be seen to be prepared for by the insistence on doubles earlier in the play. The play underlines the dual natures of its goddesses; Aphrodite is both sweet and bitter, charm and terror (348, 525-32), Artemis is both huntress and protector (166-8). Other doublings have explicitly negative connotations. The house labours under a double pain, the loss of both Phaidra and Hippolytos (1344). The Nurse draws attention to the double grief involved in tending the sick (187-8); at 258 the Nurse is one speaking for two and at 515 she makes the deliberately ambiguous point, in her persuasion of Phaidra, about a single charis (favour, grace) that will come from two. In the agon Theseus laments the lack of a double voice; he dreams of a second truthful voice, and imagines that it would be possible to possess a language identical to the 'reality' that it sought to convey, and that a distinction could be made between that language and the actual prevailing language that is capable of fiction (925-31). The complaint that Phaidra makes in her speech to the women of Troizen about the two kinds of aidos, which are two, having the same letters (385-7), is a complaint that conversely recognises fully the ineradicable difference within language. The prevailing impression of the doublings in this play, then, is that they are painful, ambiguous, and threatening. In the theory of Girard, antagonists become doubles of each other in the process of mimetic violence; these doubles then generate a 'monstrous double', an external monster that is once again

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instrumental in preserving the fiction of the autonomy of violence.27 'This transformation of the real into the unreal is part of the process by which man conceals from himself the human origin of his own violence, by attributing it to the gods' (1977: 161). The monster in this play, the bull from the sea that is responsible for Hippolytos' death, coincides with the finalising act that brings to an end the self-perpetuating escalation of violence. The spoken and written violence of the play produces and ends in an act of 'real' violence, the bull's attack on Hippolytos. The change in status between human and monstrous or divine violence is marked by a formal change from dialogue to the Messenger's speech. This speech, like those of other Messengers, is an unbroken stretch of narrative in strong contrast to the exchanges and short speeches that have previously constituted the drama. This narrative, conventionally, is not open to question or doubt. It is possible to argue that the speech is not even subject to interpretation, as its sense, according to convention, is transparent and unproblematic.28 In the Hippolytos, the initiative passes to the gods, and is therefore unseen; the breakdown in mortal activity is matched by a breakdown of the play's visibility. In the Messenger's account, the meeting with the monster bears all the conventional signs of the supernatural, such as the location in the liminal space between sea and land, and the awareness of the other animals involved (1203). The crash that the bull causes makes literal the image of the fatal yoke that we examined earlier in this chapter; the bull's frightful roar (1201) and the eerie silence that follows (1231) reproduce the play's concerns with speech and silence in a grotesquely reductive fashion. But despite the supernatural properties of the encounter, it remains possible to discern the human involvement in this non-human revenge. There has been much critical controversy over the fact that Hippolytos' death is doubly determined by both curse and exile. Theseus first calls on Poseidon to curse his son and then, in apparent scepticism about the efficacy of the divine promise, himself pronounces the sentence of exile (887-o,8):29 Father Poseidon, once you gave to me three curses ... Now with one of these, I pray, kill my son. Suffer him not to escape, this very day, if you have promised truly. 27

28

29

It is perhaps striking that two separate analyses of Racine's Phedre devote much energy to the monsters in that play; see Orlando 1978: 29-35 a n d Barthes 1963: 120. Barthes writes: 'Us sont tous monstres les uns pour les autres, et tous aussi chasseurs de monstres' ('They are all monsters, each to the others, and all hunters of monsters as well' - my translation). Orlando (68-80) also draws out the ambiguity in the French word 'monstre', as both noun and verb, since in the latter sense it contrasts with 'se cacher', another theme of Racine's play as of Euripides'. Only at the end of the Iphigeneia at Aulis does a character express doubt or disbelief about the content of a messenger speech. See Lesky 1983: 238 for a summary of this non-problem. Norwood 1954: 88 and note 1 provides a salutary warning of what happens when the lines are treated as a problem. Divinely granted wishes, like most other divine gifts, can only bring trouble and remorse to the recipient; this characteristic is more important than their number or putative arrangement. See also Kakridis 1928.

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And now I make this addition: I banish him from this land's boundaries. So fate shall strike him, one way or the other, either Poseidon will respect my curse, and send him dead into the House of Hades, or exiled from this land, a beggar wandering, on foreign soil, his life shall suck the dregs of sorrow's cup. I would argue that the two instances of language that accomplish Theseus' punishment of Hippolytos are in some sense identical. Both Poseidon's promise in one case and Theseus' kingly and unappealable sentence in the other take the form of the 'words of the father'. The fulfilment of Poseidon's curse is in fact perceived by Theseus precisely as a sign of fatherhood (1169-70): Why, then, Poseidon, you must be in truth My father, since you heard and ratified my curse. Critics have also noted that the paternal word can be seen to materialise in the violent, phallic bull. 30 The words of the father in each case, curse and sentence of exile, possess a similar status, in that they are in and of themselves sufficient to produce a result, without further action on the part of the speaker. They can thus properly be described as performative utterances.31 Theseus' language here achieves something of the status of the second, truthful voice for which he wishes in the agon. His sentence of exile, and his curse as ratified by Poseidon, connect word and world, by forcing the world to conform to the word, in a way that is denied to, or actively avoided by, the other speeches of the play. That said, there is clearly a difference between the two performative utterances. A sentence of exile may only be pronounced by one who is empowered to make such sentences, so invoking, and assuming, a situation that must be characterised by inequality of status. A curse invokes the realm of the divine and so evades the inequalities of human political power; a curse may be uttered by a person in any station without detriment to its effect. Moreover, Poseidon's promise to ratify the curse takes immediate effect because the god must act, as it were, automatically; we are not invited by the Hippolytos to conceive of the deities as subjects of moral reflection. Theseus, on the other hand, could have altered or retracted his sentence of exile, and is in fact encouraged by the Chorus to do so (891-2). The double determination of the violent death is overt and self-conscious, so that it insists on the ultimate human responsibility for this violence even while such responsibility is denied. A similar double vision, of divine violence concealing human, can be read at 30 31

See Segal 1978: 136 on the paternal, phallic attributes of the bull. O n this concept see Austin 1971. It is true to say that the distinction between performative and constative in Austin's work eventually collapses, so that all language is considered to be performative, m u c h as in the Hippolytos all language emerges as a form of violence.

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the ending in the words of Artemis. Her intention to take revenge on Aphrodite's nameless favourite, coupled with her dictum about the autonomy of individual gods (what I shall call the nomos (law) of non-intervention, 1328-30), raises the spectre once more of an interminable sequence of attack and counter-attack. This is exactly the movement that constitutes the self-perpetuating violence in the body of the play. Thus the proposed violence of the ending, while apparently transposed to the sphere of the divine, remains a trenchant comment on the actions of the mortal characters. The ending as a whole provides material for further speculation along the lines of Girard's enquiry. The central thesis of Girard's work is that the tensions aroused by the violent crisis and dissolution of differences are discharged by a unanimous generative act of violence, an act which a society performs on a surrogate victim or scapegoat. This generative unanimity, he argues, is the founding act of culture and civilisation, because it allows the society to preserve and perpetuate itself by avoiding the fragmentation that violence would produce. 32 But such an act only becomes culture when it gives rise to new and imitative forms of violence, which are essentially commemorative and in which the elements of chance present in the original act are placed under conscious control. These new forms can then function prophylactically to ensure that the original act does not have to be repeated. Girard writes (1977: 102): The original act of violence is unique and spontaneous. Ritual sacrifices, however, are multiple, endlessly repeated. All those aspects of the original act that had escaped man's control - the choice of time and place, the selection of the victim - are now premeditated and fixed by custom. The ritual process aims at removing all elements of chance and seeks to extract from the original violence some technique of cathartic appeasement. These imitative, commemorative forms comprise, as the quotation suggests, sacrifice, which is the central concern of Girard's thesis, but also the literary forms that reenact violence, namely tragedies. I would argue that the genesis of both these forms can be read at the close of the Hippolytos. On the one hand Artemis institutes a kind of sacrifice for her devotee in the person of Aphrodite's unnamed favourite who will be destroyed in recompense for Hippolytos' death. On the other hand, Artemis institutes a song to be sung by brides before their weddings, a song that commemorates Hippolytos' death and Phaidra's desire. This latter can be seen as the imitative form, controlled and contained both by the form of the song and by perennial repetition, in which the recapitulation of violent events is rendered harmless by its ritual setting. That this song does 32

The historical existence of the original act of violence is a difficulty in Girard's theory as it is in the text on which he draws, Freud's Totem and Taboo. My interest, however, is in the literary application of the theory and in the 'later', 'imitative' forms that Girard discusses, which may well have an existence independent of any founding act. I do not think that this reservation invalidates Girard's insights or my use of them. It will be noted that sacrificial practices regularly make reference to an original act. Euripidean tragedies, in an even more complex gesture, frequently take themselves as the original act which other forms, they claim, will go on to celebrate. See further chapter 5.

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concern itself closely with the genesis of tragedy can be seen in the fact that the brides will always sing this song, even, presumably, in the present day and the moment of the play's production. The play that has just been watched or read then offers itself as another in the series of the brides' endless musical repetitions. I shall explore this complex situation further in chapter 5.

Imitation and authority

In the preceding chapters I have elaborated the Hippolytos* concern with speech and silence in the light of the play's other structuring polarities and as part of the articulation of its discussions of desire and violence. A specifically theoretical interest in speech and silence, or to put it more succinctly, in language, can be seen to characterise not only twentieth-century critical discourses, but also the intellectual practices of fifth-century Athens. This aspect of Athenian activity has been called 'rhetorical selfconsciousness' (Kerferd 1981: 78). In this chapter I shall examine some of the specific ways in which the Hippolytos can be seen to reproduce and articulate the contemporary self-consciousness about language. Drama may be seen as one of the manifestations of the spoken word which characterise certain special practices of fifth-century Athenian democracy; other such manifestations include the debates in the assembly and the confrontations in the law courts. On such occasions the entire citizenry was, or was entitled to be, present; to put things es meson (in the middle, Herodotos 3.80, 3.142) was both a political gesture, definitive of democracy, and a discursive one. The publicity and consequent accountability of the workings of democracy were two of its salient features. The sites in Athens where political influence and authority could be gained and exercised were thus also sites of publicly exchanged language; tragedy, the third of the cultural forms listed above, can be seen to dramatise both the importance of this exchanged public language and the conflicts of authorisation that such exchanges could articulate. The prominence of the spoken word, especially in political contexts, made language itself a matter of urgent concern to Athenian culture. The second half of the century produced specifically linguistic studies like those of the sophist Prodikos, and studies of rhetorical technique such as are associated with the sophists generally and perhaps especially with Gorgias.1 Such specialised studies gave language a newly theorised and self-conscious status, and were perceived to change what was understood about language and about its possible political functions. The ensuing anxiety can be seen to be reflected in the 1

On the linguistic theorising of the fifth century, see Kerferd 1981: 68-82 and Goldhill 1986: 230-8.

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tragedies. According to Plato, although Gorgias did not claim to teach Virtue' {arete) as some sophists did, he claimed to teach rhetorical success to such an extent that if a doctor and a pupil of Gorgias were to compete publicly, in front of the citizens, for a medical post in the city, Gorgias' disciple would be victorious (Plato, Gorgias 456). His rhetoric would overcome the doctor's actual technical skills. Even without this extreme example, it is clear that the possibility of rhetoric as a separate technique, capable of being exercised in the service of personal or political ambition, presents the democracy with a problem. This is because a participatory democracy of the Athenian type must commit itself, to some extent, to the belief that debate and deliberation do issue in correct and rational action, and that the logos that 'wins' is in some sense the right one. Perikles is made to express a belief in rational debate when he says 'We Athenians . . . take our decisions on policy or submit them to proper discussions: for we do not think there is an incompatibility between words and deeds; the worst thing is to rush into action before the consequences have been properly debated' (Thucydides 2.40.2-3). But the Mytilenian Debate, which takes place in Book 3, dramatises the near-failure of the process of deliberation. Within the Debate, Kleon is made to suggest that the process of deliberation has in fact already failed, for he claims that the Athenian assembly enjoys only the rhetorical display made by the competing speakers, and takes no thought for the real issues at stake (Thucydides 3.38.4-7). Such texts suggest a pervasive anxiety about rhetoric and about language generally. The anxiety about language can be seen to be focused by the influence of the sophists and expressed in the common charge against them - that they made, or were capable of making, the worse case appear the better. This process is memorably dramatised by the agon between the just and unjust logos in Aristophanes' Clouds. The influence and effects of the sophistic movement can serve to focus for us the problems of the spoken word as experienced in fifth-century Athens. But the conflicts about language were also conflicts of authority. The spoken word is almost invariably conceived of as functioning in an agonistic context, as the extreme example from Plato's Gorgias, and the competing logoi in Aristophanes, can demonstrate. The public manifestations of the democracy, such as I mentioned above, were frequently cast into adversarial form. Tragedy took place at Athens under the rubric of a competition, and we know from the various Hippocratic writings that even doctors and related groups such as philosophers competed in open public debates, in which they were judged by their audience to 'win' or 'lose' (Lloyd 1979: 91-8). We can say then that in Athens discursive authority was gained through agonistic situations, and that the city correspondingly gave prominent institutional space to the competition of different logoi. But the logoi in question could represent real political and ideological conflicts in the city. Two Greek sources in fact represent civil strife in terms of disagreement about language. Thucydides' account of civil war in Corcyra analyses the way in which terms of moral and political approbation or abuse were leached of meaning by events

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(3.82), and in Euripides' Phoinissai, produced after the oligarchic coup at Athens in 411, the rival brothers Eteokles and Polyneikes first debate their assumptions about language before proceeding to debate their conflicting claims to power (469-72, 499-502). Athens experienced civil strife when the democracy was overthrown for a brief period at the end of the fifth century, but even at the height of Athens' power and confidence the citizens did not cease to discuss the ends and means of the state, the basis on which it was constituted and what the ultimate sources of authority within it should be. Such debates can be seen to be articulated between what were perceived as the claims of traditional thought and what were perceived as the challenges to it. Earlier assumptions about the conditions of civilised existence appeared, in the second half of the fifth century, to be open to interrogation. Among such assumed conditions could be cited the nature of divinity and the reciprocal obligations between humanity and the divine; the proper relations between generations, and within other apparently 'natural' hierarchies such as those between male and female and between free and slave; and the possible relations between the loyalties demanded from the citizen by his oikos and his polis. Underlying many of these discrete debates, and determining their articulation in the Athenian context, was the question whether reality was ultimately relative or absolute, or as it was commonly formulated, whether convention, nomos, or nature, physis, finally conditioned human existence.2 These debates are all reproduced in the tragic texts, which dramatise both the conflicts within their society and that society's reliance on the public, spoken word. We might also say, with the example of Thucydides' Melian Dialogue in mind, that the drama could be perceived within Athenian culture as a form especially appropriate for the articulation of ideological conflict. In the Melian Dialogue, the narrative form of Thucydides' History gives way to a dramatic encounter in which the speakers, Athenians and Melians, collide without the mediation of the narrator's voice. Certainly the dramatic festival, like the democracy, gives institutional space to competing voices. Euripides, according to Aristophanes, was the most 'democratic' (Frogs 952) of the three dramatists, responsible for 'teaching to talk' (X,aXeiv e5i5a^a, Frogs 954) those groups which were excluded from participation in the democracy's publicly exchanged language, such as women and slaves (Frogs 948-54). The Aristophanic text here represents the specificities of Euripidean drama in terms of politics and language, and modern criticism too frequently registers precisely these differences. Euripidean plays can be seen to demonstrate a pervasive anxiety about language and about the relation of language to political power, and the debates over authorisation that dominated Athenian society seem often to find their most striking and unavoidable expression in these texts. In this chapter I shall examine three areas of debate within the Hippolytos which seem to me to be informed by contemporary anxieties about language and 2

On the general debates that informed the city's intellectual activity see Kerferd 1981: 83-173 and Goldhill 1986: 238-42.

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about discursive authority. I shall link these two concepts of language and authority by the idea of 'imitation', which has emerged in my argument previously as the mimesis of violence, and the significance of which I want to extend in this chapter. I shall examine further the role of the gods in the play and its account of the possibility or desirability of human imitation of the divine. I shall suggest that at least part of the significance of the gods in the Hippolytos lies in the fact that they are represented as possessors of a uniquely effective and authoritative language, which the human characters strive in vain to appropriate. The language of the gods offers itself as an alternative in that it operates without the constraints that bind human speech and the insecurities that undermine it. I shall suggest that the difference between divine and human language is articulated within the play by the terms manteia and homilia. The privileged position within language of the gods can be seen to produce the privileged status of myth, stories about gods, as source of traditional moral teaching and of paradigms for human conduct. I consider what myths are invoked by the different characters, under what circumstances and with what effect, and to what extent the myths cited in the play provide a stable system of reference. In any discussion of myth and of the imitation of mythic paradigms, the myth-making activity of the text is also at issue. Particularly perhaps in the case of the second Hippolytos, the text and its activity are situated in a context of imitation, repetition and rewriting. Writing itself is crucial to the logic of the play; the play traces a debate on its significance, its relation to the spoken word and its claims to authority, that can be read as a commentary on the workings of all language. Divine and human The discursive texture of the Hippolytos can be seen to be constituted by the various more or less accurate narratives that the characters tell to and about each other. We investigated this phenomenon in the second chapter under the term 'inscription'. Such narratives work by invoking culturally available paradigms that are assumed to determine the behaviour of the individual. Thus Hippolytos, in his tirade, can berate Phaidra as the archetype of the wanton woman; Theseus in the agon can excoriate Hippolytos as the archetype of the sanctimonious hypocrite. As each character subsumes the other within such paradigms, it begins to seem that there is a limited number of available narratives and that 'new stories' (kainoi logoi, 688) can only be generated by the imitation of old. Phaidra is fated to act out and repeat in her own story that of the young girl before the mirror who becomes the adulteress, and to become exactly what Hippolytos claims she is. In her dialogue with the Nurse Phaidra seems almost consciously to set out the models that she will imitate, those of her mother (337) and sister (339). Hippolytos' death imitates the terms of his oath (1028-31) and, more significantly, the fate of Persephone, whose model he unwittingly invokes in his song to Artemis (73-87). Imitation, unwitting or unwilling, of cultural paradigms is not the only form of

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imitation that is at stake in the Hippolytos. The play has frequently and productively been analysed in terms of an imitation by humans of divine action.3 The play is motivated by Aphrodite's desire for recognition by Hippolytos and for the preservation of her own eukleia. These desires are then reproduced by Phaidra, so that the revenges of woman and goddess work in parallel. As several commentators have noticed, this parallelism leads to divergences from the normal patterns of Aphrodite's vengeance.4 As Phaidra is aligned with Aphrodite, so Hippolytos is with Artemis. At 98 Hippolytos wonders whether 'we in our world and the Gods in theirs / know the same usages', but this reservation does not prevent him from attempting to imitate Artemis in his devotion to the hunt and his resolute chastity. He cannot, however, imitate or even come to terms with the goddess in her role as the divinity who presides over the ceremonies and events that result from sexual maturation in both men and women, and who accompanies the consequent penetration of both temporal and status-defining boundaries. The other characters are not free from this flawed and dangerous imitation of the divine; the Nurse notoriously encourages Phaidra to take the gods' illicit affairs for her models as she endeavours to cope with her illegitimate desire for Hippolytos (451-8). Theseus dreams of reproducing something like a divine infallibility by his second, invariably truthful voice. As we saw in chapter 3 he achieves this voice with the sentence of exile that reproduces Poseidon's curse. This last example suggests that while imitation of the gods is hard, if not impossible, to succeed in such imitation is disastrous. We can see this in reference especially to Phaidra and Theseus. In the opening scene Aphrodite represents herself as producer and director of the play; the whole action has the status of a demonstration of the truth of her words (o,).5 Her phrase ev xf]5' fjfxeQa (this very day, 22) is repeated at strategic intervals by the other characters (726, 889-90, cf. 369) to underline the identity of the guiding force behind the play - 'a tribute to the irresistible presence in [Phaidra's] house and at her side' (Havelock 1984: 262). Phaidra, in unwitting imitation of Aphrodite, takes it upon herself to 'change the story' (Norwood's translation of kainoi logoi, 688) and to direct the action of Theseus and Hippolytos, but the only spectacle she can 3

4

5

See Berns 1973: 174; Vellacott 1975: 230-1; Luschnig 1988 and 1980, Orban 1981b: 204, and Zeitlin 1985a: 63. See Zeitlin 1985a: 106—11. See also Burkert 1979: 112: 'One may wonder . . . about the curiously complicated means Aphrodite uses to take her revenge... If I were Aphrodite I would not trust this assassination machine to work properly.' Of the gods who introduce Euripides' plays, only Dionysos in the Bakchai really qualifies as a 'director' (on this see Segal 1982a, especially chapter 7). Poseidon and Athene in the Trojan Women and Hermes in the Ion fulfil the function to varying extents. On the question of the gods' dispensations in the prologues see Hamilton 1978. He does not deal with the omission in the prologue of the Hippolytos which leaves open the mechanism by which Phaidra is to destroy Hippolytos, but merely remarks that the prologue robs the play of suspense (277). Conacher 1967: 29 has a different interpretation: 'the failure of the goddess to tell us how Phaedra's secret will be revealed to Theseus [is] an omission which leaves room for the human motivation by which Hippolytos' downfall is actually to be secured'.

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arrange is one dominated by her own dead body.6 Theseus' sentence of exile imitates the curse granted by Poseidon in that it is an instance of powerful, irreversible language; in Poseidon's case his language is guaranteed by his godhead, in Theseus' by his position as king and father. Poseidon's language takes effect, for the wishes he granted Theseus are fulfilled with divine speed and dispatch, but Theseus can exploit this more than humanly powerful language only to the detriment of his own kind. The examples of Theseus and Phaidra suggest that part of the difference between gods and humans in the Hippolytos, which makes imitation between the two groups either difficult or disastrous, is a difference in the efficacy of types of language. If this is so, it would seem that the gods cannot provide a useful model for human language or behaviour.7 This point is emphasised at the end of the play, when Hippolytos expresses the wish that humans could curse the gods (1415). Artemis takes over his speech and inverts it, promising that instead, the gods will go on cursing and destroying humans (1420-2). Her speech ensures the death of Aphrodite's favourite. But the ending raises the question of imitation as well as of divine language. Two representations of imitation between gods and mortals seem to be simultaneously at issue. The gods begin to imitate the humans, both in taking revenge and in the pattern of relations among themselves that Artemis outlines in 1328-30. The isolation of the gods from each other which she depicts corresponds closely to the experience of the humans, who are represented as unable to communicate with each other no matter how tight the 'knot' that binds their shifting yet repetitive patterns of behaviour. The gods' unwillingness to interfere in one another's murderous intentions, coupled with their unhappily human desire for revenge, ensures that the tragedy which Artemis initiates in 1420-2 will be an exact imitation of the human series of reprisals that the play has just displayed. Action on the divine plane thus imitates that on the human; but at the same time it becomes clear that this is indeed the model of behaviour that the humans have been following all along, a model that has nothing to offer but moral abdication. That such a model is utterly barren and devoid of authority is suggested by the fact that at the end, Artemis leaves the stage and the divine world retreats into its own selfreproducing system of revenge and counter-revenge, separated from the one conceivably healing moment of the play. The question of whether gods and mortals can or should share forms of behaviour is posed throughout the Euripidean corpus. In the Hippolytos, the Servant urges Aphrodite to pardon Hippolytos, arguing that the gods should be 6

7

See Zeitlin 1985a: n o on Phaidra as producer and director. We can compare Medea as a producer of spectacles similarly painful to herself. The Greeks had long understood that the gods spoke a language different from that of mortals; see Rosenmeyer 1955: 228 and Clay 1972. In the Hippolytos, however, we are concerned not so much with naming as with the greater efficacy of the gods' language and with their more exact control over it. Goldhill 1984: 26-7 and 61-2 develops a similar theme. See also Orlando 1978: 95, on the gods in Racine: 'these gods play with man's language . . . by taking words at their letter, or rather disassociating the letter from the spirit and placing the former before the latter'.

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more sophoi than humans (120). The sense that gods should conduct themselves with reference to human standards of behaviour is frequently and provocatively expressed in other Euripidean plays. Ion complains that men are called wicked for imitating the crimes that are good to the gods, and questions the gods' ability to make laws for men when they themselves appear to be criminals {Ion 442-51): Why, if a man is bad, it is the gods who punish him. How can it berightfor you to make laws for men, and appear as lawbreakers yourselves?... It is unjust to call men bad for copying what the gods find good; the sin lies with our examples! But Ion discovers that he is the fortunate fruit of the rape to which he refers, and that the god's misdemeanour has led him to the Athenian throne. In the Herakles Mainomenos Amphitryon complains of Zeus in similar terms, comparing the god's apparent attitude towards his family with that of the mortal father (339-47)Zeus! I once thought you were my powerful friend. You shared My marriage, shared my fatherhood of Heracles. All this meant nothing; for you proved less powerful Than you had seemed; and I, a man, put you, a god, To shame. I've not betrayed the sons of Heracles. You knew the way to steal into my bed, where none Invited you, and lie with someone else's wife; But those bound to you by every tie you cannot save. This is strange ignorance in a god; or else, maybe, Your very nature lacks a sense of right and wrong. Zeus answers Amphitryon's censure by returning Herakles from the dead, but Herakles is promptly condemned to madness by Hera and Lyssa, and only redeemed by Theseus. The refrain is taken up in an even more devastating key in one of Euripides' last plays, when Kadmos says to Dionysos 'Gods should not be like mortals in vindictiveness' {Bakchai 1348), a plea to which the play offers no response. The human characters in Euripides' texts voice their need for divinities of recognisable moral credibility in moments when it is denied, and the plays seem constantly to measure the distance between that need and the situations that the characters actually face. In the Herakles and the Bakchai, the human characters are finally forced, by the absence of the gods, or the malignity of their presence, to form new relationships with their own kind. But the Hippolytos hardly offers even this bleak consolation. The question whether or not there is shared moral behaviour between humans and gods resonates throughout Euripides' texts. In the Hippolytos, this question seems to be articulated partly in terms of a shared language. Whereas the words of Aphrodite, Poseidon and Artemis can order events to the gods' own satisfaction, the human characters can appropriate such powerful and effective language only to the detriment of themselves and their philoi. A line of demarcation between human and divine language can also

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be traced at other points in the play, especially in the case of the term semnos.8

When used of divinities, or events and people that are divinely inspired, the word seems straightforwardly to underline their august and awe-inspiring qualities. The mysteries that Hippolytos goes to witness are semna (25). Artemis is semnotatay the most semnos (62). When the Chorus wonders if Phaidra's nosos is caused by the semnai Korybantes (143), it is not difficult to see how the use of the word could extend from divinity to the divinely possessed Corybantic dancers. The Chorus swears by semnen Artemin (713); the Hesperides that they long for are semnos (746); and they speak of Diktynna (Artemis) as semne at 1130. The eye of Zeus is semnon at 886. These instances are not obviously problematic, but the word causes difficulties in a scene where it is predicated of humans too, the scene between Hippolytos and the Servant. The Servant claims that it is a nomos (91) among humans to hate (93) what is semnos and not friendly to all.9 Semnos is here a term of blame or disparagement, as the scene goes on to demonstrate. The semnos among mortals is achtheinos (burdensome, 94) and by implication not euprosegoros (95). Euprosegoros means easy of address or affable and so is a word of some significance within this play. When Hippolytos refuses to address (99) the semne daimon Aphrodite (99, 104), the implication is that he shows himself not euprosegoros and therefore semnos in the culpable human manner. That Aphrodite is also not 'friendly' and is therefore semnos in the disparaging sense is an argument that could be made, but such an argument would be unproductive. Aphrodite remains semnos in the divine sense, and exactly this quality of semnotes makes the possible condemnation of her by humans ultimately irrelevant. To expect behaviour comprehensible in terms of human morality from the heavens is a mistake, as we have seen with regard to several other Euripidean deities. Not only is such an expectation futile, but it also distracts from the more pressing business of establishing proper relations among mortals. This is perhaps demonstrated by the fact that while Hippolytos discusses his reasons for refusing to worship, he also deals with the Servant with unnecessary dismissiveness (107-13). 10 The difficulties raised by this scene do not stop Hippolytos from using semnos of himself later in the play. At 1364 he claims both semnotes and sophrosune for himself when he lies dying, his virtuous projects in ruins. Semnos is used in close conjunction with sophron, but it is the pursuit of these qualities which has brought Hippolytos to the point where they seem not only profitless but inappropriate. Either they were the wrong qualities to have exercised in the 8

9

10

See Carter 1986: 53 on semnos. Conacher 1967: 31 discusses its two different senses. Grube 1941: 193 writes that the word is Nowhere used in a good sense when applied to a mortal'. Words for 'hatred' appear more often in this play than in any other extant Euripides except for the Orestes, which is considerably longer. See Vellacott 1975: 114—15 on hatred in Euripides. For some of the implications of the scene between the Servant and Hippolytos see the debate in Classical Review: West 1965, Glucker 1966, West 1967, and Diggle 1967. See also Osterud 1972: 61-3. The view of Kovacs 1980b: 130-7 must be dismissed. Levin 1971: 44-5 sensibly suggests that the Servant is not necessarily imparting a clear and unequivocal message.

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situation, or perhaps they were the right qualities but wrongly interpreted. His conception of sophrosune, as we have seen, was articulated in terms of exclusion and separation, and was predicated on avoiding necessary connections with people, as his semnotes is predicated on making impossible choices among gods. Semnos at 1364 is painful and ironic, and all other mortal claims to semnotes in the play are dismissed as false by their very nature. At 957 semnois logoisin (holy-seeming words) connote deceit and duplicity, and at 1064 Theseus cries 'Your insufferable piety [semnon] chokes me to death' to censure what he sees as Hippolytos' hypocrisy. At 490 the Nurse accuses Phaidra of semnomuthein (high moralizing) to underline her claim that what Phaidra needs is not any kind of muthoi at all, but consummation of her desire for Hippolytos. The semnoi muthoi represent to the Nurse an attempt to ignore or disguise the reality of the situation, and again the Nurse implies hypocrisy and deceit on Phaidra's part; in the Nurse's eyes Phaidra is pretending to a level of moral achievement which she is no longer entitled to claim, and she inevitably fails.11 The play's deployment of semnos seems to set up a division that prevents the human characters from laying claim to the divine term. Other points in the play can be read in terms of a divine use of a word that the play has registered as particularly complicated for the mortal characters. Such divine use seems to offer the prospect of stable, unproblematic meaning, but in practice the offer is withdrawn as soon as it is made. My two examples come from Artemis' speech at the ending of the play. At 1318 Artemis describes Poseidon as phronon kalos, thinking well. This phrase can be translated Veil disposed', but the vocabulary of active rationality, of thinking, aligns it with other important expressions in the play. All the characters articulate concern about the attainment of correct thought. This concern arises from the pervasive intellectualism of Greek moral vocabulary; the verb phronein, to think, is part of the verb sophronein. Greek terms for thought are thus terms of moral approbation or disapproval, and vice versa.12 Such intellectualism is particularly marked in the Hippolytos by the many references to teaching and learning 'virtue'. Hippolytos makes a difference in his entrance song between those who have sophrosune 'naturally' and those who have learned it. Phaidra, in her speech to the women of Troizen, argues that virtue is knowable and recognisable, but that other concerns distract from it (373-81). Theseus laments in the agon that men 'invent, discover everything' except what is most pressing, 'a way to teach fools wisdom' (916-29). The necessity for the democracy to train its younger members, and the pressure of the sophists' claim to teach various other kinds of success, made this question of teaching and learning virtue a contemporary preoccupation. It is discussed at length in the 11

12

Eusebeia (reverence or piety), another key term, has a less complicated usage. Artemis uses it three times in her vindication of Hippolytos (1309, 1339, 1419) and Theseus once echoes her (1454). Hippolytos also uses it three times: of his hand on his garland (83), of his wasted life (1368), and of his oathkeeping which saves the Nurse (656). These last two instances are less innocuous, being more concerned with Hippolytos' self-image than with the good deeds which he may fairly claim. See Luschnig 1988 on the general theme of thought, knowledge and understanding in the play. I regret that I did not see her book until mine was in its final stages; our work has much in common.

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speeches of Protagoras in the Platonic dialogue named after him. In the Hippolytos, the scene between the Nurse and Phaidra centres on the Nurse's attempt to restore Phaidra to her right mind (phroneis eu, you think well, 313) and on Phaidra's attempt to investigate and guard against the intellectual causes of moral failure (378, 388). Morality in these speeches seems to be predicated on rationality, on the ability eu or kalos phronein. When Theseus laments the moral condition of humankind he does so in the vocabulary of reason and thought (930). He further claims that for the gods to believe in Hippolytos' boasts would be a failure both of their morality and of their intellect (951). This sense is frequently expressed that to have too high an opinion of oneself, to think wrongly, is a moral fault (6,309,445,641). The text is thus constantly concerned with the necessity of right thinking, with debate over its definition and its absence from mortal relations. Artemis' use of the phrase phronon kalos to describe Poseidon's discharge of Theseus' curse is thus painfully ironic. The phrase can be seen both to reproduce the play's debates and simultaneously to deny them; the vocabulary of moral intellectualism is deployed to describe an act which is precisely not complicated by thought or by moral reflection. Artemis also makes use of another term that has become controversial in the course of the play. At 1402 she calls Hippolytos sophron and claims that his sophrosune was what earned him Aphrodite's hatred. Artemis gestures towards an ultimate divine knowledge of human worth that would give the final word on the situation, but Aphrodite has already used the opposite term to describe Hippolytos (6). The human debates about sophrosune are reproduced in the divine speeches; it appears that the gods use a language that is as riven and divided as that of the mortals. In the terms of the play's moral and linguistic debates, Artemis' gesture solves nothing. We have noted that she is also unable - and represents herself as unable - to give a final judgement on Phaidra's conduct, which is described as both madness and nobility (1300-1). Imitation of the gods in the Hippolytos is disastrous because the gods seem to possess an effective, powerful language that humans can only appropriate to destructive ends. The play can be seen to draw a line of demarcation between divine and human use of moral terms, particularly around the word semnos. In the exchange of other terms, the gods seem to gesture towards a presumption of greater clarity and stability about their use that is never born out by actual practice. The dream of an uncontroversial language, like the dream of a second truthful voice, shadows the play but can never be brought to fruition. The text can be seen to register the difference between gods and mortals in the words manteia and homilia. Hippolytos characterises the relationship or homilia that he has with Artemis as one of perfect presence (xuneimi, I am together with, 85) and reciprocity (ameibomai, I exchange with, 85). At other points homilia indicates a relationship between two mortals rather than between mortal and god, and human attempts to communicate with the divine are denoted by the word manteia. At 236 Phaidra's nosos is characterised by the

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Nurse as manteias axiapolles, worthy of much manteia. The origin of the nosos is concealed by Phaidra's silence and distorted by her delirious words; manteia is that which would cut through the opacities of human discourse and render everything intelligible. At 1055-6 Hippolytos asks Theseus whether he is prepared to exile him without having tried his oath, his pledge or the words of manteis (prophets or diviners). Theseus rejects the manteis' claim to superior knowledge as he rejects theoria, consultation of oracles. At 806-7 n e symbolically casts off the theoric garland. But he substitutes for manteis and oracles Phaidra's letter, which has, he claims, enabled him to see through the fiction of Hippolytos' sophrosune and has ensured that neither he nor the gods will be duped any further (943-55). The oath and pledge that Hippolytos offers and that Theseus rejects require in their audience a previous belief that words are indeed an index and representation of the intentions behind them. As Zeitlin writes (1985a: 81) 'an oath in itself can be viewed as an autonomous selfvalidating act, as fidelity to its terms in the human domain is an obligation of the inner self. Its public pronouncement must be matched by an internal determination to remain true to what it has sworn.' This view of the relation between Hippolytos' words and his 'inner self Theseus no longer holds. Phaidra's letter has opened up for Theseus a gap between Hippolytos' words and his intentions. This gap is the same as that which Hippolytos opened up at 612 when he said 'My tongue swore but my mind was still unpledged', and which Theseus longs to close with his second truthful voice. Manteia is rejected in this scene because of the stronger claims of the letter, which is substituted for it. Yet it is the very meaninglessness and obscurity of Hippolytos' words in this scene, which are deployed both to conceal Phaidra's desire and simultaneously to point to that concealment (1021, 1091), that require further elucidation, or manteia. Manteia, were it attainable, would function exactly like the second, truthful voice of Theseus' fantasy; it would be a touchstone to identify and correct the enigmas of human speech. At the two points where manteia is invoked, in the delirium at 236 and in the agon at 1055, the human speech to which it refers is convoluted and distorted by concealed desire. In Phaidra's case the Nurse is aware that further investigation is necessary (she knows that she does not know the answer), and Phaidra's discourse eventually yields to the Nurse's pressure, so that the Nurse can act as her own mantis and discover the truth. In Hippolytos' case Theseus does not believe in the necessity of investigation or of manteia (he believes that he does know the answer), and he is rebuked for his omission by Artemis at 1321 when she repeats the appeal to oaths and manteis that Theseus rejected at 1055-6. Manteia appears in the play as a line of communication to divine omniscience which can replace and defeat the complexities and ambiguities of human language. The play also makes reference to another such line of communication, the oracle from which Theseus returns. But oracles are persistently represented in Greek sources as notoriously ambiguous; they are paradigmatic examples of language that demands interpretation, and that punishes with disaster a single

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faulty reading. The language of the gods is paradoxical in that it both sets up an alternative to human discourse and, simultaneously, reproduces the conditions of that discourse. Oracles in texts, such as the story of Kroisos in Herodotos (1.53, 55-6), offer a further complication: they are structurally parallel to this play in that they are open to inspection by a third party, the reader, who is thereby enabled to escape the particular ironic trap into which the person consulting the oracle invariably falls. In the Hippolytos the audience or reader may be considered as being in the position of one with manteia, knowledge which the individual characters desperately need but are denied by the play. As Barthes writes (1977: 148), with reference to the work of Vernant and Vidal-Naquet: Recent research has demonstrated the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, its texts being woven from words with double meanings that each character understands unilaterally; there is, however, someone who understands each word in its duplicity and who, in addition, hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him - this someone being precisely the reader .. there is one place this multiplicity is focussed and that place is the reader. But if the play offers to put the audience or reader in the privileged position of mantis, it also immediately withdraws that offer; the claims for manteia are undermined by the insistence on the inevitability of misreading and misinterpretation, failures in communication which I shall suggest are connoted by the word homilia. While the play functions as a demonstration of divinity, it denies to human speech and communication any security or stability. Human speech emerges as always imperfect and incomplete. The term homilia, which appears more frequently in the Hippolytos than in any other extant Euripidean play, connotes both the aspirations and the failures of human communication. It represents an unattainable ideal of communication towards which the characters can only gesture. After Theseus learns of Phaidra's death, he laments at 838 xf]c; of\c, OTEQrjdeig cpiXT&rnc; OjiiXiag, 'I am deprived of your most dear homilia\ We learn of their homilia only when it is a thing of the past. Yet this poignant comment is also, fatally, mistaken; Theseus' conversation with his wife is not over, for she continues to communicate with him in death. The conversation that they hold is disastrously one-sided, and contravenes the norms of speech between man and woman, for she speaks, through the letter, and he listens, unable, as Artemis points out (1310) to question her. The homilia between Phaidra and Theseus was short in life and is unequal in death. Hippolytos is able to sustain homilia only with those who are like him (1000), but these homiliai too are short-lived (1097,1099). The crucial homilia is with Artemis. Hippolytos' homilia with the goddess is meizo broteias (19), more than human. At the same time it is less than human, because it lacks the essential element of the presence of the interlocutor. The only time at which Hippolytos and Artemis appear on stage together witnesses the end of this homilia'. 'You can

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lightly leave a long companionship' (1441). The manner of its end indicates its inherently flawed quality, for the distance between Hippolytos and Artemis, that between a mortal and a deity, remains. As Berns writes (1973: 184): The disillusionment with his goddess .. significantly is expressed in terms that resemble the earlier description of Hippolytos' companionship with Artemis .. an indication that his believing himself in the friendship of Artemis was, at least from afinalpoint of view, an illusion. Hippolytos' homilia with Artemis is less than human not only because it can by its very nature never be truly reciprocal, but also because its effect is to deprive him of homilia with those who would be appropriate partners for him. Unable to engage with women or other inferiors, such as the Servant, he is also forced into a position where he is unable to speak to his father. This distance is diminished when Artemis explains the plot to the two men, but she must withdraw and end the anomalous homilia before they can speak to each other.

Myth The dream of a language that could match that of the gods in its efficacy and stability is a pervasive influence throughout the play, although even the gods cannot make it materialise. The gap between the two possible systems of language can be seen to be represented by the terms manteia and homilia. The gap also has the effect of separating the mortal and divine spheres and of disestablishing the divine as source of mythical exempla and paradigms for human behaviour. Such insecurity about the role of the divine is a frequent theme in Euripidean texts, where criticism of gods or the myths about them is regularly voiced. Such criticism is not, however, simple iconoclasm against the Olympians of tradition. Part of what is under discussion in the discourse that the Hippolytos develops on myth, its status and authority, is again the possibility of stable meaning and the security of the poetic enterprise itself.13 Mythical exempla can be invoked to explain and justify the world as it appears to mortals, as in the choral odes, or to validate action, as in the Nurse's attempt to persuade Phaidra. The authority of myths as paradigms to which conduct should conform appears to be guaranteed by their claims to unequivocal significance and permanence. This aspect of myth is foregrounded in the Chorus's 'escape ode', where the tears of Phaethon's sisters are said to turn into amber (738-41): Above the waters of Eridanos Where, in lament of Phaethon, His sisters drop their piteous tears Which glow like amber in the dark stream. 13

Eisner 1979 examines the prevalence of'outside myth', i.e. myth not drawn from the same cycle as the play under discussion, in Euripides. His examples lead to the conclusion that such myths appear most frequently in the Hippolytos.

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Barrett (1964) comments 'there is grief here still, but a grief remote and turned to beauty by the spell of legend'. The sisters' grief for Phaethon transcends the world of process and change and is translated into an image of endurance and preservation. This metamorphosis of tears into amber can be read as an image for the preoccupations and purposes of art and poetry. The timeless grief expressed in amber for one doomed youth, Phaethon, can be seen to parallel the timeless grief for Hippolytos, articulated both in the song of the brides that Artemis institutes at the end (1428-30) and in the play itself. 'Tears into amber' is a possible metaphor for the transforming energies of the poetic endeavour itself, when such endeavour seeks to give form to chaotic events and to contain what would otherwise be unbearable. Such an imposition of enduring form can be seen to be one element of the genesis of tragedy, insofar as tragedy can be said to free events from their inherent violence and to transform them into an object of contemplation. In this instance the myth of Phaethon's sisters, and by implication the poetry of the play, seem to guarantee the possibilities of transcendence. The permanent, unassailable quality of the metamorphosis into amber is one aspect of myth as represented in the play. But we have already seen in this chapter how the play offers models of behaviour and of language that seek to transcend the limitations of human existence but that only succeed in forcing such limitations on the attention. This movement too can be perceived in the play's deployment of myth, in the very appeals to mythical authority previously mentioned. At 453-8 the Nurse, encouraging Phaidra to gratify her desire, tells how Zeus was smitten with love for Semele and Eos for Kephalos: yet all these dwell in heaven. They are content, I am sure, to be subdued by the stroke of love. But these examples contain implications diametrically opposed to the Nurse's ostensible intention, so that the Nurse's demonstration undercuts and subverts itself. For although Zeus and Eos were not harmed by their illegitimate desires, their luckless human partners Semele and Kephalos were destroyed. Thus the myths can be seen to speak not of divine paradigms for human behaviour but of the impassable gulf between divine and mortal, and of the impossibility of imitation between the two spheres. 14 The status of myth as a permanent unequivocal entity beyond the necessity of interpretation is also called into question. The Nurse recounts the tale of Zeus and Semele to illustrate for Phaidra the inevitability of love and the probability of surviving its onslaughts. The Chorus, however, cites the very same story (555-62) to demonstrate the danger of love and its disastrous power: 14

Recent work on the significance of myth in the plays of Euripides has frequently concentrated on the ways in which the paradigms of myth influence the characters in partial and consequently destructive fashion. See for instance on the Elektra Kubo 1966 and Walsh 1977, and on the Orestes Zeitlin 1980.

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The story's significance alters with the purposes to which it is put by each narrator; the myth has no one meaning, no autonomous identity separate from or prior to the various retellings. The transcendence that we read in the image of tears into amber is denied by the text's play on the story of Semele. The play offers simultaneously two opposing views of myth, one that suggests stability and transcendence, one that conversely denies any such qualities. The fantasy of stability of meaning can again be seen to mark the play, even if only with its failure. The status and authority of myth are notoriously called into question by other Euripidean texts. At Elektra 726-37 the Chorus sing of the Sun's horror at the crimes of the Atreid house, horror so great that the Sun reputedly turned its course around to the direction which it follows nowadays. But they go on to comment Xeyexai, xav 5e Jti / axiv a|iixQav JTCIQ' ejioiy' ex 81 (That is the story, but I can hardly believe it, 737-8), with a scepticism like that of Elektra when faced with the signs of her brother's return. This choral scepticism itself may be suspect (like Elektra's, which proves disconcertingly unfounded), since the Chorus also claim that Klytaimestra should have heeded mythical warnings such as the story of the sun, and hence refrained from murder (745-6): Had you but remembered tales like these As you raised your hand to kill your husband! But the Chorus are also right to mark the gap between the teaching of myth and the possibilities of human morality, for the protagonists of the play come to grief at least partly through their unquestioning belief in the heroic myths that condition their perceptions of themselves. Invocation of inappropriate mythical figures, and inability to distinguish between the productive and pernicious uses of myth, lead to the murder of Klytaimestra as a Gorgon, and the celebration of Orestes as an Achilles, Perseus or home-coming Odysseus. But the complications that myth poses for the Elektra do not end here, for the play is itself another myth in the making and poses its own problems of belief. The Chorus's expression of disbelief, their breaking of what may be called the mythic illusion, parallels the play's continual breaking of the dramatic illusion, its insistence on its consciousness of itself as related to and produced by other poetic histories and conventions.15 Reference to myth in a Euripidean text is often conflated with reference to poetry. Such poetry claims to be the work of other and previous writers, but proves on closer examination to be Euripidean poetry itself. In the Herakles Mainomenos Herakles says (1340—6): 15

See also Goldhill 1986: 256—8 on this passage in the Elektra.

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What you say of the gods is hardly relevant. I don't believe gods tolerate unlawful love. Those tales of chainings are unworthy; I never did And never will accept them; nor that any god Is tyrant of another. A god, if truly god, Needs nothing. Those are poets' lamentable myths. As Foley writes (1985: 200), 'The logoi of the poets attacked by Herakles are Euripides' own logof; Herakles refuses to believe in precisely those events of the play that have resulted in his present position. He seems to make a heroic gesture of self-delusion, a gesture that in some ways foreshadows that of Iphigeneia's sacrifice at Aulai. In these lines the play seems to offer a complex, bifurcated view of its own attainment. A similar movement is undertaken in the Medea. In the first ode of the play the Chorus sing of a time when the female sex will be honoured in song and when the misogynist tales of old poets will fall from favour (418-2 2): Legend will now reverse our reputation; A time comes when the female sex is honoured; That old discordant slander Shall no more hold us subject. Male poets of past ages, with their ballads Of faithless women, shall go out of fashion. This attack on myth and poetry focuses the problem of the play's own achievement. These difficult lines seem to ask with what sort of voice it is possible for a male poet to make female characters speak. They pose the question whether Euripides' play is itself the new song or whether the play instead bears out the misogynist claims of the old poetry, displaying as it does a woman who triumphs in murder and who gladly claims as praise all the paradigmatic accusations of masculine ideologues. Euripidean references to myth, its claims to authority and its inability to sustain those claims, render problematic the achievement of the plays themselves. These plays can be read to exploit myth as part of a discussion of their own status and limitations. In the Hippolytos the claims of the myth of Phaethon's sisters are undermined by the other myths of Semele and Kephalos, which are deployed in a way that suggests their instability. The subject matter of these myths is external to the Hippolytos, but the myth of the play itself does not possess perfect autonomy. Instead, it is subject to different tellings, as it is caught up in a network of repetition and imitation. This is of course true of all Greek tragedy in its relation to previous poetry, such as the Homeric epics, and true again of Euripidean writing in its relation to its dramatic predecessors. But the situation is perhaps different for the second Hippolytos in that while its forebears may have included Sophokles' Phaidra,16 they did certainly include Euripides' own previous production of the Hippolytos Kaluptomenos, a situation unparalleled to 16

See Barrett 1964: 12 and 22-6 for the fragments of this play.

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our knowledge for any other play. The narrative structure of the play is reproduced in the story of Stheneboia and Bellerophon, which Euripides also dramatised.17 Such a structure figures in other cultures in the biblical tale of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, and in the Egyptian Tale of Two Brothers.™ The anti-heroines of the two Euripidean retellings, Phaidra and Stheneboia, became themselves the subjects of repetition and generalisation. They attained legendary status as paradigmatic examples of what were contemporarily perceived as the dramatist's besetting faults, namely his insistence on ugly realism and his fascination with bad women. They are exemplary, in these senses, in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousai 153, 497, 547 and 550, and Frogs 1043 a n d I O 5 2 ; m several of these references Phaidra and Stheneboia have been so subsumed under their paradigmatic status that they appear in the plural. Why certain narrative structures should possess this extensive appeal is not easy to determine. Possibly the pleasure of this structure lies in the final restoration of proper relationships, in the vindication of the chaste male and the descent into oblivion of the wanton female. It is questionable whether this satisfactory outcome in fact obtains in the Hippolytos, since Phaidra's story is resuscitated at the end to share the timeless limelight of myth with Hippolytos (1429-30). 19 This ending, in which the brides sing the stories of both Hippolytos and Phaidra, can be seen to constitute a discussion of poetic repetition and imitation. The play becomes its own myth as the brides' song (1428-30) once more transforms 'tears into amber'; their tears for Hippolytos (1427) echo those shed for Phaethon (74), but these tears are removed from the actual violent events of Hippolytos' death, and they preserve Hippolytos' and Phaidra's memory as in amber. The violent events of the play and of Hippolytos' life are transformed into controlled, contained music and ritual. The ritual context is significant; it presupposes that each sung rehearsal of the events will be an exact repetition of the singing that preceded it. Within the ritual setting, moreover, the song is presumed not to have any significance that exceeds its immediate context, so that song and ritual, word and gesture, are the same, working together to the same end. In other words, the meaning of the song is exhausted in the performance of the ritual. The narrative of Hippolytos' death becomes 'the song which is sung by brides', and is completely contained by this very specific occasion and circumstance. The ritual established at the end of the play presupposes repetition, while the bridal song presupposes imitation, for it recounts the same events as the play. But if the song and ritual are in one sense 'the same' as the drama, they are also very different in form and effect. The music and ritual cast into a static form what is experienced in the play as a dynamic process. Moreover, it is clear that the play differs from ritual in that there is no cultural demand that a play should 17

18

19

See Webster 1967: 80—4 on the Stheneboia of Euripides. He dates it to the same period as the second Hippolytos (1967: 77). For the Tale of Two Brothers see Slater 1968: 276-8. For the popularity of the narrative structure see Sechan 1911: 130 and Burkert 1979: 115 and 1983: 61 n.12. For the differences between Euripides' play and the stock version see Lattimore 1962: 7.

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repeat exactly either other plays or 'real' events. I shall have more to say on this relation between play and ritual in the final chapter.

Writing The play's references to myth can be read as self-conscious reflection on the play's own achievement, since myth raises for the play questions of imitation and authority and of stability of meaning. The play also demonstrates anxiety about imitation and authority in its discussion of writing. The frequent and significant references to writing insistently question its status and authority, and its debatable relation to the spoken word.20 The Nurse's reference to myth in 451, where she introduces the stories of Semele and Kephalos, is itself intriguing, as Barrett points out, because it mentions writing: He who has read the writings of the ancients and has lived much in books, he knows that Zeus once loved the lovely Semele. The first plausible mention of writing in Greek poetry, the 'dire signs' (semata lugrd) of Iliad 6.168, figures in a narrative very similar to that of the Hippolytos. Stheneboia, wife of Bellerophon's uncle, attempts to seduce Bellerophon. When he rebuffs her she accuses him to her husband Proitos (as Phaidra presumably did to Theseus in the first Hippolytos), who sends Bellerophon off to his father-in-law bearing, unknowingly, the semata lugra that will guarantee his death with their request that the father-in-law kill him. Desire, deceit, death and writing are bound together in this story as they are in that of Hippolytos. The plot of the second Hippolytos in fact hinges precisely on writing; together with the absence of confrontation between Hippolytos and Phaidra (and because of it) the letter is the major innovation of the second play. The rewritten drama turns on a piece of writing, which, I shall argue, is a focal point for the play's most urgent concerns. The Hippolytos contains more references to grammata and graphai than any other extant Euripidean play. Writing is prominent also in the two Iphigeneia plays; the recognition central to the plot of the Iphigeneia in Tauris turns on the letter which does not get sent, while the Iphigeneia atAulis can only begin to have a plot because of the impossibility of recapturing Agamemnon's first letter. Distance, death, and ruptured family relations are some of the conditions that these two letters have in common, and that they share with the letter in the Hippolytos. The references to writing in Sophokles' Trachiniai are similarly 20

Turato 1976: 159 lists the oppositions underlying the Hippolytos: 'diverse tecniche di argomentazione e loro implicazioni di classe, diversi statuti gnoseologici in rapporta alia opposizione ... essere /verita — sembrare/menzogna, diverseforme di communcazione (oralitd e scrittura/ ('different techniques of argumentation and their class implications, different states of knowledge in relation to the opposition ... being/truth - seeming/falsehood, different forms ofcommunication (spoken and written/ - my translation).

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sinister. The first part of the play is shadowed by the heavy irony of the deltos (tablet, 47, 157) that foretells for Herakles either death or, in a phrase that is a synonym for death, a quiet life till the end. The instructions for using the Centaur's deadly pharmakon are engraved on Deianeira's memory like writing on a bronze tablet (683).21 The Hippolytos also shares numerous themes with Plato's Phaedros, such as the relations between desire and writing, and between the presence and absence of the author, which are explored in Sokrates' discussion of the discourse of Lysias. The Phaedros is perhaps the site at which the tragic anxiety about writing passes into philosophical prose. 22 Phaidra's letter is evidently crucial to the plot of the Hippolytos, but writing also figures in a variety of other contexts. I will argue, however, that all these various references point more or less directly to Phaidra's letter. Writing first appears at 387, in Phaidra's lines about the ambiguity ofaidos. Reference to the pharmakon of speech or persuasion follows that to the grammata ofaidos (389). Ofaidos she says 'But there are two [or, they are double], the one not bad, the other a burden to houses; but if the kairos [time, occasion] were clear there would not be two having the same grammata.'23 Barrett glosses: 'If we could be sure of the kairos, could be certain when aidos were in or out of place, we could make a sharp distinction and call it by one name in one case, by another in the other; but we cannot be certain, the distinction is blurred and the two shade into one another, and so perforce we must use the same name for both.' Given Phaidra's unambiguous pronouncement on the ambiguity of aidos, it does not seem very productive - although the ceaseless endeavours of critics might suggest otherwise - to unpack her speech and offer explanations for each of the two types of aidos.24 My analysis, as in the case of Phaidra's delirium and Theseus' wish for a second truthful voice, will attempt not to supply factual referents for the elusive speech but to demonstrate what their absence signifies. Phaidra's pronouncement is difficult however we gloss it. Phaidra starts out in 387 with duo, two, yet the duo are then said to have the same letters, and two that 21 22

23

24

See also DuBois 1988 on writing in the Trachiniai. Other similarities between the Phaedros and the Hippolytos include discussion of the pharmakon (274b ff.), the erotic madness (265b), the horse as symbol of sexuality (146b ff.) and the covering and uncovering of the head in conjunction with shameful or honest speech (237a, 243b). For an analysis of the Greek experience of the shift between oral and literate cultures, see the work of Havelock; for a different emphasis see Segal 1982b and 1986. Kairos^ a word which has to do with exactitude, appropriately enough cannot be pinned down with any accuracy. LSJ include among its meanings distinction, point, due measure, proportion, fitness, importance, exact or critical time, season, opportunity, vital part of body, occurrence, chief cause, period, advantage, and profit. T h e attempts to define the two aidos have been many and various, so that complete documentation has become another fantasy of nostalgic plenitude. Syntactical adjustments and outright emendations proliferate, but critics' conclusions about aidos seem largely to be based on their conclusions about Phaidra's motivation and moral fibre. T h e idea that Phaidra's speech is part of a continuing polemic by Euripides against Socratic 'intellectualism' is most strongly put by Snell 1948 and 1964; his followers include D o d d s 1951, Lesky 1958, and Lattimore 1962. T h e case against him may be found in O'Brien 1966 and Moline 1975. Lesky concluded that the problem of these lines remained unsolved and the situation does not seem to have altered since then. See also Zeitlin 1985a: 200 n.78.

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are identical must have a tendency to appear as one. Phaidra both offers and withholds the possibility of knowledge; she begins by making the distinction and proceeds to deny that such a distinction can be made. Yet even as she collapses the distinction by means of the identical grammata, she still retains some claim to knowledge of the duo. The lines suggest some further knowledge, namely of the distinction, to which the grammata by themselves do not give access. If morality is here predicated on the ability to read, to know which type of aidos the grammata indicate in any given instance, then the grammata themselves seem to withhold and refuse this ability. The grammata represent not Phaidra's nascent ability to distinguish, in 385-6, but rather the fact of 386, that the kairos is not clear. The grammata reproduce only one single aspect of a situation characterised by duality. Phaidra's problem here is not dissimilar to Theseus', since for both of them language does not sufficiently represent and reproduce the world, because for two different concepts it offers only one term, or rather two that are identical with one another. Such a formula about language, as we have repeatedly discovered in the course of these investigations, could profitably be applied to many of the key terms in the play. The problems of morality and writing are introduced simultaneously, in a way that seems to point forward to Phaidra's later letter. Yet Phaidra's whole speech is a claim to knowledge about morality, and a claim that her knowledge of what is in fact good will protect her from being destroyed by any possible pharmakon (388-90). If we may read this passage in the light of the later Phaedros and extend the meaning of the pharmakon here to that which it has in Plato - that of writing - we see that the letter is indeed the pharmakon that destroys Phaidra, for it enables her to commit murder while still retaining the fiction of hands undefiled by miasma. The letter, moreover, is made possible, moreover, precisely by the fact that writing cannot be compelled to imitate either speech or the world that it claims to represent, in the same way as the grammata of aidos cannot be made to represent the ambiguity of the word.25 The status and significance of writing is further complicated by the Nurse's reference at 451 to graphai ton palaiteron, writings of the ancients. Some have claimed that graphai here can refer only to paintings, another meaning of the Greek word graphe.26 Barrett argues that graphai here does refer to writings rather than to paintings on pottery by pointing out that there would be no reason for people to possess pots by 'old masters'. The proximity of the reference to the Muses (452) also suggests to me that graphai here connotes writings. The word was ambiguous in Greek usage, and the meaning of 'writing' cannot easily be erased from any of the occurrences within the Hippolytos. Barrett further remarks: 'It is unexpected that this old slave woman should speak of written 25

26

It may b e significant that where other references are made to the ambiguity of aidos, e.g. Hesiod Works and Days 3 1 8 , Euripides Erechtheus fr. 365 Nauck, Demokritos in D i e l s - K r a n z 68b 264, Ploutarch De Virt. Mor. 8, 448f {Moralia vol. 6), it is to the concept itself and not to its representation in grammata. Easterling 1985: 6 n.26 restates the case for painting rather than writing. She also holds that the reference to graphe at 1005 can only b e to paintings.

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works as a normal source of what one might have thought to be popular knowledge: presumably in the fifth century the stories were not after all so widely known' and cites in support of this last point the remark in Aristotle's Poetics 145 ib25f that 'even the familiar stories are familiar only to a few'.27 But the Chorus and Phaidra are able to refer to myths with ease equal to the Nurse's, and with a brevity that presupposes the contemporary audience's acquaintance with them (e.g. 55-62). 28 The myths are intended, by the Nurse, to be a source of truth and a recognised authority to guide and influence behaviour; both their age and the fact that they are written down and have thus achieved some measure of stability and permanence seem to be adduced as factors that guarantee the authoritative paradigmatic status of these accounts. The Nurse seems to invoke writing as a sign of authority; she herself has just been deploying an almost 'literary' discourse in her pseudo-philosophical description of Aphrodite (447-50). She also seems to suggest that the written myths are in some way inaccessible to those who are not ev uxyuoaig aei, always with the Muses (452). But her attempt thus to enhance the status of the myths can be seen to be undermined by the fact that everyone else, like the Chorus and Phaidra, has equal access to the myths. Moreover, as we have already seen, myths cannot be considered as autonomous and univocal entities, for the same myth can be invoked to different ends by different speakers. The Nurse cannot make the myths mean what she wants them to, for they are susceptible of varying interpretations. Contrary to the Nurse's wishes, the mere fact of being written down cannot guarantee stability of meaning. The appeal to the writings of the ancients is an appeal to an authority that proves to be spurious and deceitful; the graphai are just another weapon in the Nurse's arsenal of persuasion. As with Aphrodite as irresistible force, so with graphai as authority; what the Nurse instructs Phaidra to yield to and obey is in the end the Nurse herself. I argued earlier that references to myths in other Euripidean plays usually require a reconsideration of the text's own work of myth-making (and mythdestroying). If this is a similar reference, then it is clear that Phaidra responds in kind to the Nurse's injunction when she takes her revenge on Hippolytos in the form of a written document. Once again the figure of writing leads back to the letter, the point at which the play's new myth diverges most strikingly from the writings of the ancients, the previous versions of the story. Phaidra creates a new story, that of Hippolytos' lust, in the same way as the play creates a new story with the introduction of the letter to replace the meeting between Phaidra and Theseus in the first Hippolytos. I will consider later the grammata that refer specifically to Phaidra's letter (859, 879, 1311) and the reference that is allied to the first two of these, the 27

28

But cf. Antiphanes in Kock Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta II 90 fr. 191, complaining that tragedians have an easier time than comic writers because their audiences are familiar with their plots. W e should note that in Phaidra's case the myths she quotes are also part of her family history. A similar effect is created in the Ion 265-83 when Ion questions Kreousa as to the muthoi he has heard about her family - which is of course also his.

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Orphic grammata of 954. Instead I turn now to Hippolytos' own reference to grammata, in 1004-5, where he says of sex 'I do not know this deed [praxis] except [by] hearing in word [logos] and seeing in graphe; neither am I eager to look on these things, having a virgin soul.' Here undoubtedly the graphe could well be referring to pictures, to pornography on vases or walls such as is only too familiar, but again we cannot exclude from the word the sense of'writing'.29 If Hippolytos is not eager to look upon the graphai, how is he acquainted with them at all? In one sense this is not a problem, since it is easy to be acquainted with the desires of others without sharing them. But graphai are of enough importance to the plot of this Hippolytos for a further meaning to emerge. Hippolytos is not eager to look upon the graphai, but they seem to force themselves upon his consciousness, doing violence to him in the same way as Phaidra's graphe will assault first his soul and eventually his body. It will assault his soul, because it will enforce upon him the necessity of concealment and duplicity. Under the pressure of this necessity he will voice a desire to be double at 1078-9. It will assault his body, because it will lead to his dismemberment at the hands of his father and Poseidon. At 1005 Hippolytos connects logos with graphe and implies that neither is quite as devastating as the praxis (deed) which they represent; but his downfall began when he was contaminated by the Nurse's logoi (606, 653-5) and will end in Phaidra's graphe. Once again the letter emerges from a reference to a very different graphe. Once again too the graphai prove to be a spurious authority, insofar as they are designed to exercise some form of persuasion and to produce a disposition that for Hippolytos at least would be contrary to nature. Such graphai, by causing Hippolytos to fall into the opposite of his original thoughts, would recall Phaidra's fear of the pharmakon. The same complex of ideas can be read in the Messenger's speech at 1253. The Messenger claims that I shall never be able to believe that your son was guilty, not though the tribe of women were hanged for it, not though the weight of tablets of a high pine of Ida,filledwith writings accused him. Here again the grammata constitute a spurious, deceitful authority, especially so perhaps in the hands of women. The boundless reduplication of lies that the Messenger imagines is devoid of truth, an endless repetition of the signifier that never leads to the true signified. The grammata remain liars, seducers, violators. Writing is important in the logic of the agon and of Theseus' treatment of his 29

See Loraux 1979: 54: 'graphe; le malheur, pour lui, est que ce mot designe la peinture, sans doute, mais d'abord, la trace de Pecriture: dans ce refus, sa mort est venue s'inscrire' ('graphe: the misfortune, for him, is that this word means painting, doubtless, but first of all, it means the trace of writing: in this refusal [of the graphe], his death is inscribed' - my translation). As noted above, Easterling 1985 refers 1005 exclusively to painting. But as we become more aware of the significance of graphe throughout the play, we are more likely to appreciate its force in each individual instance.

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son. Theseus, in his accusations of Hippolytos, describes him at 954 as noXkihv YQajijxdxoav xijicov xajtvoiig (honouring the smoke of many writings). Barrett 1964 draws attention to Plato's description of Orphic writings as biblon homadon, hubbub of books, at Republic 364c, and to the many references in Greek sources in which 'smoke' indicates something insubstantial or worthless. In Theseus' representation the grammata form a smokescreen, to coin a phrase, for Hippolytos' supposedly lewd activities; the smoke of the grammata is an image of his hypocrisy, empty like his boasts of virtue at 950, and yet another example of a spurious authority. As I argued earlier, the agon turns on the status of each man's speech weighed against that of the other. Here Hippolytos' speech is represented as insubstantial, mere words without material support. Theseus' speech, on the other hand, has behind it the full weight of his public persona, his power as king and father. Theseus uses an image drawn from the sphere of writing to describe what he perceives as the essential emptiness of Hippolytos' speech. At the same time, however, as Theseus characterises Hippolytos' speech as a particularly vain and empty kind of writing, he also believes that to confront his son directly and to make him speak will be to find out the truth. He demands that his son look him in the face (946-7), because through this direct and unmediated examination he can interrogate Hippolytos until the truth is revealed. 'The truth', for Theseus, is only 'the truth' of Phaidra's letter; Theseus applies his discovery about the possibility of falsifying language only to the speech of Hippolytos, and not to the writing of Phaidra. He forgets that the letter too lacks a second truthful voice and that he cannot question it to find out its truth. This is a point that Artemis will remind him of at 1310 and 1336-7. Theseus believes that he has spoken directly with the author of the letter, and so he is already in possession of its truth. As Hippolytos' speech is writing, so Phaidra's letter is speech. It shouts and speaks with Phaidra's voice (865, 877). Theseus can therefore pour scorn on Hippolytos for appealing to voiceless witnesses (1076) without realising that he himself stands condemned for the same subterfuge; for him his written witness does have voice, and is as present as his son to whom he speaks. It is clear that the letter focuses and intensifies all the problems which writing creates. Such problems can be reformulated by reference to the work of Derrida. In all his writings Derrida is engaged in a critique or deconstruction of what he perceives to be the underlying principles of traditional western metaphysics. Such deconstruction involves tracing a text's internal incoherences and the ways in which it allows its metaphoricity to undermine its claims to meaning. Derrida argues specifically that western metaphysics is guilty of 'logocentrism', which is defined as the privileging and valorisation of'speech' and 'voice' over 'writing'. These terms appear in inverted commas because in Derrida's work 'speech' or 'voice' is a figure for origin, presence, identity and transcendence, while 'writing' is a figure for what is structured by distance, absence, difference and deferral. These last two concepts are combined in the central term differance. In the western tradition, Derrida claims, writing is considered the negation of those

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values which logocentrism privileges. In this tradition writing is represented as a derivative parasitic form that seeks to imitate the spoken language. But writing cannot accomplish even this imitation, for by its second-hand status, removed from the true source of authority that is the voice, writing allows for distortion, distance, difference and death. As Derrida's translator Barbara Johnson puts it in her introduction to Dissemination (1981) Writing ... is considered by the logocentric system to be only a representation of speech, a secondary substitute designed for use only when speaking is impossible ... a second-rate activity that tries to overcome distance by making use of it: the writer puts his thought on paper, distancing it from himself, transforming it into something that can be read by someone far away, even after the writer's death. This inclusion of death, distance and difference is thought to be a corruption of the selfpresence of meaning, to open meaning up to all forms of adulteration which immediacy would have prevented. It is immediately striking to what extent Phaidra's letter exemplifies these negative characteristics of writing, and indeed plays upon the very terms that are most significant in Derrida's analyses. Thus Phaidra is both present, as a corpse and as a witness, and absent, in death. Death is obviously central to the persuasive rhetoric of the letter and indeed to its very existence. Phaidra could not have outlived her confession, for then she would have had to come before the face of Theseus (720-1), and in the confrontation her deceit and guilt would have been discovered. There can be no suicide note without a suicide. Here the death of the author is necessary for the success of the literary production, and Phaidra's death is necessary to constitute her as author. The letter draws its power, as we saw in chapter 2, not only from its transgression of the boundaries between various literary forms - last testament, legal evidence, declaration of love - but also from its manipulation of other contradictions. The letter is writing, but it is also speech; for Theseus it speaks and shouts with the manifest presence of meaning and truth. The letter similarly combines the powers of speech and silence; of speech because through it Phaidra communicates with Theseus, and of silence because Theseus cannot communicate in turn with her or interrogate her through the letter. The letter appears to be a revelation but functions as a means of concealment. It combines Phaidra's power as author and source of persuasion with the inherent female powerlessness that initially makes the rape believable. It exploits traditional assumptions about hierarchies of gender and power to create a new myth that eventually inverts such hierarchies. The various references to graphai and the thoroughly equivocal quality of Phaidra's letter indicate that the status of writing is being questioned and its claims to authority undermined. But the problem does not stop here. Derrida's own analyses do not stop at identifying the logocentric critique of writing, but go on to demonstrate that the various negations predicated of writing can be predicated equally of speech and the voice. Derrida argues that speech, as much as writing, is structured by differance, and that the search for the single transcendent origin of meaning is deluded and misplaced. Meaning can never be

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transcendent in this way, for it is already comprehended by the play of differences in language. Johnson writes (1981): 'Speech is already structured by difference and distance as much as writing is ... language is a system of differences . . . already constituted by the distances and differences it seeks to overcome.' 30 Whereas writing is posited in the logocentric system as the opposite, and therefore the inferior, of speech, deconstruction argues not only that the two opposites collapse into one but also that that one is 'writing' rather than 'speech'. It is clear that the text of the Hippolytos traces the contours of the Derridean argument. Once again, Theseus' pronouncement on the nature of human speech (925-31) is crucial to the analysis. The conclusions that he had reached concerning speech, namely that it can be used to distort and deceive, he failed to apply to Phaidra's letter. The graphe exemplifies very strikingly the problem of distortion and deceit. But Theseus' conclusion demonstrates that the problem resides also with the phone, the voice.31 His solution, moreover, demonstrates that the problem is beyond remedy, for it is inherent in the very nature of speech. Theseus fantasises a voice that would intervene, as it were, between the speaker and the speech, to function automatically as both source and guarantor of the truth, and to make unthinkable Hippolytos' scandalous declaration at 612. The impossibility of this unmediated voice indicates that speech, no less than writing, is always already structured by distance and difference. This conclusion can reinforce the previous suggestion that homilia is the term in the play for human communication. Homilia, I suggested, is characterised by absence and incompletion, in other words, by differance. All the encounters in the play are characterised either by ambiguity and difference or by the absence or distance of the interlocutor; speech in the Hippolytos does not achieve presence and identity. The homilia between Hippolytos and Artemis can stand as the paradigm for such encounters, since despite Hippolytos' idealisation of the relationship and his attempts to model himself on the goddess, Artemis is ineluctably absent from her devotee and remains unattainable. A marked inequality of rank in the scene between Hippolytos and the Servant leads to the ambiguity surrounding the word semnos; Hippolytos is unwilling to listen and the Servant to speak clearly. The scenes of Phaidra's delirium and of the Nurse's persuasion are both informed by a crucial absence. The curious scene between Phaidra and the Chorus outside the door behind which Hippolytos is denouncing the Nurse (565-600) also shares in this lacunary quality.32 During Hippolytos' tirade the 30 31

32

See also Spivak 1976: lxviii-lxx. T u r a t o (1976: 173-4) writes on the inaccuracy of i a premissa che i due diversi strumenti di comunicazione, la parola parlata e la parola scritta, rinvino a codici che si oppongono, dal punto di vista della loro funzione di produttori di messagii: rispettivamente menzogna/verita; inautenticita/autenticita; non univocita/univocita, seduzione/persuasione' ('the premise that the two different means of communication, the spoken and the written word, are reducible to codes that oppose one another, from the point of view of their function as producers of messages: respectively false/true; inauthentic/authentic; non-univocal/univocal; seductive/persuasive' my translation). See Taplin 1978: 71 and Zeitlin 1985a: 54. Trendall and Webster 1971: plate III 3.43 offer an interesting commentary on this scene with a vase-painting that they identify as Stheneboia and her

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distance, both literal and figurative, between Hippolytos and Phaidra is so great that it is not even clear where she is. 33 Phaidra's absence from her letter produces its compelling persuasion; her absence in death means that she cannot be further interrogated and that the truth cannot emerge. Hippolytos' defence in the agon is crippled by this absence, towards which he repeatedly gestures. The agon as a whole again provides the spectacle of a lacunary encounter in which the hierarchical distance between the interlocutors, who are further deafened and muted by the letter, makes communication impossible. Hippolytos' description of his homilia with Artemis idealises homilia as presence (xuneimi) and reciprocity (ameibomai). It is clear that neither of these ideals is ever attained within the encounters of the play. The homilia with Artemis does not bear close examination itself, but at the same time it serves as a commentary on the failed homiliai in the rest of the play. Once again the gods function as unattainable paradigms for the humans, offering what appear to be means of transcending the conditions of human life, which prove, however, to confirm them. In this chapter I have read three discourses in the play that can be seen to manifest an anxiety, characteristic of the contemporary intellectual context, about language and about discursive authority. Each discourse can also be seen to be concerned with imitation, namely, imitation between human and divine, imitation of mythical paradigms, and imitation between the spoken and the written word. Each of these relations of imitation can be read to offer and simultaneously withdraw the possibility of stability of meaning; the fantasy of an effective and uncontroversial language shadows the play but cannot rewrite it. 'Imitation', mimesis, was also a contemporarily available and prominent tool for the analysis of artistic and poetic productions.34 The Hippolytos' concern with imitation can therefore be seen partly at least as a self-conscious reflection on its

33

34

N u r s e eavesdropping t h r o u g h the door on Bellerophon's betrayal of their licentious schemes. Barrett (1964) c o m m e n t s ' H u m a n w o m e n would come crowding to the door to listen; a C h o r u s must refuse, so that Ph. can continue to tell t h e m for the audience's sake what she can hear . . . R e q u e s t and refusal in fact underline the lack of verisimilitude; b u t their purpose is to draw out the scene and so let the tension build u p as we wait to hear the worst.' W i n n i n g t o n - I n g r a m 1969: 131 lists this scene a m o n g his examples of Euripidean mockery of scenic conventions. See Zeitlin 1985a: 54. T h e puzzle of staging this scene is notorious. Smith i 9 6 0 is followed by O s t e r u d 1970 in suggesting that Phaidra leaves the stage and that the monody is sung by the N u r s e , b u t this view has not gained great popularity. H o u r m o u z i a d e s 1965: 28 n.2 considers that the tragic irony of the scene would be ruined if Phaidra left, and Barrett 1964 agrees: ' W e . . . must r e m e m b e r that P h . is there before the audience's eyes, for it is on her presence that the dramatic effect d e p e n d s . ' See also T a p l i n 1978: 155 and 191; and M a s t r o n a r d e 1979: 81 and notes for a restatement of the traditional view. Sider 1977 suggests that Phaidra hides behind the statue of Aphrodite, making h e r invisible to Hippolytos. If we do not think of her as invisible we must agree with those c o m m e n t a t o r s who claim that Hippolytos is deliberately ignoring her. As we have frequently seen in reviewing scholarly discussions, the traditional controversies reflect points of genuine unease in the text b u t seek to 'solve' that unease rather than investigating what it might mean. Plato and Aristotle in the Ion, the Republic and the Poetics consider mimesis to be the first term of literary analysis, although the Rhetoric of Aristotle works with a model of language as productive of certain responses rather than as imitative of a pre-existent reality. See also Else 1958. Gorgias seems to have elaborated a theory of literature as deception; see Rosenmeyer 1955 and Kerferd 1981: 131-9.

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own theatrical status.35 In the final chapter of this study, I shall suggest that the ending of the play offers itself as a further self-conscious reflection on the play's own origins, project and success. 35

See Zeitlin 1985apassim, especially 57, 93-8, n o .

The end

Speech and silence, in the Hippolytos, articulate not only the play's structuring polarities but also its representations of desire and violence. Desire and speech, both structured by difference and absence, are mutually generative and selfperpetuating; the play can be read as a series of attempts to silence a desire that continually erupts into ever more destructive speech. The exchanges of language that constitute the play become increasingly violent and material in their effects. Violence is also represented in terms drawn from a discourse of desire, so that Hippolytos5 downfall can be seen as a feminisation, figured as rape from the sacred meadow and expulsion from the paternal home, which allies him to Phaidra. This levelling effect of violence, which eradicates differences between the characters, ensures that the violence is unstoppable and that all the characters are caught up in its network of imitation. The instability of desire and violence is reproduced by the play's models of authoritative language. The gods, myth, and writing each offer to provide transcendent authority and stability of meaning, but constantly fail to do so. In my study of the ending I shall be reworking the figures of speech and silence, desire, violence, and language, examining whether the ending offers any resolution of the problems that the play has posed or whether those problems continue to trouble the play's idea of itself. I hope to show that there are more ambiguities and tensions in this ending than are usually acknowledged in the critical literature, and that drawing them out allows a better appreciation of what is at stake in the ending. I shall also argue that this ending is extremely self-conscious, and that it presents itself as a commentary on the play's origins, project and success. One contemporarily available model of authoritative language, which is omitted from the list above, is poetry, the very language of the Hippolytos itself. Following on from the more general discussion of language in the last chapter I shall investigate what this self-consciousness might mean for the play's poetic and cultural authority, and what implications it might have for audience and readers. As a consequence of this new focus of interest, I shall be engaging with the critical literature on the Hippolytos more closely than I have done hitherto.

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Artemis I begin my discussion of the ending with the manifestation of the dea ex machina, the goddess from the machine. Analysis of Artemis as she figures here has often become confused with analysis of the nature and function of the terminal god throughout Euripides, in an attempt, which I believe is misguided, to simplify and domesticate the Euripidean corpus. For instance Collard's formulation, that the terminal god enters to explain and to console (1981: 7), fails to take account of Artemis' hostility towards Theseus and her proposed revenge. Similarly, Artemis' particular aetiological pronouncements have often been discussed together with all the Euripidean aetiological endings, as if her pronouncements had no special relation to the body of the play. Other critics (such as Grube 1941: 78-9) have dismissed her pronouncements as having small relevance for the contemporary audience and none at all for the present day. Fortunately a more sophisticated approach is now prevailing, such as in the recent work of Foley (1985). Another problem that Artemis' appearance poses is the question whether or not there is a final 'reconciliation' of any kind between Hippolytos and Theseus. This question is aligned with the question whether Artemis' intervention is offered finally for approval or condemnation. I intend to demonstrate that in all respects Artemis' intervention is ambiguous and problematic, and that the critics who strongly uphold one side of the debate about the moral value of her dispensations can only do so by unduly repressing the other side; conversely, those critics who admit to a sense of instability about the ending often do not pursue the reasons for this insecurity. The amount of critical heat that is generated, however, can be a reliable guide to a significant moment in the text. It is not sufficient to dismiss Artemis, or any other deus ex machina, as product of a lapse in taste and discrimination (Jones 1962: 266-7); and the suggestion that the deus ex machina saves the poet, as well as the characters, from the consequences of incompetent plotting, has long been repudiated (Grube 1941: 75). I shall first consider Artemis as part of the Hippolytos rather than as part of the general problem of the deus ex machina; I intend to do this, however, by comparing her first with other gods, and secondly with other prophetic figures, in the extant plays of Euripides. The appearance of the terminal god is a feature of Euripidean dramaturgy; it is not often left to human figures to close the plays. Thetis appears in the Andromache to console her husband and to inform him of his coming godhead. The Dioskouroi appear twice, in the Elektra and the Helen. In the former they announce the unlikely marriage of Elektra and Pylades, explain to Orestes the plot of the Eumenides, tell him he will found an eponymous town, and inform all the protagonists of the true cause of the Trojan War, namely the eidolon (phantom) of Helen. In the Helen they rescue Theonoe from her brother and describe the futures of Helen and Menelaus as, respectively, a divinity and a denizen of the Isles of the Blessed. They also describe Helen's eponymous island. Apollo appears only once, in the Orestes, where he arranges more

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unsuitable marriages, explains Helen's divinity and the reasons behind the war, and describes Orestes' eponymous town. Dionysos also appears once, although he has largely disappeared in lacunae; he closes the Bakchai with reproaches for the Thebans and prophecies of Kadmos' future. Athene appears in the Suppliant Women, the Ion and the Iphigeneia in Tauris. In the first she imposes an oath of peace and assistance and prepares the characters for the next war. In the Ion she prevents Ion from entering the temple, explains his relationship with Apollo and describes the rule of his descendants. In the Iphigeneia in Tauris she outlines Orestes' future to him and establishes a new cult of Artemis and of Iphigeneia. In the Rhesus the Muse tells of Rhesus' birth and coming deification. Of these gods, only one, Athene in the Ion, compares with Artemis in providing knowledge that is indispensable for the characters' understanding of the events of the play.1 Artemis' main reason for intervening in the Hippolytos is to vindicate the memory of Hippolytos (1298-9) and to do this she must explain the plot of the play to Theseus. With this exception, the gods from the machine all look to the future; even when Apollo and the Dioskouroi explain the true cause of the Trojan War, the phantom of Helen, the news does not greatly affect the position or outlook of the characters, although the information is very significant for any understanding of the play. Artemis' final explanatory narrative supersedes all the others that have proliferated throughout the play and that the characters have resisted or unwillingly conformed to. The goddess thus significantly bears out Kitto's perception that 'the god at length identified with the author' (1950: 285 n.i). He calls this 'a confused situation', but it is one that requires further investigation. For it was Aphrodite who said 5ei^(0 5e ©r^oTi nqay\ia (I will reveal the truth to Theseus, 42), claiming a right to revelation that it now appears Artemis has appropriated. The introduction of a divine voice that is also in some sense an authorial voice suggests that throughout the closing scenes the play's idea of its own authority is one of the issues under discussion. This self-consciousness makes complex demands on the audience. At the end yet another voice will emerge, that of the brides. For while Artemis elucidates the past action for Theseus, she leaves behind another text, the two recompenses and in particular the song, that still requires interpretation. This further text, which looks to the future, is as important for an understanding of the play as is Artemis' previous elucidation for Theseus' understanding of its events. Artemis also has a more complex relation to the human characters than other terminal gods. While other gods intervene to prevent violence (in the Orestes, the Helen and the Iphigeneia in Tauris) she expressly denies any ability to prevent violence (1328-30): 1

Even Athene's contribution to understanding the past could have been made by Kreousa, had Ion been prepared to believe her. As with Artemis in the Hippolytos, so Athene's narrative in the Ion supersedes all those which have proliferated in the play about the hero's birth and descent. The Ion, although produced at a later date, can also be read as concerning itself with the status of various kinds of speech and the conflicts between various kinds of authority. See further Goff 1988a.

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The end For it was Cypris managed the thing this way to gratify her anger against Hippolytus. This is the settled custom of the gods: No one mayflyin the face of another's wish: we remain aloof and neutral.

Instead of preventing violence, she actively instigates it in her hostility towards Theseus (1297, 1313-14) and her revenge on Aphrodite's favourite (1420-2). Only Dionysos in the Bakchai compares with her in this respect. At the same time Artemis is in some sense, as I shall suggest later, the instrument of a rapprochement between Hippolytos and Theseus. She provides them with some compensation for their sufferings; she laments for Hippolytos, who feels his body lightened by her presence (1392), and she suggests that even Theseus will find pardon (1326). Her presence and her foundation of a cult give significance to Hippolytos' death; but her presence is bestowed only to be withdrawn, and the cult, as we shall see, is problematic. We could describe Artemis, in the Aeschylean phrase from Agamemnon 182 (charts biaios), as bringing both charts and bia> both grace and force. Foley writes (1985: 58) 'the notion among the Greeks that the gods are an ambivalent source of violence and order was ... pervasive and even axiomatic', but the particular combination in the Hippolytos still repays further analysis. Artemis' explanatory narrative, moreover, is far from straightforward. It is told in three stages, which deal with the letter (1297-1312), the curse (1313-24), and the authorial role of Aphrodite (1325-41). The first part both condemns and exonerates; Artemis cannot tell if the narrative is of Phaidra's madness or of her nobility (1300-1): I will show you, too, the frenzied love that seized your wife, or I may call it, a noble innocence. Similarly, while the first two parts of the speech condemn Theseus utterly, the third opens the possibility of his exoneration (1326, 1335, 1434) and implicates Artemis herself (1328-30). The authoritative voice appears after all to be only provisional, unable to pass the judgement that will make sense out of the story and thereby complete it. Artemis' presence is similarly provisional, soon to be withdrawn, and any resolution she brings must be predicated on the suffering of both Hippolytos and Theseus. The complexity of Artemis' intervention and the instability of her judgements make it inadequate to talk of 'un rayonnement de transfiguration, une serenite celeste' as did Meridier (quoted by Kitto 1950: 206); more recently Spira in his major study was led to ignore the more painful parts of Artemis' intervention in his zeal to amalgamate her to his preconception of the role of a deus ex machina (i960: 87~92).2 Criticism of this persuasion emphasises Artemis' contribution 2

Spira is followed by Lloyd-Jones, who writes (1971: 155) that 'the god's appearance rescues the human characters from the situations into which their mortal limitations have brought them by

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to the putative reconciliation and discounts her infliction of pain on the human characters, while other commentators take account only of the suffering, both of Hippolytos and of Theseus. Some of these latter commentators argue that the apparently hostile representation of Artemis is part of the supposed Euripidean commitment to undermining traditional concepts of divinity, or part of a predilection for philosophical exegesis at the expense of dramaturgy. For all critics, hostile or favourable to Artemis, the reconciliation is crucial. Some do not believe in a reconciliation at all; Fitzgerald writes (1973: 36) that 'the concord of melodrama replaces the harsh disintegration of human relationships, yet the facts that generated the disintegration remain the same'. But for Fitzgerald 'the facts' include the idea that Theseus attacks Hippolytos not because of the alleged rape but because of Theseus' persistent guilt over Hippolytos' bastardy. Other critics separate the intervention from the reconciliation between Hippolytos and Theseus and discount Artemis' contribution to the reconciliation.3 These critics argue for a 'humanist' interpretation of Euripides; the dramatist is not concerned with satirising particular conceptions of godhead so much as with defending the claims of humanity where all that is not humanity is inimical. For these critics Artemis cannot be the figure that redeems the play, since according to this interpretation redemption is to be found only in humanity. Knox writes of the 'affirmation of purely human values in an inhuman universe' and he is followed by several others.4 In order to privilege the human element, however, these critics have to ignore Artemis' injunctions to Theseus and Hippolytos at 1431-6: {To Theseus) Son of old Aegeus, take your son to your embrace. Draw him to you. Unknowing you killed him. It is natural for men to err when they are blinded by the Gods. {To Hippolytos.) Do not bear a grudge against your father. It was fate that you should die so.

3

4

leading them to recognise the wider purposes of the gods'. In a similar vein see Grube 1941, who also seems to neglect the specificity of Artemis' activity when he writes '[the gods] prophesy the future and put the drama back into its legendary background, thereby achieving a peculiar kind of balance, and perspective . . . [the drama is raised] beyond the individual circumstances and the particular time and place . . . it becomes a part of the universal experience of mankind, a chapter in human history' (1941: 77). For various such shades of reaction see e.g. Matthaei 1918: 111-12; Lucas 1950: 207; Norwood 1954: 96-103; and Conacher 1967: 46. Knox is followed by Vellacott, for example: 'Such qualities and attitudes are the prerogative of mortals, a spiritual power that enables the transient to challenge the eternal. In none of these epilogues is there any hint that gods overrule humans for their own good, or direct events to fulfil a wiser justice beyond man's vision' (1975: 21). See also Taplin 1978: 52, for whom Artemis differentiates herself from other terminal gods by departing before the action is completed, thus leaving the real resolution to Hippolytos; her departure sharpens the contrast with the reconciliation scene, pointing up the difference between divine and human action.

no

The end

Whether or not there is a reconciliation between Hippolytos and Theseus, and if there is, what responsibility for it Artemis bears, are complex questions that have implications for any understanding of the play. I want to emphasise that Artemis' direction to Hippolytos not to hate his father (1435) is an intervention of a very different kind from the pronouncements that precede it; the previous pronouncements, which are concerned with past events, do not indicate to the human characters that any positive response is possible. It could be argued that Hippolytos anticipates Artemis' wishes when he expresses sympathy for his father (1405, 1407, 1409), but he claims that he ends the quarrel in obedience to Artemis (1442-3): 'You bid me end my quarrel with my father,/And I obey'. During the earlier lines (1405-14) he turns from speaking with Artemis to addressing his father. The inevitable end of the long and anomalous homilia between Hippolytos and Artemis (1441) leaves a space for a brief homilia between the two men. Hippolytos' previous untouchability gives way to an embrace with his father (1445): 'Father, lay hold on me and lift me up.' But what is perhaps the crucial moment comes in 1449. Hippolytos speaks the line that enables him to free his father from guilt and to leave him as hagnos (pure and holy, 1448) as himself. His words are 'I free you from all guilt in this' (e^euGeQco 4>6VOV, 1449); the line offers itself as yet another performative utterance, the opposite of, but as powerful as, Theseus' curse and Artemis' dispensations. We cannot conclude that Theseus lives happily ever after, or that Hippolytos achieves an ultimate insight into the human condition; but the one conceivably healing moment of the play is attained by the judicious use of powerful and effective speech, the kind of speech that has previously been available only to the gods or to those intent on harming their own kind. If it is possible to claim this much reconciliation, as I would argue it is, then Artemis shares responsibility for the reconciliation, and her intervention brings both charis and bia, and the destabilising effect that results from the conjunction. In comparison with other terminal gods, then, Artemis' intervention can be seen to be thoroughly equivocal. Other anomalies emerge when we compare Artemis with other figures in the Euripidean plays who make either aetiological pronouncements or prophecies that look beyond the confines of the play. In many plays, prophecy is concerned with the achievement of divine or eponymous status. At the ends of the Herakleidai and the Hekabe, Eurystheus and Polymestor, despised and vanquished enemies, are suddenly posessed with the gift of prophecy; the one foretells the future war, the other the downfalls of Hekabe and the Atreid house. Other endings are more aetiological. Medea at Medea 1381-2 founds a 'solemn festival and rites' which are 'in place of this impious murder' ('in place of translates the Greek anti, which can also mean instead of or in return for). Athene prescribes two cults; in the Suppliant Women, a sacrifice and an engraved tripod that will stand at Delphi, and in the Iphigeneia in Taurisy a new temple and a festival that will partially reenact Iphigeneia's story. A drop of human blood will be exacted to

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commemorate the near-sacrifice of Orestes.5 Only the Medea, the Iphigeneia in Tauris and the Hippolytos, then, envisage rituals that can be seen to repeat the content of the play concerned and thereby to act as prolongations or perpetuations of the play. Of these, only the Hippolytos ends with a rite that includes a reference specifically to music. In other words, the Hippolytos concludes with a reference to the mode of language of the play just performed.6 The rite and song thus establish at the outset a claim to be considered as self-conscious comment on the play.7 Nor are the rite and song the only provision that Artemis makes for Hippolytos' memory, for she also intends to take revenge on Aphrodite by destroying one of her favourites (1420-2): I'll wait until she loves a mortal next time, and with this hand - with these unerring arrows I'll punish him. Could this be another play in the making? Only in the Hippolytos does the deity make two arrangements for the future so utterly opposed to one another as these. The charis and bia of Artemis' presence and intervention are reproduced in her two recompenses of violence and music. I shall argue that these mutually exclusive alternatives coexist throughout the ending, and that this pervasive ambiguity throws into doubt the very possibility of an ending. Paradoxically, however, there is also a movement towards normalisation in this epiphany. The withdrawal of Artemis' gaze and presence is the logical conclusion of the impossibility of the homilia that Hippolytos idealised into a presence and a reciprocity (85). The brides' song and ritual restore Artemis, from Hippolytos' bizarre and idiosyncratic conception of her, to her traditional role as guardian over periods of transition in the lives of young women and men. We shall see further paradoxical instances of 'normalising' in the ending. The two recompenses of violence and music also offer the alternatives of speech and silence, but in a problematic context. Artemis ends the play, and so 5

6

7

Athene founds two cults in the fragmentary Erechtheus; see the edition of P. Carrara, Florence 1977. In this context it is interesting that Wilamowitz suggested that the Hypsipyle also ended with the institution of music; see Bond 1963: 20. In the fragmentary Antiope Hermes describes the power of Amphion's music to move inanimate objects; see the edition of J. Kambitsis, Athens 1972. In the Erechtheus Athene apparently institutes maidens' dances. Several critics go some way towards recognising the self-referential qualities of this and other aetiological endings, but do not pursue the implications. Webster 1967: 290 writes: 'Besides the immortality given by cult there is the immortality given by poetry, and the other function of the deus ex machina is to reinsert the characters in the traditional story, which has preserved their exploits'. But he goes on to say that this, like references to aetiology, is not necessary. Kitto explores the suggestion only to reject it (1950: 287): 'the Euripidean play ends with a reference to a rite because it originally was the rite . . . it is possible that we have before our eyes the awful spectacle of Euripides destroying himself like the suicidal lemming'. Whitman on aetiology at least differentiates between the Hippolytos and other plays: 'Euripides, whose concern with the origins of cults and other aetiological matters appears at times to be little more than antiquarian, here seems to intend more . . . Euripides . . . may have felt in the establishment of a religious institution some hint of permanence arising out of the ruins . . . If tragic mythology could not be rounded out into any form of salvation . . . at least it might leave memorials' (1974: 118-19).

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what follows her departure and the scene between father and son must be silence, but it is a silence full of speech, of music (1428-9). Artemis responds to the death of Hippolytos, the silencing of one who was incapable of correct and timely speech, with both the silencing of the rival favourite and the speech of the brides. In chapter 3 I suggested that this threat of death to the anonymous favourite, taken together with the nomos of non-intervention (1328-30), produces an endless regression of reciprocal revenges.8 This mise-en-abime is both a perpetuation of the play's own internal violence and a model of its action. Although this violence takes place in the divine sphere, it constitutes a commentary on the human activities just witnessed and reenacts the action of the play in a stark and uncompromising form. This first recompense thus offers the threat of an endless perpetuation of violence. Yet the imitative reciprocity of this projected violence, while denying it any principle of closure, does lend it some form or pattern; the first recompense in a sense offers two contrasting views of itself, in the same way as Artemis' whole dispensation offers the alternatives of music and violence. Later in this chapter I shall show that the second recompense, the rite and song, is similarly ambiguous. Since the first violent recompense opens up the possibility of a series of plays of divine revenge, it perhaps challenges us with the questions of why we 'enjoy' representations of violent events and what compelling quality there is about dramatic violence. One answer to these questions might be formulated in terms of the second, musical recompense. A Girardian answer would be that it is only violence that is compelling, and that tragedy, like other cultural practices, represents an ever-renewed attempt to contain it. Pucci (1977), arguing from a deconstructive position, suggests that the terror of tragedy is generated in order that it may be subsumed in pity, and that the terror is the necessary pharmakon, the poisonous remedy, of the healing process undertaken by tragedy. I shall consider his argument at greater length later, but for the moment I want to note that both these answers point to the second recompense. Whatever answer we give, it is clear that the ending of the play turns directly to the audience and readers and requires an evaluation of their critical responses. If this conclusion is true of the first recompense, it is even more true of the second, the rite and song of the brides which Artemis institutes in honour of Hippolytos (1423-30): Unwedded maids before the day of marriage will cut their hair in your honour. You will reap through the long cycle of time, a rich reward in tears. And when young girls sing songs, they will not forget you, your name will not be left unmentioned, nor Phaedra's love for you remain unsung. 8

Other views of Artemis' revenge are apparently possible; Barrett 1964 and Dimock 1977: 254 play down or deny the vindictiveness of the threat, while Spira i960: 92 assimilates it to a return of order.

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The rites or partial reenactments outlined at the end of the Medea and the Iphigeneia in Tauris clearly speak of violence deflected or diminished and thereby controlled, as does this rite, but they do not possess the verbal, poetic quality of this commemoration, which also includes the song. The song recounts the same events as does the play, the love of Phaidra and the death of Hippolytos. Both the song's content and the fact that it is a song justify the consideration of it as self-conscious comment on the play just past. This introduction at the end of the Hippolytos of a further reference to language, here as song, reinforces all those that have preceded it and foregrounds the play's concern with the conditions of its own genesis. The ending enters into an active and questioning relationship with the body of the play, a relationship that I will now explore. How does the song reflect on the play? It takes the same violent events, the sort of violence suggested in the first recompense, and transforms them into music, bringing them under conscious control and containing them within poetic form. The repetition of the story that the song undertakes is very different from the unthinking repetitions, imitations and substitutions within the body of the play, all of which have disastrous consequences; the song rather removes the narrative from history and drains it of its violence, reducing that violence to an unthreatening object of contemplation. It is true that in speaking of the transformation of the play into song, we must provisionally accept the play as 'real', whereas it is itself a transformation of the 'real'. I hope to show that the introduction of the song can generate a closer examination of that transformation. If we accept the transformation as such, it can be considered as an image of the poetic enterprise itself, insofar as such an enterprise seeks to create beauty out of pain, order out of chaos, and lasting significance out of ephemeral events. This second recompense can thus be seen to offer the same representation of poetic endeavour as did the choral ode that described the metamorphosis into amber of the tears of Phaethon's sisters (738-41). It thus offers another representation of the play that has just happened, for that too transforms and transcends the raw material of desire, deceit and death. The two different recompenses thus suggest two distinct alternative ideas of the play, and together they constitute a meditation on poetic and dramatic activity.

The brides The rite and song are important for an understanding of the Hippolytos, but the young girls who perform them are equally significant figures. The brides, by means of their ritual song, reduce the explosive events of Hippolytos' story to an unthreatening object of contemplation, and are enabled to distance themselves from the violence. Unlike Aphrodite's luckless favourite, they avoid becoming caught up in the narrative. By deploying the story of Hippolytos' mental and physical rending, they can better negotiate the moment before marriage, when their own psychic and bodily integrity is perhaps most threatened. Yet at the same time they are deeply involved in their own narrative of violence and

reconciliation, of marriage and defloration, and so they can also be identified with the story that they recount. They are both distanced and involved, both inside and outside their song. The paradoxes of their position are significant. Those critics who discuss the brides' relationship with their song, and the song's relationship with the play, draw attention to the song's normalising function and to the way in which it expands the significance of Hippolytos' career and of the prevailing tensions within the play. The marriage ceremony can be read, schematically, as one that leads from the realm of Artemis to that of Aphrodite, and that thus offers one solution to the play's problem of antagonistic goddesses. The brides' physical loss can be understood as relating to, and their compensatory rite as giving expression to, the sense of a greater loss of innocence, not only that of Hippolytos, but also of Phaidra, which pervades the whole play.9 The rite and song also enjoin upon the bride conformity to the expectations of her society, such as Hippolytos failed to meet. The rite and song can be seen as helping the brides to bear the conditions of mortality, of change and loss, that Hippolytos rejected at his peril.10 The song can also be read as a warning to the bride to emulate neither Hippolytos in his perverse chastity nor Phaidra in her adulterous desire; the bride should instead conform to the mean between these alternatives that is legitimate marriage.11 While the bride contains the mythical violence by means of the song, she has no final control over the socially sanctioned violence that the rite and song herald and prefigure. The song contains in music the frightening events of the play; the rite to some extent contains the frightening events of the marriage night by its deflected and partial enactment of loss; but both also act as a means of controlling the brides and of bringing them within their assigned roles. In chapter 3 I suggested that Hippolytos' downfall is represented in terms of a female experience of violence. This feminisation of Hippolytos now paradoxically provides the paradigm for the brides to follow. Relations between the sexes have been disrupted throughout the play, as they must be when men are silenced by women's speech; now, however, at the end of the play, the proper differentiation of the sexes is restated, and the confusion brought about by excess or deficient sexuality is rectified by the practice of legitimate marriage. But the context in which the 'normalising' rite and song emerge renders them 9

10

1]

Reckford writes (1972: 415) 'the experience of loss and suffering had somehow to be expressed, as indeed it was at Troezen in the cutting of a lock of hair, the song, and the tears for Hippolytos'. He continues (416) 'Artemis' prophecy therefore ... gives express form to something intimated throughout the play, returning us at last to the point of inspiration'. So Corelis 1978: 4. Dimock 1977: 242 suggests 'Euripides thought he saw, in a myth to help girls submit to marriage, a myth to help mankind in general submit to the cruelty of history'. Segal 1978: 139 speaks of'the appropriateness in the fact that this figure whose place has been in the margin of the city should be involved in the rite of passage which civilized the "untamed" or "unyoked" maidens'. Dimock begins to suggest some of the tensions within the song. His argument is that on the one hand, the story it tells points to the necessity of obeying Aphrodite, and thus encourages the brides to conquer their reluctance in the face of defloration (1977: 241). On the other hand, the fact that the man is overthrown satisfies the brides' latent hostility towards the agents of their violation, and distances and legitimises their feelings for the chastity they are on the point of abandoning (242).

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unsettling. That a display of various destructively abnormal forms of sexuality should end in an aetiology of the rites of marriage is a striking irony. Tragic marriages, like those proposed at the close of the Elektra and the Orestes, seem to be only intrusive last-ditch attempts to impose a form of happiness on hopelessly wretched situations. The arrangements of Apollo and the Dioskouroi seem deliberately to withdraw the possibility, and to underline the impossibility, of a satisfying closure. Comedies and folk-narratives properly end in marriage; tragedies do not. The figure of marriage here, however, seems to me to possess a specific significance in the context of the Hippolytos. The relations between desire and language, which I elaborated earlier, seem to be restated here in terms of the relations between marriage and song. As the threat of unruly and illegitimate desire is, ideally, contained in legal marriage, so the chaotic and destructive speech that has characterised all the play's previous encounters is contained and controlled in music, in the regular and pleasing ordering of events in song. Music thus figures as both a transcendence of, and an alternative to, the human speech of the play. Music avoids the complexities that have surrounded human speech and approaches instead the powerful, finalising status of the gods' words. It is one of the authoritative forms of language represented as available to humans within the play, the others being Theseus' curse and Hippolytos' freeing of his father from the guilt of murder. Despite the inconclusiveness of Artemis' intervention, then, it can be argued that there is a definite movement towards normality and stability in the ending. Desire and language are both contained within institutional structures. The figure of Artemis appears in her traditional cultic role. The focus of the play opens up, so that the events of the play are made to reverberate through a community that is wider than the single oikos. The figure of Hippolytos moves from the 'marginal' areas of woodland and seashore to a central role in civic and religious practice (Segal 1978: 139). If we consider the play in terms of an incorporation of the marginal, the rite and song can be seen as a means of bringing the marginal figures of unmarried females into the heart of the polls, that polls which not only supervises marriage for the propagation of its species but also ensures that its history and traditions be preserved and transmitted to future generations. After the entrance of Theseus, the play invokes the figure of the polls with increasing frequency. This is perhaps to be expected, as Theseus is the ruler of the polis; Hippolytos is exiled from all Theseus' dominions including Athens (974-5, 1094). Hippolytos' relation to the polls is tangential even before his exile, as might be expected from one who is represented as a hunter and an ephebe. The hunt, as Vidal-Naquet has demonstrated, is an integral part of the representation of the ephebela, the institution that characterises and defines the pre-political state of Athenian youth.12 It is Hippolytos who politicises the agon with his references to oratory (986-9) and monarchy (1012-15), but he does so only to deny that he has any political ambition (1017): 12

See Vidal-Naquet in Gordon 1981: 147-87.

n6

The end I would wish to be first in the contests of the Greeks, but in the city I'd take second place.

He rejects politics and sex in the same terms, claiming that he is adept neither at the language of politics (986-9) nor at the representations of sex (1004). He thus renounces any claim to full adult participation in the life and propagation of the polls. Theseus' sentence of exile only completes the process by rendering him actually as well as figuratively apolis (1184, cf. 1029). Theseus is the immediately obvious political figure of the play; the first part of the play is concentrated on those whose exclusion defines the polls, namely women, slaves and youths. Theseus is thus the only figure that remotely resembles the Athenian males who gather to watch the dramatic performances at the festival of Dionysos.13 He also reproduces their position specifically as audience, for he is a theoros (spectator, 792, 807) and one who witnesses aplkra thea (bitter sight, 809). Theseus, more than any other single character, is implicated in the problems of interpreting spoken and written language that the play poses. Not only does Theseus represent an audience within the play, but his gestures of political and linguistic power, skepsasthe (look, 943) and prophono pasl (I speak to all, 956) are also theatrical gestures that must in some sense include the audience.14 Similarly the address of the Messenger to the citizens of Athens and Troizen (1158-9), Theseus' reference to Athens' loss (1459-60) and the Chorus's reference to the grief of all the citizens (1462), must invoke the Athenian audience and thus incorporate it within the play. The closing scenes implicate the audience both as spectators and as citizens; the polls appears both on and off the stage. This emergent political context, at the close of the play, makes it more striking that the commemoration of the story is entrusted to young unmarried girls. These girls are the very creatures who are most excluded from the polls. Far from making sacrifices themselves, their marginality uniquely fits them for the role of becoming sacrifices, as frequently happens in the plays of Euripides.15 The figures of the brides thus present an anomaly with even wider implications than those discussed above. Although the rite and song contain the brides within a traditional role, they also give them voice and therefore a certain power. They are women singing about a woman silenced, but by this song the brides ensure that 13 14

15

See Walton 1980: 77-8 on the question of the presence of women at the theatre. For the conservative view of the possibilities of'audience address' of this kind see Bain 1975. He mentions Theseus' skepsasthe specifically (19) and claims that while it is directed towards the 'world in general', this is not the same as ad spectatores. It is true that women, both young and old, have great prominence in religious and ritual practice, both within purely female festivals such as the Thesmophoria and within the major cults of the polls. Our knowledge about this aspect of women's life remains partial and we have not yet succeeded in synthesising it with what we know about the contempt for and distrust of women otherwise found in our sources. In any case, it remains anomalous, and therefore significant, that this enshrining of female voices should close a play which has been so concerned with the transgressive aspects of female speech. But for a different view of the possibilities of this ending see Rabinowitz 1987.

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Phaidra will be heard. As girls on the brink of marriage, the brides are about to become counters in the patriarchal exchange of women; but the signs that are women are uniquely equipped also to make signs themselves, to use language, as the brides do when they sing of Hippolytos and Phaidra. As Levi-Strauss writes (1969: 496): 'woman could never become just a sign and nothing more, since even in a man's world she is still a person, and since in so far as she is defined as a sign she must be recognised as a generator of signs'. The cult context, such as is adumbrated in the description of the rite and song, afforded the only site in which fifth-century Athenian women could legitimately acquire a public voice and public presence; the silencing and containment of the female, which the play has been so anxious to achieve, is both confirmed and qualified in the publicly vocal figures of the brides. Insofar as the brides have only a marginal relation to the polls, Segal is in one sense wrong when he writes that Hippolytos' suffering 'will become part of the rituals of his city' (1979:159, emphasis mine). In another sense he is right, because the brides are about to be assigned their role by the polls, and they will participate in the polls by providing it with male children. The brides will thus assist in the propagation of the polls both by producing sons and by perpetuating songs, even though they have no political place within it.16 They can be seen to reproduce Phaidra's anomalous position, where she was the means of transmitting both parrhesla (422) and oikos (305-6) to her children, but herself possessed neither. Ritual The figures of the brides, then, can be closely related to many of the play's abiding concerns. But none of the above speculations on the relationship of the brides with the song, or of the song with the play, is affected by the consideration of any historical ritual that may have informed the reference to it. The relations between ritual and tragedy have often been stated in terms of the question whether the forms of tragedy descend historically from the practices of ritual and if so, how this putative descent can be traced. The Hippolytos, in its reference to the bridal rite, does seem to gesture towards an idea of its own genesis, but the ritual cannot be sufficiently accounted for in these terms. Even if the play was historically inspired by such a ritual, it can be seen to invert that relationship; as Foley writes 'The poet... habitually closes his dramas with the establishment of new rituals for which the plays themselves become an aetiology' (1985: 21). No matter how sophisticated the terms in which we discuss tragedy's descent from or relation to ritual, the important point for an understanding of this play is that the play returns to the (supposedly generative) ritual at its close, and that the two methods of ordering experience thereby confront each other. This confrontation is heightened by the song's status as not only part of the ritual but also self-conscious commentary on the play. Even if there had been no such 16

See e.g. Calame 1977, particularly the last section, on girls' choruses as part of'civic' education and initiation.

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historical rituals as the cutting of hair and the singing of songs, it would not make a great deal of difference; the point is that the play takes over and incorporates the ritual, for a short while, as part of a meditation on the conditions of its own genesis. The meaning of the confrontation therefore requires further analysis. I have already briefly outlined the similarities and differences between tragedy and ritual in the two previous chapters. The relationship between the two is obviously more than a simple equation or antithesis, especially since the tragedies themselves were performed within a ritual context, at the festival of Dionysos.17 A ritual may thus frame a play that may itself incorporate a ritual. The play is another institutional form of language, like the ritual, and this fact must further complicate our understanding. The ritual context, celebrating the success and self-glorification of Athens, makes the tragic competition possible as an event, and correspondingly makes possible the questioning process that tragedy seems to undertake. Civic stability succeeds each performance, reasserting itself at the close; whether this containment of the tragic energies is complete or whether the images of breakdown persist after the end of performance and alter the terms of that stability, are questions of abiding difficulty. The invocation of ritual at the end of the Hippolytos is thus a more complicated gesture than may at first appear. In the third chapter I suggested that both cultural forms, ritual and tragedy, share a common aim, which is to contain violence by recapitulation and thus to render it unthreatening. There are of course similarities in many other areas. Both ritual and tragedy include elements of staging, costume, spectacle, theatrical gesture and role-playing. Ritual is itself very dramatic, involving heightened, compelling types of action. But ritual can also provide a stylised and therefore safe way of negotiating a transitional period that is potentially difficult and dangerous. I have already suggested how the bridal rite in the Hippolytos can claim this function. Ritual offers a space and time that are set apart from those of'real life'. The play, like a ritual, is set apart from real life and can be seen to provide a mixture of both danger and management of danger; its uncompromising analyses of desire, violence and language are perhaps rendered less threatening by the fact that they are contained within a shared and recognisable ritual context. Both ritual and tragedy, then, can offer their society a place in which to speak of its deepest anxieties. A further similarity between ritual and tragedy lies in their role as educators of the citizens. I have argued that the content of the brides' rite fulfils an educative indoctrinating function, and in this it corresponds to other initiation rituals, which all have as their goal the incorporation of the pre-social young into society in their proper roles. Poetry, of which tragedy is a particular form, is also often credited in Greek culture with the ability to inculcate certain values. The moral exhortations of lyric poetry were recited at symposia where the ties between male citizens were both confirmed and celebrated, and such exhortations thus formed part of the acculturation of the young. A considerable portion of the discussion in Plato's Protagoras on the teachability of virtue is devoted to an exposition of a 17

On the rituals which preceded the tragic performances see Goldhill 1987.

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relevant poem by Simonides. The Frogs of Aristophanes turns on the relative merits, as educators of the city, of Aischylos and Euripides, and the purpose of tragedy is explicitly stated as 'to make men better in the cities' (Frogs 1009).18 The technical term for producing a play is didaskein, which also means 'to teach'. But it is important to register the fact that ritual characteristically teaches only obliquely, as in the case of the brides' rite and song, for this is also true of tragedy. The content of tragedy's teaching, unless reduced to a truism, cannot be extracted like a moral from a fable. The method of its teaching is also questionable; women, youths, barbarians, madmen and murderers fill the stage, triumphing in very equivocal fashion or, with even more sinister effect, seducing the audience to grieve over their downfall. One final similarity between ritual and tragedy that has been the focus of recent research is that both involve violence. The way in which this violence is deployed is crucial. In ritual practice violence figures as sacrifice, and most commentators agree that the violence of sacrifice is deployed for a beneficial purpose, specifically in order that the violence be transcended and the community that performed the violence be reintegrated and restored to health. The proper performance of a sacrifice, in Greek culture, can be seen to be part of the definition of a healthy community.19 It is this area of the deployment and transcendence of violence that has provoked some important recent criticism, and that I shall now explore. It has been suggested that tragedy, particularly that of Euripides, selfconsciously exploits ritual as part of its dramatic strategies so as to point up its own claims to the healing or remedial properties predicated of ritual by Greek culture. Foley (1985) examines at length the salvific effects of ritual as it is represented within Euripides' plays. Although she concentrates, as do most recent critics on ritual and tragedy (e.g. Zeitlin 1965, Segal 1982), on those rituals that inform the action of a whole play, such as in the Iphigeneia atAulis and the Bakchai, she also makes many points that are relevant to a consideration of Euripidean ending rites such as that in the Hippolytos. Her analysis emphasises the ways in which ritual within a play may link odes to action, sacred to secular, and mythic past to democratic present (19), as a closing rite may provide the link between the world of the play and the everyday immediate world of the audience. This last point is especially significant if the closing rite is itself a rite of transition, as in the Hippolytos. Foley also demonstrates that ritual action can be invoked to restore a play to its traditional mythical plot when the dissonances of its action threaten its progress towards the correct conclusion (20). Ritual action, such as the self-sacrifice of young people in the Iphigeneia at Aulis or the Phoinissai, can resolve the crisis that afflicts xhepolis or other community (21) and 18

19

Among actual practitioners of the dramatic art Aristophanes seems the most convinced of this; the tragedies do not seem to be so explicitly programmatic about their ambitions. The perceived obligation of tragedy to teach the city, to improve its citizenry, and finally to be its salvation, is amply demonstrated in the agon of the Frogs between Aischylos and Euripides. Plato lays similar stress on the teaching function of poetry only to show how poets have betrayed it. See Foley 1985: 30-56 for a lucid summary of the different strands of recent criticism.

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indeed Foley states that: 'All positive resolutions of Euripidean plays are achieved either through a deus ex machina or by a strategy based on ritual' (90). Ritual provides the only paradigm for positive action in a world otherwise characterised by the corruption and disintegration that is a feature of the Euripidean vision (45). Hence Euripides' tragedy, by its multiple uses of ritual, is able to claim for itself the remedial effects of ritual (60-1). Ritual practice can thus be seen to deploy violent actions for the ultimate benefit of the community; tragedy, by appropriating ritual forms, seems to claim for itself a similar status. The success or healing of ritual is frequently represented as dependent on the nature of the repetition that it undertakes: Ritual ... is a ceremonial order of acts which at first level imitates: that is, it reenacts an established pattern. But at its second level of definition, ritual demands that this conservative reenactment be really efficacious, effective in its repetitions as it was in its origins. Thus ritual is a present act which historically recalls the past for the purpose of reordering - even predetermining - the future. But that present moment of reenactment merges into the future, and so makes the efficacy of predictive action inevitable as its pattern evolves from contingency to control. In short,ritualis a prediction which, completed, fulfills itself. (Quoted in Hardin 1983: 852) Repetition is also central to the argument about Euripidean tragedy that I am analysing. Foley writes that 'in these closing references to cult Euripides seems to want to establish links for his art with ritual as an effective and precisely repeated performance enacted by the community rather than observed by it as audience to a tragic spectacle' (1985: 22, emphasis mine). If we follow this line of argument, the closing ritual of the Hippolytos can be seen to claim exactly such healing effects for the tragedy. The violence of the play is twice replayed and defused by the ritual, once in the cutting of the hair, which I have called a deflected and partial enactment of loss, and secondly in the song. The ritual offers to heal the violence of the play, because it is a recompense for Hippolytos. But as I have argued, it also offers itself as a figure for the play, and as such, it focuses attention on the play's own achievement in the transcendence of violence. Although comprised within the text and performance of the play, the ritual will be enacted in the future and outside the parameters of the play; this ambiguous position means that the play can invoke and appropriate the ritual as an image of its own achievement. This achievement can be discussed in other terms. The play deploys the ritual to make a fitting closure to Hippolytos' life; the ritual is the only form of lamentation for Hippolytos that the play proposes, for the play makes no gesture towards a burial ceremony or kommos such as might have been verbally suggested or actually performed on stage. Another possible compensatory ending for the play might have been the foundation of a temple to Hippolytos; but the opening of the play, when Phaidra founds such a temple (31), has usurped such an ending. The ritual can be seen to substitute not only for the kommos or temple, but also for the known alternative ending to Hippolytos' story, to which the play

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studiously avoids all reference. In this alternative ending Asklepios raised the dead hero to life.20 In the absence of physical immortality such as the alternative ending bestowed, the immortality conferred by heroic cult becomes doubly significant. The explicit claim of the ritual to bestow immortality can be seen as a figure for the play's implicit claim to do the same, and to draw attention to the status of the play as a song about Hippolytos, staged as a ritual in his honour. The play that promises Hippolytos immortality beyond the confines of the action, itself also fulfils this promise. Recent criticism of the Hippolytos has pursued a similar analysis of the ending. Pucci (1977) not only suggests that the play proceeds like a ritual sacrifice in that it deploys violence in order to be healed of it, but he also claims that Euripides expressly announces this project for his tragedies in lines from the Medea, in which the Nurse laments that men have songs to accompany pleasure but not to assuage pain (190-203): The men of old times had little sense; If you called them fools you wouldn't be far wrong. They invented songs, and all the sweetness of music, To perform at feasts, banquets, and celebrations; But no one thought of using Songs and stringed instruments To banish the bitterness and pain of life. Pucci argues, of Euripides' texts, that 'sacrifice is the violent ritual through which men achieve a remedy... Euripides' tragic representations are marked by analogous loss and violence while simultaneously retrieving analogous gain and remedy' (1977: 165-6). He further suggests that the poet inflicts pain and despair on his audience (but also on his characters, 171 and on himself, 177) in order to retrieve the remedy; 'Euripides presents tragedy as a song aiming at the paradoxical kerdos [gain] of tears as medicine for grief (179). Euripides' goal, according to Pucci, is 'to repress the negative terms, loss and pain, by means of a rhetorical experience of these terms and thereby reach the gain and the pleasure' (172). Pucci thus identifies the song with the play, and the voice of Artemis with that of the poet, so that Euripides contemplating the permanence of Artemis' rites is also Euripides contemplating his own immortal art (185). The poet, Pucci claims, 'achieves a presence' as donor of the play, the ultimate tribute and consolation to Hippolytos. Although it begins from loss and violence, the 'remedial discourse' undertaken by the ritual and hence analogously by the play ends with the mastery of the poet and his control over death. Ritual and play ensure the remarkable status of both hero and poet; by invoking ritual at its end, the play makes clear the claims of tragedy to healing and immortality and to the ultimate transcendence of violence. I shall cite Pucci's work again, as it seems to me to be the best account of the ending of the Hippolytos so far available. I shall also have to quarrel with his 20

See Barrett 1964: 6, 8.

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account, but for now his work can serve as a summary of the positive exploitation of ritual by tragedy. But the story does not stop here. There are many complications in the relations between tragedy and ritual that undermine a simple positive account. The violence of many tragedies is itself cast in ritual forms, or as a perversion of ritual, a fact that suggests that the relation between tragedy and ritual is not easy and that tragic violence need not have the same redeeming final effects as are attributed to violence within ritual. If ritual and tragedy are both other than 'real life' in the ways that I have outlined earlier in the chapter, they are still 'other' in different ways. The ending rite of the brides in the Hippolytos seems to draw attention to the differences between tragedy and ritual particularly by being both similar to and different from the tragedy, by offering both an image of the play and an alternative to it. The only image of violence contained that occurs in the play is precisely that offered to us by the rite; and although the rite is contained within the text and performance of the play and constitutes a reflection on it, it remains external to the play's action. This externality of the rite to the play means that the rite can comment on the very different violence within the play. The violence in the play, I argued in chapter 3, is not contained but is unstoppable, a self-perpetuating and increasingly destructive crescendo of speeches and acts. The ending rite, then, can be seen to call attention to itself as a form of salvation from the very different kind of action that the play displays. 'The honour is an ironic inversion' (Segal 1978: 138); the rite celebrates marriage and procreation rather than chastity, operates on the social plane rather than the personal, and corrects, too late and for the benefit of others, the imbalances that governed Hippolytos' existence. The closing rite of the Hippolytos is an alternative to as well as a figure for the play; the similarities between tragedy and ritual are challenged by the equally significant differences. The differences between play and rite may be examined in the area of repetition. Artemis' description of this particular rite emphasises repetition; Hippolytos will 'reap a rich reward in tears through the long cycles of time' (dVaionos makrou, 1426), the young girls will sing aei (perpetually, 1428). The commentators whom I have quoted are in agreement that repetition is central to the success and effectiveness of ritual in general. But 'repetition' is precisely what is problematic in this play, with its mimetic violence, mirror scenes and anxiety about sameness and difference. It is unnecessary to claim that a tragedy could not be as effectively and precisely repeated as a ritual performance. But it seems that no fifth-century Athenian tragedian could necessarily expect his drama to be frequently performed; the tragedies were essentially single events for a particular occasion.21 Indeed this very 'ephemeral' nature of the performance might afford an interesting perspective on the ritual 21

There were extra performances at the Rural Dionysia, probably in the fifth century and certainly later. Revivals of older plays (except for those of Aischylos) were not common until the fourth century, so that fifth-century tragedians could not necessarily have expected them. I do not want to stress the 'ephemeral' aspect of tragedy except insofar as it leads us to think about repetition within and at the end of the Hippolytos; the plays were evidently anything but ephemeral in their popularity and enduring importance to cultural and social life.

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repetition envisaged at the end of this and other plays. Such ritual repetition, although a recounting of the play's action, casts it in a very different form. It is thus 'repetition' that is under scrutiny in this ending, as the ritual offers itself as both figure for and alternative to the play. But the ritual is not the only repetition that is envisaged by the ending. The ending also offers, in implicit contrast to the ritual, uncontrolled repetition in the revenge taken by Artemis against Aphrodite's favourite. This revenge can be seen as opening up the possibility of a further series of plays like the Hippolytos, plays of divine revenge on mortals; and such a reading would expose the limitations to the play's implicit claim to ritual healing of its own violence. It could be argued that this divine revenge has a quality of ritualistic repetition about it, but it is a repetition that does not achieve the transcendence of ritual and that cannot be said to have any healing effects. It is important, however, that the two alternatives are present in the ending. These alternatives, I argued before, offer two views of the play, and can now be seen to suggest also the alternatives of the play's success or failure in transcending or mastering its own violence. The closing rite itself can be seen both as an exalted image of the play that exemplifies the play's claims to healing, and also as a contrasting form of action that undermines such claims. Exploration of the ways in which tragedy and ritual can be represented as similar or different suggests that to introduce the bridal rite as a form of closure for the Hippolytos is anything but a simple gesture. The ending is further complicated by the fact that the rite can be seen to be in a state of contradiction with itself, and to be an irony that contains its own opposite. The rituals that tragedy deploys as part of its action are frequently corrupt; sacrifice becomes murder or suicide, weddings become funerals. Foley points to the salvific effects of ritual action within tragedy, for instance in the Iphigeneia at Aulis and the Phoinissai. But the ritual actions of Iphigeneia and Menoikeus are not just sacrifices, but human self-sacrifices; the remedies for the crisis are as terrible as its ills.22 If the closing cult in the Hippolytos is an analogous 'remedy', a healing compensation, for Hippolytos' violent death, it is no less corruptedly involved with the ills that it is designed to correct. Foley underlines this point when she writes that 'the references to cult that close Euripides' tragedies offer the audience the opportunity to reenact and to reconsider perpetually both the remedies offered by myth and the disasters heroically faced by the tragic protagonists' (1985: 64, emphasis mine) and also when she writes, in reference specifically to the finales of the Hippolytos and the Herakles, that the cults offered to the central characters 'hardly succeed in assuaging the suffering of the heroes' (1985: 22). Both cult and tragedy offer the hero immortality; the text of the Hippolytos makes this point in the double reference to permanence in Artemis' description of the song and rite. But this immortality is 'that ambiguous and qualified form of eternity which is open to mortals; it is only through their suffering that dead heroes are kept alive in ... memory' (Segal 1978: 160). It is 22

See Goff 1988b.

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not hard to see the irony of a song of immortality that consists in the recounting of death. The irony is perhaps especially pointed in this case, as Hippolytos' death is represented as an end of music (i 135-6): The music which never slept on the strings of his lyre, shall be dumb, shall be dumb in his father's house. The brides' repeated striving to fill this gap with their own music of lamentation will only draw more painful attention to the absence. Both ritual cult and tragedy, then, offer a version of immortality that appears to attempt to compensate for violent death but that may remain, as Foley writes (1985: 64), essentially incommensurable with it. This structural irony is not the only one inherent in Artemis' description of the song. Artemis announces that 'your name will not be left unmentioned,/nor Phaidra's love for you remain unsung' (1429-30). The introduction here of Phaidra's posthumous fame must complicate the achieved heroic status of Hippolytos. Despite the plot's attempt at containment, the woman is not silenced by or in death; as she continued to speak after death in the letter so she will continue to be heard after death in the voices of the brides. Although, as I argued earlier, the play commemorates Hippolytos' name in many different ways, it claims here that the one who will not be nameless (anonumos, 1429) is Phaidra; the power of her name displaces the earlier destructive force of his. Hippolytos' story is to be recast in another form, and retold; and in the retelling its elements may be displaced and its emphases distorted. This play is itself a retelling of the first Hippolytos, and Seneca and Racine, among others, took the hint from the ending in renaming the narrative. Nor can critical reconstructions escape the imperative to retell and reinterpret. The text has already made this point in its deployment of the story of Semele, which is recounted in two different places in the play for two diametrically opposed ends; the story is not a constant given but can change with each narration. Even the music of the song, then, which previously seemed to be offered as a transcendent alternative to human speech, does not escape its limitations but is as vulnerable to various forms of distortion and failure as the play's other models of language. The structural irony of the ritual compensation for Hippolytos' death is not lost on Pucci in his analysis of the ending of the Hippolytos, although his terms are different from mine. The achievement of the 'remedial discourse', which in his argument is undertaken by the rite and song, is always threatened by their recounting of violence. The mastery over death and the presence of the poet, which he argues emerge with Artemis' bestowal of immortality, cannot last; they are already undermined by Artemis' previous compensation that is her revenge against Aphrodite. Both Artemis and Euripides, according to Pucci, know that the song is not enough to compensate for Hippolytos' death (1977: 185). Furthermore, Artemis' revenge and her description of the nomos of nonintervention expose, while attempting to exonerate, her complicity in the murder

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of Hippolytos, and in this gesture the poet's complicity is also exposed (186). The donor of the play is indebted to the play's victim, the gift of the play is a poison that kills Hippolytos (186); the play is revealed as a true pharmakon, a poisonous remedy. Pucci concludes his deconstruction of the ending at this point, and it is this arguably premature conclusion that I shall later dispute. In my discussion of violence and its putative transcendence by ritual and tragedy, of death and the promise of immortality, I have suggested that the introduction of the closing ritual simultaneously exalts and undermines the play's achievement. I would now like to address the relations between tragedy and ritual from another perspective. Foley writes, as I quoted earlier, 'in these closing references to cult Euripides seems to want to establish links for his art with ritual as an effective and precisely repeated performance enacted by the community rather than observedby it as audience to a tragic spectacle' (1985: 22, emphasis mine). This passage evidently registers the fact that although the performance of a tragedy takes place in a ritual context, to watch a tragedy and to take part in a ritual are two different practices. But the situation is more complicated, because to draw a very sharp distinction between spectator and participant does not seem to be a productive gesture for the understanding either of tragedy or of ritual. (I should point out that Foley later blurs this distinction, particularly with regard to the Bakchai) While people certainly do participate in ritual, its success depends on the participants also being spectators, who maintain a distance from the violent events and return eventually to their daily lives. Conversely, especially in the case of this tragedy, it would be perverse to maintain distance to the extent of ignoring the drama's insistence on the involvement of the audience and readers as those who 'witness', listen, read and interpret. The drama seems at the end to invoke its own ideal audience in the figures of the brides, for as we have seen, the brides are both comprised by and external to the action, registering it in their lives but at the same time commenting on it. They are implicitly contrasted with Aphrodite's hapless favourite, who is not permitted to maintain the correct distance from the play's events, but must be hideously caught up by the action. The notion of'distance' has been a feature of the analysis of drama since the Poetics of Aristotle. The Poetics posits an emotion or pleasure, appropriate to tragedy, which arises from a judicious balance of pity and fear (Poetics not every kind of pleasure should be demanded of tragedy, but only that which is proper to it; ... the dramatic poet has by means of his representation to produce the tragic pleasure that is associated with pity and fear ... The definitions of 'pity' and 'fear' that appear in the Rhetoric are articulated in terms of self and other. 'All things are to be feared which, when they happen, or are on the point of happening, to others excite compassion' (Rhetoric 2.5.12), 'all that men fear in regard to themselves excites their pity when others are the victims' (2.8.13, Loeb translation). The successful deployment of tragic emotion or pleasure, as represented in the Poetics, can thus be seen to be predicated on

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the difference between self and other, or on how much the spectators watching the sufferings of others feel themselves implicated in or threatened by them.23 The Poetics prescribes the maintenance of a proper distance and a correct balance between self and other, or between identification and separation. Where Aristotle argues that tragedy can achieve this proper distance and can thus be productive of a healthy community, Plato, in the Republic, argues that tragedy encourages a total, destructive identification between audience and characters. Tragedy in Plato is thus more dangerous than in Aristotle, unbalanced and transgressive, pernicious to the community. On the dangers of audience 'identification' the Republic states (6o6b-c): Our better nature, being without adequate intellectual or moral training, relaxes its control over these feelings [hunger for tears and indulgence in grief], on the grounds that it is someone else's sufferings it is watching and that there's nothing to be ashamed of in praising and pitying another man with some claim to goodness who shows excessive grief ... very few people are capable of realizing that what we feel for other people must infect what we feel for ourselves, and that if we let our pity for the misfortunes of others grow too strong it will be difficult to restrain our feelings in our own. In the Republic's account the audience is helplessly caught up in the tragic action, whereas in the Poetics a distance and balance are maintained. The Hippolytos can be seen to represent both possibilities, of the tragic distance both persisting and collapsing, in the separate fates of the brides and of Aphrodite's favourite.24 Again the important point is that we are confronted with alternatives that are both present in the ending. A further point is that they are in fact not represented as alternatives, for both Artemis' recompenses, the revenge and the rite, are envisaged as taking place simultaneously. The incongruity between them is a problem not for the play but for its audience and readers. In this chapter I have examined the equivocal epiphany of Artemis; the various and conflicting ways in which her two recompenses reflect on the play; the uneasy relations of the brides to their song; and the problematic relations of tragedy and ritual. It is clear that the ending of the Hippolytos leaves behind it a number of unresolved tensions. Artemis both closes the play and opens the space for its further commemoration; her presence withdraws as much as it bestows, and she brings both charis and bia, both pity and terror. The reconciliation between Theseus and Hippolytos, while it establishes a human claim to effective and healing language, can only be predicated on Artemis' devastation of 23 24

See Halliwell 1986, chapter 6, especially 176 and 178. T h e ending of this tragedy plays back an interesting grace-note on the theme of self and other, spectator and participant. Hippolytos says at 1409 axevoo a e uaAAov f\ 'jie xf]c; djiaQiLag (I grieve for you, though guilty, more than for myself); he has reached the paradigmatic 'tragic emotion', the transcendence of one's own grief in the contemplation of another's pain. By contrast, T h e s e u s is caught up in helpless identification, to the point where he says (1410) el y&Q Y8voi|iY]v . . . dviL oov vexgoc; (If only, my son, I could die in place of you). H e wishes for the other's pain, and crosses the boundary between self and other that is necessary for the therapeutic process, a Platonic rather than an Aristotelian spectator.

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Theseus, and is to some extent overshadowed by the general bleakness of the ending. While Artemis elucidates the past action for Theseus, her account of the recompenses still remains to be interpreted. The two recompenses, violence and music, are fundamentally at odds with one another, although each is also a figure for the play and a self-conscious commentary upon it. The brides have an ambiguous relationship to their song; they are distanced from it because it is a song, a reworking of violent events into an object of contemplation, and yet they are caught up in its narrative structure because of their own position in a rite of initiation into sexuality. They control the violent events of the narrative in the song, but the song is part of a social mechanism for controlling them. They are marginal figures in that polls which increasingly emerges towards the end of the play, yet they are entrusted with the commemoration of the story. They are women singing about a woman silenced, who is thereby given voice. The immortality offered to Hippolytos in the song is ironically qualified both by the remembrance of his suffering and death which the song must activate, and by the presence of Phaidra within the song. The rite of dedication and the song, by repeating the play's content in radically altered form, force on us a double vision of the play and require that we reflect on the similarities and differences between the two methods of ordering experience. The ritual, insofar as it is the same as the play, is a figure for the tragedy's successful transcendence of violence, but insofar as it is different, it offers an alternative to the play. The two recompenses, with their contrasting figures of favourite and brides, also offer alternative representations of what happens to the audience of the Hippolytos. The radical instabilities of this ending are difficult both to analyse and to articulate. One way to account for them would be to say that the various attempts at normalising undertaken by the ending are also the objects of a subversive counter-movement. This, it seems to me, is a representation of Pucci's argument; his analysis presents the deconstructionist case, with which my own argument has some obvious affinities, but does not thereby I think succeed in rendering the anomalies of the ending. Pucci's argument seems to me to be vitiated by the assumption of an explicit and ambitious authorial intention, an intention, moreover, that can actually be read in the text. Pucci exploits the Nurse's speech in the Medea (190-203), which I have quoted above, to support his thesis about Euripides' aim of a 'remedial discourse'. Identification of Euripides with the Nurse is surely problematic, and in any case the Chorus sings, not long after this speech, of women attaining a public voice (410-30, quoted in chapter 4). This claim could equally well stand as a valid authorial intention, especially since it is more controversial (not that the two 'intentions' are mutually exclusive). It seems more likely to me that neither of these passages announces an intention, but that both complicate the status and achievement of the play. While in the opening pages of his article Pucci lays much emphasis on the 'upsetting dynamics' (1977: 174) of the remedial discourse and hence of tragedy, in his analysis of the ending of the Hippolytos he represents the 'dynamic' of the play as an undermining movement that overturns the positive, normalising gestures of

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the play. He is led to assert that in the Hippolytos Euripides identifies with Artemis when she offers the consolation of immortality to Hippolytos (1977: 185) but not when she contemplates his revenge (1977: 185-6); the dramatist is apparently unaware of half of what he writes. It is perhaps more productive to dispense with the dramatist as source of meaning, or of incoherence, and instead to read the ending as representing two contradictory but equally valid views of what this tragedy is and does. The ending of this tragedy, which precisely does not put an end to the complexities of desire, violence and language that have been explored in the play, will equally well not let us find a point of rest from which we can simplify it.25 So what I want to stress, as I close my account of the ending of the Hippolytos, is that the ending holds the positive and negative ideas of the play in a tension that is not a balance, but that is rather a persistent oscillation. If the ending is in contradiction with itself, it is still inadequate to privilege one moment of the contradiction over the other. The tension is not resolved, but rather ignored, by foregrounding only its negative moment; the normalising gestures are undermined, but that undermining is constantly recuperated. The music is as valid and persuasive a representation of what this tragedy is as the violence. The persistent oscillation between the two is what makes this ending significant. To end my analysis, I shall examine how the second recompense, the song, rehearses this oscillation by itself being in a state of tension and self-contradiction. The cult song will be sung, repeatedly, by different groups of brides (1426, 1428). Each retelling, in the terms that I have been employing, will constitute an imposition of control and containment upon desire, violence and language; but each will also be a violation of the silence that should surround the scandalous events of the narration, and each will be forced to recount the very uncontrollability and destructiveness of desire, violence and language that have structured the play. Yet at the same time each retelling, as it replays the drama, will lead to the further containment that is its own origin. The work of commemoration will be a ceaseless play between loss and recovery of order, 'a meaning advanced and at the same time a meaning withdrawn' (Barthes 1963: ix). The ending is thus hardly an ending at all, but rather a series of beginnings, and the play itself threatens to lose its autonomous identity and to disappear into the brides' retellings. One of the beginnings posited by the ending is a beginning to critical practice. The audience and readers are constantly implicated in the play by its insistence on the complexities and insecurities of witnessing, listening, reading and interpreting. This insistence focuses at several points in the play, notably in the delirium scene, Phaidra's pronouncements on aidos, the letter, and Theseus' description of the second truthful voice; and here again the song, as self25

I have devoted space in this chapter to a consideration of Pucci's argument about the ending of the Hippolytos both because it is a recent and important piece and because its terms and tactics, while being in my view ultimately unsatisfactory, are so close to mine. Walsh 1984: 125-6 holds an unqualifiedly positive view of the possibilities of both ritual and song.

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conscious reflection on the play as a whole, requires a reconsideration of our critical response. As audience and readers, we are in a position analogous to that of the brides, which we discovered was not an easy one. 26 Both within and without the play, we can distance ourselves from it or accept that we are always implicated in its discussions of the vulnerability of human language. The brides sing for themselves, in the absence of any interlocutor; this specific absence throws into relief the complex, oblique encounters that constitute the body of the play. The space for the brides' interlocutor is perhaps an invitation to the audience; it is we who must interrogate the brides as to the meaning of their rite and song, and who must answer in terms of our relations to desire, violence and language. What must our response be to a work that seems to concern itself precisely with the problems of its language, and to question radically its own origins, project and success? The paradox of the relations between the two recompenses, and of the relation of the song to itself, also structures the play as a whole. Although the inadequacy and failure of language is foregrounded throughout, the play simultaneously offers a vision, especially in the brides' song and the ode on tears and amber, of a language that can transform and transcend what otherwise is the recalcitrance of desire, of violence and of language itself. The play seems to posit its own achieved mastery of a language that it represents as intractable; and critical response must perhaps describe the same trajectory. Critical assumption of mastery can be seen to be always already undermined by the demonstration of the play, and to be the object of a ceaseless attempt at recovery and recuperation, just as the brides' song repeatedly brings under control a narrative that threatens to escape and to overturn those institutions of marriage and song that the brides celebrate. Like the brides, the audience and readers must repeat and rework; the instability of the ending removes the possibility of easy answers and allows us no rest in our involvement. We experience directly what the Hippolytos speaks obliquely as we discover that our critical discourse cannot retell the play completely, cannot recuperate it fully, and so continually strives to do so. We experience the Hippolytos because we have a place within it, at the position of the brides, where we are both part of and distinct from the narrative of desire, violence and language, where we are both able and unable to close down the play, JIOI JiQo|3f|aeToa Xoyog; (342) - where will the story end? Both the speech and the silence that follow the last words of the play are to some extent our own. 26

Helen in Iliad 3.125-8 can be compared to the brides; she too is both inside and outside her tapestry. The tapestry is itself an image of the poetic work of the Iliad; see Bergren 1985: 79.

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INDEX

absence and desire, 34, 35, 36 and differance, 102-3 and persuasion, 48 structuring play's encounters, 61 Achilles, 21 note adolescence, 4 and note, see also ephebeia adulteress, 8, 22, 23, 36, 46 aetiology, no—11 and note, 117 agon, 11, 32, 38, 41-4, 50, 54, 65, 69 Hippolytos in, 17, 25 Phaidra as absence in, 35 Theseus and writing in, 99-100 see also Hippolytos, Theseus aidos, 8, 25, 35, 73, 96-7 Aischylos Agamemnon, 3, 64, 108 in Frogs, 30 Oresteia, 55, 56 Suppliant Women, 29, 38 Anakreon, 63 Aphrodite, n , 14, 20, 28, 29, 63, 67, 82 and Artemis, 71 described by Nurse, 37, 98 and favourite, 71, 125-6 and prologue, 31 and semnos, 85 Apollonios of Rhodes, 59 Aristophanes, 23, 30 Clouds, 79 Frogs, 30, 36, 80, 94, 119 Thesmophoriazousai, 30, 36, 94 Aristotle Oikonomika, 5 Poetics, 66, 98, 125-6 Politics, 2 Rhetoric, 125 Artemis, 12, 18, 26 and Aphrodite, 71 as deus ex machina, 106-13 ending play, 73, 83

and Hippolytos, 20, 41, 58-62, 61, 82, 87, 89-90, i n and marriage, 62 and revenge, 76, i n , 112 see also gods Asklepios, 121 Athens celebrated, 118 rhetoric at, 78-80 violence in, 56-7 Barrett, 72, 91, 96, 97, 100 Barthes, 27, 34, 38, 53-4, 89, 128 Bellerophon, 94, 95 Berger, 21 Berns, 90 bia, 53, 48, 108, 110, i n Boccaccio, 37 brides, 63, 68, 76-7, 94, 107 song, 32, 36, i n , 112, 113-17, 128-9 bull, 18, 73, 74 Buxton, 48 character, 66-7 and note chartsy 108, n o , i n charm, 9, 49-50 Chorus at door, 10 escape-ode, 63-4, 90-1 Euripidean, 13 parodos, 5 coinage women as, 45 Collard, 106 concealment and revelation, 12-20 Culler, 46 note delirium, 7, 14, 31, 32-5, 61 democracy, 56, 78 Derrida, 100-3 deus ex machina, 106-13

137

138

Index

desire, chapter 2 passim, 115 and death, 60—5 and language, 30—9 and violence, 57-60 diaphtherein, 49 dijferance, 100—2 difference dissolution of, 67—71 Hippolytos unable to accept, 46, 47, 61 in language, 46, 53, 73, 97, 102 women as, 46-7 Dionysos festival of, 116, 118 disease, see nosos Dodds, 33 double of Hippolytos, 25 in play, 73 Empedokles, 57 ephebeia, 115, see also adolescence Ephialtes, 56 eros, 28-9 in Euripidean plays, 29-30 eukleia, 2, 8, 15, 20, 23, 24, 26, 34, 51 Euripides Alkestis, 3, 7, 37, 69 Andromache, 5, 39, 106 Bakchai, 3, 4, 43, 49, 84, 107, 108, 119, 125 chorus, 13 deus ex machina, 106-13 Elektra, 3, 45, 66, 72, 92, 106, 115 eros in plays, 29-30 in Frogs, 80 and Girard, 66 Hekabe, 66, n o Helen, 14, 106, 107 Herakleidai, 4, 39, n o Herakles Mainomenos, 44, 84, 92-3, 123 I°n> !•> 59> 84, 107 and note Iphigeneia at Aulis, 62, 95, 119, 123 Iphigeneia in Tauris, 95, 107, n o , i n , 113 Medea, 6, 22, 30, 44, 45, 66, 72, 93, n o , i n , 113, 127 Orestes, 106, 115 Phoinissai, 3, 80, 119, 123 Rhesus, 107 Suppliant Women, 107, no Trojan Women, 4, 30, 53, 62 and war, 55, 56, 57 Fitzgerald, 109 Foley, 55, 56, 93, 106, 108, 117, 119-20, 123 Foucault, 27 Freud, 27, 57, 76 note garland, 61-2 gaze, 2, 19, 20-6 Girard, 27, 55, 57, 66, 68, 69, 70, 73, 76, 112

Glenn, 31, 33 gods human imitation of, 82-3 and language, 81, 83, 87, 89 and morality, 83-4 relations between, 71 and note terminal, 106—7 see also Aphrodite, Artemis, Poseidon Gorgias, 78 Encomium of Helen, 30, 48, 49, 53 Graces, 64 grammata, 44, 96-7, 99, 100, see also writing graphe, 37, 97-8, 99, see also writing Grube, 106 hanging, 38, 62, 65 Herakleitos, 57 Herodotos, 13, 39, 78, 89 Hesiod, 11, 19, 28, 45, 47, 57 Hippocratic writings, 6 note, 79 Hippolytos in agon, 17, 25, 39 death, 60, 65 exile, 64, 69 feminised, 47-8, 65-6, 114 and house, 3-4 name, 51, 124 object of desire, 20 in prologue, 31 relationship with Artemis, 61, 87, 20, 82, i n , 89-90 song to Artemis, 41, 58-62 tongue unsworn, 25, 67, 88 wishes to abolish women, 45 see also agon, tirade, Messenger's speech, oath Hippolytos Kaluptomenos, 18, 71, 93 Homer, 93 Iliad, 28, 36, 95 Odyssey, 9, 28 Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, 28, 36 Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 59, 60 homilia, 87, 89-90, 102-3, n o house, 2-12, see also oikos house walls, 8, 12, 22-3, 26 Humphreys, 13 inscription, 37-9, 60, 81 Iole, 63 Johnson, 101-2 Jones, 106 kairos, 96 and note kibdelos, 45 King, 38 Kitto, 107, 108 knot, 62-4, 83 Knox, 31, 66, 109

Index kommos, 120 Lacan, 27, 35 note, 58 Lacey, 13 language at Athens, 78-9 and desire, 30-9 and difference/absence, 46, 53 of gods, 81 Nurse's model of, 51 Phaidra and Hippolytos on, 68 see also oath, persuasion, rhetoric, second truthful voice, writing learning, 41, 60, 86—7 Lemaire, 27, 58 note letter, 11, 17, 24, 32, 35, 37-8, 61, 67, 89, 98, 100, 101 Levi-Strauss, 117 light and dark, 19 logos, 15, 16, 17, 36, 54, 79, 129 Loraux, 15 note, 38, 99 note Lysias, 49 McEwan, Ian, 22-3 note manteia, 87-8 marriage, 46, 60, 62, 63, 114-15 and death, 60-5 see also Artemis, brides meadow, 41, 58-62 mechane, 65-6 Meridier, 59, 108 Messenger's speech, 18, 26, 54, 61, 74, 99 miasma, 34, 69 mimesis, 70, 81, 103-4 mirror, 16, 23, 25, 72 Muses, 97, 98 muthoi, 19 myth, 90-5, 98 New Comedy, 20 nomos of non-intervention, 76, 112 nosos, 1, 5, 12, 16, 24, 40, 50, 68 Nurse and graphai, 97—8 language, 51 and mechane, 65—6 persuasion of Phaidra, 36, 49-51, 52-3 scene with Phaidra, 14-15, 21, 34 see also pharmakon oath, 17, 18, 24, 26, 32, 39, 59, 88 oikos, 2, 3, 4, 5, 13, 115, 117, see also house oracles, 88-9 parrhesia, 7, 23, 117 parthenos, 23, 63, 65 paternal house, 64-5 paternal voice, 24, 75 peitho, 48, 50, 53, see also persuasion

139

performative utterance, 75, n o persuasion, 9, 36, 48, 49-51, 53, 68, see also pharmakon Phaethon, 63-4, 91, 93, 113 Phaidra Artemis' judgement, 23-4, 26, 87, 108 death, 24, 38, 67, 83 and house, 4, 5, 7 mother and sister, 36 in prologue, 31 speech to Chorus, 16, 34, 39, 49 the subject of song, 94, 124 see also aidos, delirium, letter, mirror phaino, 13-14, 15, 16, 17, 18 pharmakon, 10, 16, 48-53, 96-7, 112, 125 philia, 10, 35, 47, 53, 62 philon diaphthoreus, 47, 62 philon tekmerion, 17, 21, 25, see also second truthful voice Plato Gorgias, 79 Phaedros, 4, 29, 49, 96 Protagoras, 87, 118-19 Republic, 43, 100, 126 Symposium, 29 poetry as education, n 8-19 polis, 3, 12, 115—16, see also public and private Poseidon, 64, 74, 83, 86-7 Potiphar's wife, 94 Prodikos, 78 prophecy, n o , see also oracles public and private, 13 Pucci, 19 note, 112, 121, 124-5, 127-8 Racine, 74 note, 124 reconciliation, 26, 109—10 rhetoric in agon, 39 and note at Athens, 78-80 Hippolytos' denial of, 42-3 peitho, 53 ritual, 2-3, 20, 94-5, i i o - n , 116 note, 117-26 and repetition, 112-13 and tragedy, 117-26 and violence, 119-25 Rousseau, 33 sacrifice, 76, 119 saphes, 25 Sappho, 28 Sechan, 59 second truthful voice, see Theseus Segal, 28, 31, 39, 117, 123 Semele, 63, 91-2, 93, 95, 124 semnos, 85-6 Semonides, n , 19, 47 Seneca, 124

140

Index

Servant, 85 sophia, 11, 24, 40, 42 sophists, 14, 53, 78, 86 Sophokles Ajax, 39 Antigone, 3, 29 Oidipous at Kolonos, 56 Oidipous Tyrannos, 38 Phaidra, 93 Philoktetes, 56 Trachiniai, 9—10, 29, 38, 95—6 sophrosune, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 19, 32, 35, 36, 39-48, 50, 59, 60, 61, 68, 87 speech and desire, 30—5 and silence, chapter 1 passim, 105, m - 1 2 , 117, 129 and violence, 68, 69 Spira, 108 Stheneboia, 94, 95 stichomythia, 16, 34 substitution, 48, 70 Tale of Two Brothers, 94

Taplin, 3 Theokritos, 52 theoros, 24, 116

Theseus in agon, 18, 21, 23, 39 and Amazons, 56 and Artemis, 18 as audience, 116 curse, 74-5, 85 garland, 62, 88 gaze, 21, 24 and house, 3 and letter, n - 1 2 , 17 in Nurse's persuasion, 37 and polis, 116

second truthful voice, 17, 21, 23, 44, 45, 46, 73, 82, 88, 100, 102 sentence of exile, 74-5, 83 see also agon, philon tekmerion

Thucydides, 15, 22, 53, 56, 57, 79, 80 time, 8, 22, 34 tirade, 1, 10, 16-17, 24, 32, 40, 45-6, 54 veil, 5, 7, 14, 18 Vernant, 56, 58, 69, 89 Vidal-Naquet, 4 note, 56, 89, 115 violence, chapter 3 passim and Athens, 56-7 and desire, 53, 57-8 and Greek tragedy, 57 and ritual, 119-25 and speech, 53-4, 69-70 war, 56 Wilamowitz, 59 witnesses, 2, 19, 20 note, 22, 24, 25, 26, 43 women as coinage, 45 creation of, 19 and note, 45 as difference, 46-7 Hippolytos wishes to abolish, 45 and house, 4-5 and language, 47, 117 and loosening, 7 and possession, 5 and note, 6 see also sophrosune

writing, 95-102 Xenophon, 4, 5 yoke, 63-4 Zeitlin, 3, 7, 32, 88 Zeus, 28, 63