Hippolytus

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to death by suicide.

The destructiveness of love and desire is one of the main themes of Euripides’s Hippolytus, a play that contrasts Phaedra’s inappropriate passion for Hippolytus with Hippolytus’s pursuit of chastity. The play highlights the dangerous and destructive power of love and desire, especially by personifying these forces as the plotting goddess of love, Aphrodite.

At the beginning of the play, Phaedra is represented as the passive and helpless victim of Aphrodite. In the Prologue, Aphrodite herself describes how she caused Phaedra’s heart to be “filled with the longings of dreadful love” (28). When Phaedra first comes on stage, she displays the physical symptoms of love’s devastation: feverish, disheveled, and rambling. She is consumed by her desire for Hippolytus even though she feels bound by societal norms of fidelity to her husband Theseus. Phaedra’s attempts to suppress her feelings have failed. She sees herself as a passive victim of love and the love gods, and this view is confirmed by the way the other characters view and describe love: The Nurse, for instance, refers to Aphrodite as “something stronger than a god” (360), or as a goddess whose “tide […] is not withstandable” (442-43), while the