The thing that astonishes me about Euripides’ tragedy Hippolytus is Phaedra’s virtue. Though she has fallen scandalously in love with her stepson Hippolytus, her behavior is decorous. She has neither flirted nor made sexual advances. Pining away of love, she confides in the nurse and the chorus, displaying a Trollopian enthusiasm for the hunt, never adverse to adopting a hunting metaphor, since Hippolytus hunts, along with his favorite goddess, Artemis:
God, how I long to set the hounds on, shouting!
And poise the Thessalian javelin drawing it back -
here where my fair hair hangs upon the ear -
I would hold in my hand a spear with a steel point."
-- David Grene's translation of Hippolytus
Love and death: here they are again. Phaedra’s nurse propositions Hippolytus behind Phaedra’s back on her behalf. As you can imagine, this does not end well. With a few exceptions, at least one character dies in each Greek tragedy: here there are two. But there is a widespread literary trope in Western literature of killing off sexually active women. In 19th-century literature, the sexually active woman usually dies (Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Edna Pontellier); in Hippolytus, the virtuous woman who does not act on her sexual desire dies.
Phaedra censored herself; Euripides censored his play. Censorship may be the wrong word here: I don’t know if literary censorship existed in fifth-century Athens. But this version of Euripides’ play, according to an ancient source, is a rewrite of his original Hippolytus, which was so explicit that even the Athenians were shocked, In this lost version of the play, Phaedra aggressively proposes to Hippolytus. This disturbed an audience of people who blithely paraded around festivals waving giant penises.
Euripides’ metamorphosis of Phaedra into a sad woman doomed by Aphrodite may have been a business decision. Writing is a business, after all. Though, again, I don’t know if tragedians got paid. But rewriting is in itself a statement about art and/or money. Euripides always teeters on the edge of going too far with his intense psychological portraits and descriptions of violence. But it is difficult to imagine him going too far with his first version of Hippolytus, because this one also goes too far. Hippolytus is one of Euripides’ most disturbing tragedies, and they are all disturbing. In Hippolytus, Phaedra is the heroine, the most sympathetic character. And she wouldn’t have died if Aphrodite hadn’t considered her collateral damage.
I don’t have access to any books that address the issue of censorship in ancient Greece, but there has been much censorship in Western culture. Skipping far into the future from fifth-century Athens, most of the great 19th-century Russian writers were exiled, with the exception of Tolstoy, though they were usually allowed to return. Even gentle Turgenev was exiled, but he actually preferred Paris and Baden-Baden.
As for Russia in the 20th century, it was a bloodbath, or at least a keep-your-head-down culture. Pasternak won the Nobel for Doctor Zhivago before the book was published in Russia: it was first published in Italy in 1957. And The Master and Margarita, written in the late 1920s and early ’30s, was not published in Russia till the ‘60s, and that in an expurgated form.
In the 20th century in the U.S. and England, Lawrence, Joyce, and Henry Miller saw their best books banned. It wasn’t just Lady Chatterley’s Lover: the censors also banned Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love.
By the way, the women in Phaedra’s family all make poor sexual choices. Her mother, Pasiphaë, fell in love with a bull and gave birth to the Minotaur, and Phaedra’s husband, Theseus, deserted her older sister, Ariadne, on an island (he had promised to marry Ariadne, but then marries Phaedra). And, for the record, the French writer Colette seduced her stepson and had a longtime affair with him. I wish I hadn’t read that biography! But there were no repercussions. She was known as the French Phaedra.
