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Men and Gods in Euripides' Hippolytus

The relevancy of the appearances of the two goddesses, Aphrodite and Artemis, to the action, causation and characterization of the Hippolytus has long been debated. The rationalists' view is that they constitute a superficial and largely structural frame for the real, human drama, having little or nothing to do with what happens on the stage between epiphanies. Indeed, it is hard to deny that the human characters have a great deal to do with their own undoing. The divine nature of the catastrophe, on the other hand, prevents our rationalizing the superhuman element as outside the tragedy. If we include Poseidon in our Olympian cast of characters, it may be possible to find a relationship of the gods to the action of the play of another kind than a strictly causal one. It is the purpose of this paper to show that the characters and motivations of the persons of the drama both human and divine are so closely parallel that they form but a single frame of action within a dramatic structure that is so tight that barely an oimoi is superfluous. And surely two (or three) divinities have not been added for their appeal to the audience's love of the spectacular, or from a simple desire for balance. In a recent article B. D. Frischer has observed that between the human and divine frames, as well as within each frame, the principle of concordia operates. He asserts, however, that the device of reenactment (which ‘harmonizes characters by showing them doing and saying the same things’, 87) functions within but not between frames. My contention is that in action and in character the human actors are like their gods, that their actions parallel those of their gods, that they try to impose on the situation a state of immutability that is not suited to the mortal condition, and that they impose upon themselves and each other an isolation which is very close to the gods' aloofness and anti-social existence. It is through the goddesses' statements and the implications of these statements when transferred to human relationships that we become aware of what is taking place at the human level.