When was hippolytus written

Zeus kills him with his thunderbolt. How old is Hippolytus? Hippolytus is a tragedy written by Euripides c. As with many tragedies of the era, the central focus of Hippolytus is humanity's relationship with the gods.

What is the fate of Hippolytus? Hippolytus' superhuman resistance to the force of desire, just like Prometheus' transgression, causes the gods to take notice. Desire itself is the law or fate of human life, and the audience watches it destroy Phaidra from within before seeing Hippolytus killed for his arrogant rejection of it. How did Medea's children die? According to Euripides' version, Medea took her revenge by sending Glauce a dress and golden coronet, covered in poison.

This resulted in the deaths of both the princess and the king, Creon, when he went to save his daughter. Medea then continued her revenge, murdering two of her children herself.

What does Hippolytus name mean? The name Hippolytus is a Greek Baby Names baby name. In Greek legend, the son of Theseus and Hippolyta, who was dragged to his death by stampeding horses.

How did Phaedra die? Theseus cursed his son; so, a bit later, Hippolytus' chariot horses were scared by a sea monster and dragged him to death. In another version, Phaedra lied to Theseus, who killed Hippolytus; out of guilt, Phaedra committed suicide. He first presented a trilogy of tragedies at the Dionysia in BCE—the year after Aeschylus' death who therefore never saw a play by Euripides produced there—but Euripides had to wait well over a decade, until BCE, to secure a first prize.

Of the eighty or so plays he wrote, nineteen survive, more than twice the number of either Sophocles or Aeschylus. Some information about Euripides' life has come down to us, mostly from contemporary and later comic playwrights who were fascinated with the great master of drama.

For instance, the ancient comic poet Aristophanes makes fun of the fact that Euripides' mother was a green-grocer—a confusing joke unintelligible today—and from other comic poets we learn his home life was as tempestuous as the family lives of the characters in his tragedies. It's also said that he composed his tragedies in a cave on the island Salamis just off Athens.

What exactly can be trusted in this information is unclear, except that behind it lies a picture of an unconvivial loner largely uninvolved in civic life—very different from the politician-playwright Sophocles—probably not a person easy to get along with, either, uninterested in currying popular favor with his dramas or otherwise, and a fiercely independent thinker.

His solitary habits, no doubt, encouraged the exploration of both sides of issues, a characteristic which pervades his work. No matter the circumstances, Euripides seems able to argue for or against any cause like some lawyer-for-hire, only he appears to do it not for the money nor to defend the innocent nor even to pursue some higher justice but mainly to provoke his audience into thinking about something in a new light.

Judging from the reaction of his contemporaries, one must conclude that his audiences didn't fully appreciate this extraordinary talent for presenting both sides of issues with equal force. Thus, they rewarded him rather rarely with a first prize, which didn't stop either him or them from producing his plays again and again at the Dionysia. Today Euripides is often listed third among Greek tragedians after Aeschylus and Sophocles, but it's misleading to do so either in terms of chronology or the quality of his writing.

Though younger than Aeschylus, he and Sophocles were all but exact contemporaries—Sophocles, in fact, died a few months after Euripides—thus, they must have contended against one another at the Dionysia probably more than once. And if Sophocles won far more first prizes there, it bears little upon Euripides' dramatic talents and skill.

To be precise, although Euripides entered the playwrights' competition more than twenty times, ancient sources tell us that he was awarded first prize only four times over the course of his long career. He won once more with a final trilogy presented after his death, but that couldn't have been very satisfying to him.

Indeed, if handing someone a victory can be an insult, this was. In the end, Euripides' constant provocation of the Athenians' basic preconceptions about life and his criticism of the fundamental postulates structuring their society—particularly, his portrayal of the gods as wantonly vicious and cruel super-beings who toy maliciously with humankind—must have grated on them, but his drama was eminently watchable, perhaps the most of any Greek tragedian.

He fascinated and at the same time frustrated his contemporaries. Athens' most prominent hero in classical mythology is Theseus and, like many such characters upon whom legends and stories have accreted over time, the tales of his life encompass many different adventures. The story of Hippolytus is set near the end of Theseus' life when he has already been abroad and married several times, slain all sorts of dangerous beasts, become the king of Athens and even visited the underworld.

Theseus' story begins with his parents. When his father Aegeus married his mother Aethra , the princess of Athens, they at first had no children. In answer to their fervent prayers, the sea-god Poseidon slept with Aethra from which union she bore a son whom she named Theseus and Aegeus later believed to be his own.

He had good reason for doing so because at the time of the child's conception he had, in fact, recently slept with his wife. Thus, Theseus ended up with two fathers, one mortal and one immortal, both guiding his destiny in different ways.

All this took place in Troezen , a coastal town near Athens. After bedding Aethra, Aegeus had left a sword and sandals under a rock and said to her that, if she bore a child and it was a son, she should tell him about these tokens belonging to his father and, when he was old enough to move the rock, that he should come to Athens bearing the sword and wearing the sandals so that Aegeus would recognize him. When grown, Theseus did exactly this, exterminating a half dozen monsters and madmen along the way.

After Theseus arrived in Athens, Aegeus recognized him but, to secure for himself the throne of Athens, the young man had to prove his might and courage by performing a pair of labors. The first and lesser by far was the capture and sacrifice of a rogue bull which was at that moment ravaging Marathon, an area near Athens.

This he did expeditiously. The second was to slay the Cretan Minotaur "Minos' Bull" , a half-bull half-man people-eating monster. As it turned out, these labors were closely linked because the Minotaur was the offspring of the Bull of Marathon. Thus, Theseus killed the father and then the son.

The mother of the Minotaur was the former queen of Crete, a woman named Pasiphae "All-shining" , whose myth is among the more bizarre in classical myth. She had procreated her hideous offspring because of the hubris of her husband, Minos the king of Crete. His crime was that Poseidon had sent him a beautiful, white bull which according to ancient tradition he should have sacrificed back to the god but didn't, wishing to keep it for himself.

Angered by Minos' selfishness, Poseidon punished the king by making his wife fall in love with the bull. Their sexual union posed some challenges engineering-wise. Fortuitously, however, there happened to be a Greek inventor Daedalus "Intricate" living in Crete at the time, so Pasiphae solicited his help in consummating her desire for the bull.

The ingenious Daedalus devised a "wicker cow," into which Pasiphae climbed and achieved her goal, after which she gave birth to the Minotaur. When at long last Minos discovered all this, the clever Greek was forced to flee because of his involvement in the affair—few societies look fondly upon inter-special liaisons—and trapped as he was on an island, Daedalus had to employ his ingenuity again.

To escape, he devised two pairs of wings, fashioned out of feathers and wax. One pair he wore, and the other he gave to his son Icarus. Together they flew from Crete and headed west toward Italy, but both unfortunately didn't make it.

Elated by the experience of flying, Icarus went too high in the air despite his father's stern warnings not to do so. When he passed close to the sun, the wax in Icarus' wings melted and the feathers fell away, plunging the boy into the sea where he died. After arriving in Italy, Daedalus grief-stricken set up a memorial to his deceased son. Back in Crete, what happened to Pasiphae after Minos learned what she'd done isn't clear but she disappears from the story, indeed from all myth.

The Minotaur does not, however. Having at some point developed a taste for human flesh, the monster proved useful to Minos who decided to keep it around in order to intimidate surrounding nations. For instance, Minos decided to impose on Athens, one of the subject states in his large maritime empire, a fine of seven boys and seven girls every year to be fed to the Minotaur as recompense for the accidental death of one of Minos' sons in Athens. By now the monster had been situated in the bowels of the huge palace-complex where Minos lived, the Labyrinth.

Yet another of Daedalus' inventions, this was an enormous maze inside of which Minos locked those sentenced to die. There they wandered around in the dark until the Minotaur stumbled across them and feasted. To spread the allotment of this horrible fine more evenly over the whole population, the Athenians used lots to determine which hapless children were to be condemned as bull fodder.

When Theseus heard about this, he volunteered to go. Although Aegeus begged him not to, Theseus insisted but conceded to his anxious father that, if he succeeded, he would raise a white sail on his return to signal his safe passage home from Crete.

If not, he would tell the sailors to leave up the black sail normally used. Upon his arrival in Crete, Theseus' good looks—are leading men ever pocked and deformed? She met with him in secret and devised a plan to help him defeat and kill her half-man half-bull half-brother.

She gave Theseus a sword and a spool of thread. With the former she told him to sneak up on the Minotaur and slit its throat. He would be able to tie one end of the latter to the hinges of the door leading into the Labyrinth and unwind it as he walked about in the maze of rooms. This way he could retrace his steps and escape after killing the monster.

This he did and, when he was done, he and Ariadne stole a boat and fled Crete. But the fickle Theseus dumped her after a brief overnight stay on the island Naxos. In some stories she died of grief; in others she did better without him. The god Dionysus found and married her.

Either way she left the picture and the myth. Theseus proceeded to Athens alone, but in the excitement of the Minotaur's defeat and Ariadne's abandonment he forgot to change his sail to white. When his father saw a black sail on Theseus' ship returning, he assumed his son was dead, threw himself into the sea off Athens and drowned.

That part of the ocean was henceforth named the Aegean Sea in his honor. On landing, then, Theseus became the king of Athens. His trials, however, hardly ended there. During his reign the Amazons , a race of dreaded and fierce warrior-maidens, attacked Athens. In the ensuing battle Theseus met and fell in love with their queen Hippolyta.

After defeating her in hand-to-hand combat, he seduced—or in some stories, raped—and impregnated her. She subsequently gave birth to a boy, Hippolytus "Horse-break" , and died soon after, according to some stories in childbirth. During the time this son of an Athenian hero and an Amazon warrior was growing up—by Greek standards Hippolytus was almost as much of a hybrid as the Minotaur—Theseus went back to Crete for some reason where he arranged a wedding with Ariadne's younger sister, Phaedra "Shining".

She came to live with her new husband in his kingdom and their marriage, given the circumstances, turned out to be an unexpectedly happy one. As the years passed, they had two sons, younger half-brothers of Hippolytus who was by then serving as a priest in the cult of Artemis. That made him a hunter of sorts who was sworn to celibacy. This choice of professions revealed in him an odd predilection for his long-dead mother, the Amazon—like her son, Hippolyta had been formidable with a bow and averse to sexual contact—and a certain distaste for his father, which was unusual in a Greek man.

It's at this point in the myth that Euripides' play is set. Euripides' Hippolytus. This play has been a particular favorite of many readers and theatre-goers over time, myself included. Though it's one of Euripides' earliest surviving plays, it's far from an immature work or even a play written early in his life. He produced it in BCE when he was almost sixty years old and had been a producing playwright for almost three decades. It shows the hand of a master storyteller ably re-crafting a traditional tale.

The myth of Hippolytus and Phaedra follows a very old story pattern found in various forms across many different cultures.

Its manifold charms—lust, youth, beauty, chastity, incest, revenge, suicide, oaths, violence, miracles, misery—have universal appeal. Those who know the Bible will recognize here an echo of the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife. The variations on this ancient tale are hardly restricted to ancient societies, however. Many a modern soap opera has done a variation on this plot. A step-mother usually, an older husband's younger wife falls in love with her husband's chaste and pious son, not her own child but one of her husband's by an earlier marriage or affair.

She offers herself to him, and he haughtily rebuffs her. In anger and fear, she goes to her husband and falsely accuses the son of rape. The father curses his son who dies most horribly or barely escapes death. In anguish and remorse, the wife confesses all and commits suicide. By the time Euripides wrote the play we're about to read, the legend had already served as the subject of several tragedies produced at the Dionysia, including one by Euripides himself. Sophocles, for instance, had staged a play entitled Phaedra , probably shortly before Euripides' Hippolytus , and Euripides himself had composed an earlier Hippolytus , called in antiquity Hippolytus Veiled for a famous scene in which Hippolytus covers himself with a veil after Phaedra has approached and propositioned him.

Both Hippolytus Veiled and Sophocles' Phaedra are now lost, but we can gather something of their content from references to these plays and pieces of dialogue which happen to have been preserved. For example, we know Hippolytus Veiled scandalized the Athenian audience because Phaedra threw herself at Hippolytos right on stage in front of the audience.

Such an explicitly sexual scene was unheard of in the day, a typical Euripidean gesture pointing up the biases in his audience who, in fact, enjoyed watching this sort of explicit sexuality but didn't want to admit it in public.

This Phaedra—probably the first ever to stride the stage but certainly not the last—was a wanton vixen invested with barbarian morals. Although her old nurse tries to restrain Phaedra's passion, the lustful queen confronts Hippolytus directly, as shown in a snippet of their dialogue which happens to have been preserved:. After he rejects her, Phaedra lies to Theseus that Hippolytus has raped her and somehow falsifies evidence of a violent assault. Theseus angrily tells Hippolytus about Phaedra's accusation, and for some reason the young man is unable to defend himself.

After Theseus lays on him a curse and he dies horribly, the father learns the terrible truth about what really happened to his son.

At the end of the play, a report comes that Phaedra has killed herself. Appalled by Euripides' violent, lustful portrayal of their ancestors, the Athenians did as they did so often, they gave the winner's crown to some other playwright. Some time later, Sophocles made a stab at staging the same myth but, if it's fair to judge from the title of the play, he focused on the queen instead of Hippolytus. In Phaedra , he attempted to reform the central character by making a good and decent woman of her—no mean feat!

While our understanding of the play is far from complete, it's possible to grasp the basic outline of Sophocles' story. Part of the general mythology of Theseus included a trip to the underworld. It was during this exploit that Sophocles decided to set his play. As the drama opens, rumors have come to Athens that Theseus is in the underworld, missing in action and presumed dead. Hippolytus is accorded the throne over Phaedra's sons who are still too young to rule.

Frightened that because she's a foreigner her sons will ultimately be denied their rightful kingdom and torn by both love and fear of Hippolytus, Phaedra goes to him and suggests that they form a legal liaison. She almost certainly argued that, if they did, Theseus' children who were also Hippolytus' half-brothers would be assured their rightful place in their father's kingdom and the throne would pass without bloodshed to the next generation.

The Greek myth of Hippolytus likewise tells of the love of a married woman for a single man, but a crucial difference: the woman is now his stepmother, married to the young man's father.

This small alteration now suffuses this canonical story with quasi-incestuous connotations. The husband is Theseus, one of the most famous and well-connected Athenian mythic heroes, who like Heracles and Perseus boasted both a divine and a mortal father. The young man is the son of an Amazon queen, whose people were famous for their untamed and warlike nature. In many ways, this brief sketch of Hippolytus, Phaedra, and Theseus illustrates that the ingredients of a great tragedy are already in place, ones which furthermore guarantees disastrous consequences: we have Athens' greatest hero who is frequently absent due to his various exploits, a woman from a line of licentious Cretan women, and young man from a proud and wild race.

It is therefore no surprise that this tale was brought to life on the Athenian tragic stage, especially given the recurring fascination in tragedy with women who lusted after men who were not their husbands. Tragedians also had no qualms depicting married women who specifically lusted after young men: Euripides himself dramatized Bellerophon's story in a lost tragedy, Stheneboea , which famously ended with the hero mounted on the winged horse Pegasus.

But what is surprising is that in the fifth century there were not one, but three different tragedies that dramatised the story of Hippolytus and Phaedra: two by Euripides with the title Hippolytus , and a Phaedra by Sophocles.

Unfortunately we know very little about Sophocles' play, beyond an assumption that the play must have focused on the experience of Phaedra. Yet with Euripides' two versions of Hippolytus we have the only certain instance of a fifth century tragedian who rewrites one of his plays. In comedy, we know that Aristophanes revised a few of his plays - there were famously two versions of his Clouds , for example.

But throughout the fifth century BC all tragedies were performed for a single performance in Athens, and it is only in the fourth century that revivals of the 'classics' began.

In other words, the spectators of BC who saw the second and only surviving version, the play we now possess had a special treat in store, witnessing what is perhaps the only second treatment of the same myth by the same tragic playwright. Though we only have a few extant fragments of the original Hippolytus , we know from this and other evidence e.

Aristophanes' Frogs that the play featured a shameless Phaedra, who made a deliberate and bold attempt to seduce Hippolytus, in direct contrast to the virtuous and discreet Phaedra from the version that survives today.

With the second Hippolytus , Euripides therefore set out to do something extraordinary: to redeem and transform the formerly sexually assertive Phaedra into a nobler and more sympathetic figure.