Phaedra

Phaedra is an adaptation of an old Greek myth from the collection of traditions involving Theseus, arguably the principal hero of Athens. The myth tells of Phaedra’s doomed love of her stepson Hippolytus, which leads to the unhappy deaths of both Hippolytus and Phaedra. Seneca’s main source was most likely Euripides’s Hippolytus, a Greek tragedy produced in 428 BCE.

Euripides composed two Hippolytus tragedies. To distinguish between them, the earlier of the two is often known as Hippolytus Veiled (Hippolytos Kalyptomenos in Greek) while the second is known as Hippolytus Crowned (Hippolytos Stephanephoros in Greek), or simply Hippolytus. Of these two plays, only the latter survives. The original play, Hippolytus Veiled, was probably produced in the mid-430s BCE. For reasons that are unclear (only fragments of the play survive), the first Hippolytus was condemned as immoral when it was first staged. This prompted Euripides to produce a second Hippolytus in 428 BCE. This play, which has survived intact, was much praised in antiquity and awarded the first prize. It is still widely read and admired today.

Euripides’s second surviving Hippolytus told a slightly different version of the myth from that told by Seneca in Phaedra. In Euripides’s version, Hippolytus is the son of the Athenian king Theseus by an Amazon woman who was once his lover or wife, while Phaedra is Theseus’s current wife. Phaedra’s desire for Hippolytus is inspired by the love goddess Aphrodite (the Greek equivalent of the Roman Venus), who wishes to punish Hippolytus for his failure to honor her adequately.

Phaedra approaches Hippolytus through her nurse, but Hippolytus, who is determined to remain a virgin, refuses her. Phaedra then dies by suicide, leaving a tablet for Theseus to discover in which she claims Hippolytus raped her. Upon discovering the tablet, Theseus confronts Hippolytus in a rage. Refusing to believe Hippolytus’s claim that he is innocent, Theseus banishes his son and asks his father Poseidon to destroy him. Poseidon grants Theseus’s prayer and sends a bull from the sea to frighten Hippolytus’s horses as he drives his chariot along the shore. The horses panic and trample Hippolytus, leaving him mortally injured. Only as the dying Hippolytus is brought in does Hippolytus’s patron goddess Artemis (Diana in Roman tradition) arrive to inform Theseus of the truth. Theseus and Hippolytus are tearfully reconciled before Hippolytus dies.

There were other early retellings of the myth, some of which differed in certain details. In Euripides’s original Hippolytus, Phaedra only kills herself after Hippolytus dies and the truth comes out. The version of the myth told in Euripides’s second Hippolytus seems to have become the most influential in antiquity. In Roman literature, it was occasionally adapted by Ovid in the fourth epistolary of his Heroides, which takes the form of a letter from Phaedra to Hippolytus.

Seneca’s Phaedra differs from Euripides’s familiar retelling of the myth in several key ways. For one, Phaedra dies by suicide after Hippolytus has been killed rather than before. The confrontation between Theseus and Hippolytus—a central scene in Euripides’s play—is also absent from Seneca’s version, in which Theseus curses Hippolytus as soon as he hears Phaedra’s accusation, without even looking to hear Hippolytus’s side. On a more thematic level, the ambivalent relationship between gods and human beings is not explored in Seneca’s play to the same extent as in Euripides’s play: While two gods appear as speaking characters in Euripides’s Hippolytus, Aphrodite in the prologue and Artemis in the exodus, the gods are completely absent from Seneca’s Phaedra. These differences are important, highlighting the ways in which Seneca approached the myth in an original and innovative way.