Who is the hero in hippolytus

Abridged edition Presiding over both these activities, as we will see, is the goddess Artemis. Her role, as we will also see, is essential. Here, then, is the relevant passage, where we join an ongoing dialogue between Phaedra and her Nurse:.

This myth, at its core, recapitulates virtually everything that is essential to know about the ancient Greek hero. We have by now seen a vast array of variations, but it all comes down to this: heroes keep trying to prove to themselves that they belong somehow to a world of immortals, but, after all is said and done, heroes only end up proving that they deserve to die for trying.

Hour As we will see in the course of this hour, the many different ways of translating the word telos have one thing in common: each translation conveys, in its own way, the idea of a transition from one phase of human experience into another. And, toward the end of this hour, we will see that the world of ancient Greek myth and ritual tends to differentiate, like it or not, the experiences of men and women from each other.

In the Hippolytus of Euripides, we find two occurrences of this word telos. As we will see, the contexts of both these occurrences are relevant to the myths and the rituals concerning Hippolytus. I start with the second of the two contexts, at line 87 of the drama. The word telos in this context — and I am about to quote the text — can be understood in two different ways.

In terms of what is really meant by the myths and the rituals concerning Hippolytus, however, such a translation is overly restrictive. So, now, I proceed to a close reading of the text where we find this occurrence of the word telos in the Hippolytus. As we join the action, near the beginning of the drama, we find the young hero Hippolytus in the act of praying to the goddess Artemis while offering her the gift of a garland of flowers that he consecrates for her blond hair:.

Euripides Hippolytus [ 1 ]. After Hippolytus rounds the turning post for the last time in the course of his life, the finish line will be waiting for him. But this metaphor can lead to other meanings of the word telos. After all, the rounding of a turning post in a chariot race takes the charioteer back to the starting point, where the rounding continues back to the turning post and then back to the starting point and then back to the turning post, over and over again — until the charioteer rounds the turning post for the last time.

Then, after the last rounding of the turning post, he will be heading down the home stretch, eagerly rushing toward the finish line. But the finish line becomes a finish line only after the last turn around the turning post.

For Hippolytus, the end of life is the finish line of a chariot race. That is all there is to it. He does not see, in terms of his own metaphor, that the finish line can also be a coming full circle. After all, as I have just pointed out, the finish line is truly the finish line only when the turning post has been rounded for the very last time. Otherwise, the finish line can still become a re-starting, that is, the starting point of a new round.

So, we find here an unintended meaning in the words spoken just now by Hippolytus. Still, the intent of the young athlete is clear: he wants to go through life, from beginning to end, as a devotee of the virgin goddess Artemis.

And, by implication, he desires to reach the end of his life the same way as he had begun it, as a virgin. The thinking of Hippolytus is linear here: for him, telos is the end of a line.

But there is also the idea of telos as a coming full circle, and this alternative idea cannot be evaded in the Hippolytus of Euripides. Such an idea, which is most compatible with the metaphorical world of ritual, leads to a further idea — initiation. A telling sign of this further idea can be found in the context of the second of the two attestations of the word telos in the Hippolytus of Euripides. In this other context, the idea of initiation is overtly expressed.

It happens in a story told by Aphrodite, goddess of sexuality and love, at the very beginning of the drama. As we are about to see, there is a moment in the story when the beautiful young queen Phaedra, married to an older man, the king-hero Theseus, first lays eyes on the beautiful young bastard son of the king, Hippolytus.

At that moment, as we see from the narration of Aphrodite, this goddess of erotic desire arranges for Phaedra to fall instantly in love with Hippolytus. So, we are about to see an overt reference to initiation, as expressed by the word telos :. Euripides Hippolytus [ 3 ]. As we have just seen, the onset of the passionate love experienced by Phaedra when she first catches sight of Hippolytus happens in the territory of Athens, where the young hero is visiting in his quest to be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.

As we will now see, this mention of Athens indicates that the story of Hippolytus as it plays out in the tragedy of Euripides stems from a complex of myths and rituals that are grounded in two locales, one of which is Troizen but the other one of which is Athens.

And, as we will also see, these myths and rituals concern Hippolytus as a cult hero who was worshipped both in Troizen and in Athens. I will concentrate first on Athens. I start by observing that Athens is the dramatic setting of another tragedy of Euripides about Hippolytus, which has not survived except for a few fragments. From the external evidence of this Hypothesis , we learn that the surviving Hippolytus of Euripides was produced in BCE, winning first prize in the competitions at the dramatic festival of the City Dionysia in Athens.

And we learn also from the same Hypothesis that the lost Hippolytus was an earlier production. That said, I come back to the reference in Text B, lines of the surviving Hippolytus — back to the moment when Phaedra falls passionately in love with the virgin hero during his pilgrimage in Athens. I will now consider these lines in combination with lines , which immediately follow and which I now quote here:.

In compensation for [ epi ] Hippolytus 33 — she gave that name, which will last for all time to come — that is why, she said, the goddess has been installed there. Euripides Hippolytus [ 5 ]. Only the detail about the departure of Phaedra from Athens belongs to the present tragedy, which relocates her death from Athens to Troizen. I will now start to examine more closely the details we find in Text C about the story of Hippolytus in Athens — and about the myths and rituals that are linked to it.

Both of these inscriptions are referring to Aphrodite as she was actually worshipped in her shrine located on the south slope of the Acropolis. Further, as we see from the contexts of these and other inscriptions, there was a hero cult of Hippolytus within the precinct or sacred space that contained the shrine of Aphrodite, and the name of this precinct, as we see in the second of the two inscriptions I just cited, was the Hippoluteion.

In the course of his tour of important sights to be seen in Athens, Pausanias 1. The fact is, even the syntax of this expression shows that Hippolytus was a cult hero in Athens. In the same context where Pausanias 1. Pausanias goes out of his way to emphasize that this relatively small city, located at the northeast corner of the Peloponnese and about thirty miles across the sea from Peiraieus, the main harbor of Athens, is known for a different set of myths and rituals concerning Hippolytus.

According to the traditions that are local to Troizen, the first time that Phaedra laid eyes on Hippolytus was in Troizen, not in Athens. In the same context, Pausanias 1. Only at a later point in the reportage of Pausanias, however, do we see the fuller significance of this aetiology explaining why the holes in the leaves of the myrtle bush are really pinpricks originating from the heroic age, and now, in my own eagerness, I will immediately shift ahead to that later point.

The context is most suggestive. Pausanias 2. So, this myrtle bush is a most visible marker of local Troizenian traditions about both Hippolytus and Phaedra. They say that Diomedes made these things and, on top of that, that he was the first person to make sacrifice [ thuein ] to Hippolytus.

Retrospectively, what is being compensated here is the death of the hero, caused by his antagonism with Aphrodite. So, in both the Athenian and the Troizenian evidence, we see a pattern of coexistence or symbiosis between Aphrodite and Hippolytus inside a ritual space that corresponds to the myth about their mutual antagonism.

The striking parallelism we have just seen between the Troizenian and the Athenian versions of the Hippolytus tradition does not mean that the Athenian version, which is less rich in detail, was merely a borrowing from the Troizenian version.

Granted, we can find examples where the Athenian version of the Hippolytus tradition involves borrowings from the Troizenian version, but I argue that such examples are secondary. In other words, the parallelisms we see in the Troizenian and Athenian traditions concerning Hippolytus are for the most part cognate features that survive independently of each other.

Even if the surviving features of Hippolytus in Athens may at first seem less compelling than what we see in Troizen, they are still important pieces of evidence for reconstructing the myths and rituals concerning this hero. Pursuing this argument, I now take a second look at the relationship between the shrine of Aphrodite and the precinct of Hippolytus in Athens.

This line of argumentation cannot be blunted even if we concede that the overall myth of Hippolytus was to some degree appropriated by the state of Athens, which had reshaped the figure of Theseus, father of Hippolytus, as an idealized hero-king of Athens. Such an idealization is clearly at work in the Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles, for example. We may also concede that such a prominent status for Theseus in Athens cannot be reconstructed much further back in time than the sixth century BCE.

But I maintain that the rootedness of Theseus in the local mythmaking traditions of Troizen cannot justify the inference that this hero was simply appropriated from there into Athenian mythmaking. That said, I return to the testimony of Pausanias concerning the hero cult of Hippolytus in Troizen.

In Text E, which I have already quoted, Pausanias accentuates two conventional patterns of thinking about this cult hero: — First, Pausanias notes the mysticism surrounding the actual location of the tomb where Hippolytus is buried in Troizen.

As we saw in Text E, Pausanias 2. It can be said in general that cult heroes attract a variety of ritualized gestures indicating that a reverential silence is required of those who are initiated into the mysteries of worshipping them. I have already quoted the relevant wording in text E, Pausanias 2. The sanctioned wish-fulfillment, as we will now see, is the immortalization of Hippolytus as a cult hero.

Such a catasterism of Hippolytus is evident in the wording I already quoted from Pausanias 2. A comparable example is the hero Orion, a prototypical hunter, whose constellation in the heavens is mentioned in Odyssey v , a mystical passage referring to the antagonism between Orion and Artemis, the goddess who presides over the ritualized activity of hunting. It seemed to me at the time that it might have to do with wolves that had been devastating the territory of the Troizenians and that had been killed by Hippolytus.

Or again there might be some other explanation that I do not know. Another way to formulate the mystical immortalization of Hippolytus as a local cult hero was to picture a resurrection of his body through the agency of the hero Asklepios, son of Apollo.

There used to be many more of these in ancient times, but in my time there were only six surviving. On these slabs are inscriptions recording the names of men and women who were healed by Asklepios, including details about the kinds of illness experienced by each one of them — and about how each one of them was healed.

And they are all written in the Dorian dialect. From another retelling of the myth, however, we learn that the resurrection of Hippolytus, engineered by the skills of Asklepios, was not only the result of his death: it was also the cause of another death.

And the one whose death was caused by the resurrection of Hippolytus was Asklepios himself. This version of the myth seems to be quite ancient, datable at least as far back as the sixth century BCE. In the wording of Pausanias 2. The earliest attested phases of the cult of Asklepios, localized in Epidaurus, can be dated as far back as the sixth century BCE, and the cult then spread to places like Troizen and Athens in the fifth century.

Similarly, by the time we reach this era, the cult of this Asklepios had become so widespread — and commensurately elevated — that people could think of him as a god who had always been a god. And that is precisely how Pausanias thought of Asklepios 2. Although the myths and rituals that we have just examined concerning the special relationship of Hippolytus to Asklepios are localized not in Troizen but in nearby Epidaurus, there is reason to think that these myths and rituals apply to Troizen as well, since the cult of Asklepios is strongly attested in Troizen as well as in Epidaurus.

In fact, archaeologists have found that the precinct of Asklepios was actually embedded within the precinct of Hippolytus in Troizen. I return here to the description of a ritual that we have already read in Pausanias 2. Here I quote again the relevant wording:. Toward the end of the Hippolytus of Euripides, we find a passage that makes an explicit reference to the same ritual — as it already existed well over half a millennium earlier. As we are about to see, the speaker in this passage is the goddess Artemis, and she is addressing Hippolytus, who is going through his final agonizing moments of dying as a result of the horrific injuries he suffered when his chariot crashed — a fatal crash caused by the curses unjustly hurled at him by his father Theseus.

And the wording of the prediction makes it clear that the ritual acts of cutting the hair and then presenting the severed locks of that hair to the hero in his shrine are part of an overall ritual activity of choral performance. Here, then, are the relevant words spoken by the goddess:. No, it will never be passed over in silence. With these words, the entire myth concerning Hippolytus and Phaedra as dramatized in the Hippolytus of Euripides is transformed into an aetiology of the seasonally recurring ritual event that is being described.

The story begins in the middle of a war between the Achaians and the Trojans. One of the first conflicts is whether or not Achilles will give Agamemnon his prize, Briseis, in exchange for Agamemnon returning Chrysies to her father.

These men barter the women as objects not considering them as people. There was a point when Achilles felt a love for Briseis, but now he only acts thinking of himself. Not only ambition influenced him to become an evil person, the characters around him contributed to his malevolent actions. She is demanding, manipulative, and persuasive human beings towards Macbeth. Everything that she says to him brings his ego down to the bottom of the ocean trenches and has a dominance between their relationship.

Although Plutarch is often uncritically enthusiastic about Spartan institutions, his work is valuable because it is frequently based on earlier sources that are now lost. Lycurgus is credited with having obtained the original Spartan constitutions from the oracle of Apollo at Delphi in the form of the Great Rhetra. All institutions and its mechanisms are ascribed to Lycurgus, including the Spartan agoge, syssitia, dietary laws and burial customs.

However, while Plutarch 's Spartan Lives provide much useful material on Spartan society, these literary works must be used with great care. Plutarch lived a thousand years after the earliest events he described. The many writings they have are well known and some are even taught for learning purposes. Sophocles is not only the most successful writer for Greek tragedies but Antigone is one his most known tragedies that he wrote. Aristotle was ancient philosopher that was known many things such as tutoring Alexander the great and for writing over many subjects.

His writing called Poetics also help to further increase Sophocles tragedy Antigone be considered a true tragedy. Essays Essays FlashCards. Browse Essays. Sign in. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Show More. Read More. Words: - Pages: 5. Women In The Odyssey Essay She was an example of a stereotypical woman whose husband had gone to fight in the Trojan war. Words: - Pages: 2. Words: - Pages: 4. Words: - Pages: 8.

Lady Macbeth: A Tragic Hero Not only ambition influenced him to become an evil person, the characters around him contributed to his malevolent actions. Tyrtaeus: Spartan Poetry Although Plutarch is often uncritically enthusiastic about Spartan institutions, his work is valuable because it is frequently based on earlier sources that are now lost.