In which a playwright presents a tragedy driven by passions and argues against Socrates’ principles on the stage, rejecting the rationality of human action.
9.1 Philosophy on Stage
At the Festival of Dionysus held in the Theater of Dionysus in early 428 BC, when Socrates was 41 years old, the audience watched in rapt attention as, for the first time ever, a wooden crane lifted an actor in the guise of a goddess onto a perch on the roof of the scene building.[1] The goddess spoke:
Great among mortals and not without name
in heaven too, I am known as the goddess Cypris.[a]
Of all who dwell between the Black Sea and the boundaries of Atlas,
beholding the light of the sun,
them I honor who venerate my power,
but I overthrow those who despise me.
For this is the way of the race of gods:
they rejoice in the honors of men.
I shall prove the truth of my words anon.
For the son of Theseus, offspring of the Amazon queen,
Hippolytus, raised by holy Pittheus,
he alone of the citizens of Trozen here
declares that I am the basest of divinities.
He spurns marriage and the conjugal bed,
while he honors Artemis, sister of Phoebus Apollo,
daughter of Zeus, considering her the greatest of divinities.
. . .
For the sins he has committed against me,
I shall exact vengeance on Hippolytus this day![2]
Thus Euripides, the brash intellectual with modern ideas, began one of his greatest plays, the Hippolytus, a tragedy that would depict the downfall of a man whose crime was to be too moderate, sōphrōn, too self-controlled, chaste—in short, too virtuous. The goddess Aphrodite, who has just proclaimed her greatness, flies off in Euripides’ contraption as Hippolytus enters on the audience’s left from the country. He passes by the cult statue of Aphrodite to lay a garland at the feet of Artemis. A servant warns him not to slight the goddess of love, but in vain. Hippolytus loves chastity and hence its exemplar Artemis, and hates sexual passion and hence its exemplar Aphrodite. He is himself the bastard son of Theseus and the Amazon queen and presumably sensitive to the calamities brought on by lust.
Aphrodite sets her plot in motion by afflicting Phaedra, Theseus’ wife and queen who is Hippolytus’ stepmother, with an unnatural passion for her stepson. A few years earlier Euripides had staged a version of the story, his first Hippolytus, by having Phaedra try to seduce Hippolytus. The Athenians booed the work as base and offensive.[3] In his new play Euripides made Phaedra noble. Resolved to starve herself to death rather than to give in to her passion, she wastes away in the palace. But her well-meaning nurse wheedles the truth out of Phaedra, and then acts as a go-between to invite Hippolytus to make love to the queen and thus save her life. The nurse has Hippolytus swear not to divulge the secret she will tell before she invites him to share the queen’s bed. When he hears the proposition, Hippolytus denounces the nurse and the whole female sex in a misogynistic tirade. Phaedra, appalled at the nurse’s betrayal of her and fearing to be exposed before her husband and the whole city, hangs herself, leaving behind a tablet accusing her stepson of violating her. Theseus comes home to hear of his wife’s suicide, and reading the tablet invokes Poseidon’s curse on his son that he should die. Hippolytus returns to the palace, where Theseus accuses him and banishes him from the country, while Hippolytus, bound by his oath, is unable to defend himself. Soon we hear news that a miraculous bull from the sea, sent by Poseidon, has attacked Hippolytus’ chariot and left him mortally wounded. Artemis now flies in on the crane and reveals the machinations of Aphrodite to Theseus. The dying Hippolytus is brought in for a scene of reconciliation with his father. “The villain Cypris devised this,” Artemis reveals to Hippolytus. “Her honor was offended, and she resented your chastity.”[4]
The play was a triumph of drama and spectacle, with gods flying in and out and people being wheeled in and out of the palace on the eccyclema, a wheeled platform, another favorite contraption of the playwright. Euripides took first prize in tragedy for only one of four times in his long career.
But on this day Euripides was more than a playwright; he was a philosopher as well. When Phaedra made her appearance on stage, wheeled out on her couch, languishing with a broken heart, she made a defense to the chorus of the women of the city.
Ladies of Trozen, who inhabit
the front of Pelops’ land,
ere now for other reasons in the long watches of the night
I have considered how men’s lives have been destroyed.
And it seems to me that not from lack of will
they do what is worse. For many think
rightly. But consider this:
What we understand and know to be good
we do not perform, some because of laziness,
some preferring some other pleasure,
to virtue . . .[5]
In her moments of lucidity, Phaedra is a philosopher. She has worked out, before her descent into madness, the cause of people’s downfalls. It is not that they do not will what is good. No, many have good intentions. Rather, they do not act on the good reasons they have. Some sort of laziness or inertia, or better yet, some pleasure, seduces them from their noble aims. Phaedra offers an argument for weakness of will. We know what we should do, but we don’t do it because we are overcome by pleasure (or laziness or fear or . . .). Phaedra’s argument is intelligent and plausible. But who is she arguing against, and why?
Scholars have long recognized what seems to be an attack on intellectualism or cognitivism, the view that virtue is knowledge. The only known source of this theory is Socrates of Alopece.[6] One scholar notes that Euripides’ “thinkers are nearly always women.” But “where [their] opinions are conspicuously inappropriate to [their] personality or [their] dramatic situation–where the dianoia [theme] breaks loose from the mythos [plot]—there we have especial reason to suspect the intervention of the author.”[7] And, one might add, where different characters in different situations in different plays utter the same propositions, we have further reason to see the author’s own principles being expressed.[8] Behind the mask of Phaedra, the playwright makes a manifesto of his own moral psychology that supports the premise of this and other plays. People act badly not out of ignorance but out of helplessness before their own passions. Indeed, even Euripides’ gods seem driven by passions, as does Aphrodite, who burns with resentment at the impudence of a mortal daring to withhold the honors due her. In some sense, indeed, she is a primeval force, passion personified.[9]
In the Hippolytus, the temporarily rational Phaedra goes on to distinguish between two kinds of pleasure, the one harmless and the other “a bane to houses,” darkly hinting at her own attraction to shameful pleasures, which she has resolved to expiate by her own self-destruction.[10] As she sees it, what remains to her is not to conquer feelings, but only do what is best in the situation, to oppose one passion, the concern for her reputation, to another, her unnatural lust for her stepson. For her, and for traditional Greek culture in general, reputation, “honor,” was indistinguishable from the good. For the sake of her honor it was fitting to kill herself and even falsely to accuse her stepson of an unspeakable crime.[11]
Euripides’ protagonists act in the grip of passions. The playwright is a master of a kind of pathological psychology. What is unusual in the Hippolytus is a philosophical defense of that psychology. The apology suggests that someone has been challenging the concepts that lie behind the drama, the irrationalism that drives Euripides’ plays.[12] There is no likely challenger other than Socrates. Plato puts the views that virtue is knowledge, that no one does wrong willingly, that there is no weakness of will, in Socrates’ mouth in the dialogues Protagoras and Charmides, the former with a dramatic date of 433/2, the latter a date of 429.[13] In the Hippolytus we get a kind of historical confirmation that such ideas were known among intellectuals by 428. Euripides provides, in the words of the great classical scholar Bruno Snell, the earliest testimony of Socrates—at least the earliest datable reference.[14] To be sure, Euripides provides only an allusion—a play set in mythological times, as most tragedies were, could not name contemporary figures. Yet it remains reasonable to see Euripides as entering into a debate with anonymous contemporaries.[15]
Moreover, Euripides’ allusion tells us not just that Socrates was making a name for himself—thus confirming what is implied in Plato’s dialogues—but that he was becoming known precisely for his unique theory of moral psychology that supported his ethics. Contrary to some who have seen the early Socrates as a natural philosopher,[16] he was, at least by 428, espousing the theories that Plato ascribes to the protagonist of his Socratic dialogues.
Conflicting traditions show Socrates as a collaborator and friend of Euripides, on the one hand, and as having deep disagreements with him on the other. Socrates is said to have helped Euripides write his plays, and in one anecdote Euripides shares his copy of Heraclitus with Socrates.[17] In another anecdote, Socrates walks out of Euripides’ performance of a play when he hears virtue being disparaged.[18] The poet, who was more than a decade older than the philosopher, imbibed deeply of the intellectual developments of his time including natural philosophy and the sophistic movement, and clearly saw Socrates as a figure to be reckoned with. Socrates is mentioned as collaborating with Euripides and “lighting his fire” first by the comic poet Teleclides, in a reference that may date from the 440s, and the comic poet Callias continues the running joke in 429.[19] Aristophanes also claimed that Socrates ghost-wrote Euripides’ smart, long-winded tragedies, possibly in the stage version of The Clouds.[20] All of these allusions suggest more than a just a passing acquaintance between the playwright and the poet.[21]
What Euripides no doubt recognized was that Socrates’ philosophical views spelled the end of the tragic conception of life in general. If virtue is knowledge and if, as Socrates says to Protagoras (ch. 6*), pleasure cannot drag knowledge about like a slave, then virtue is sovereign and tragedy is doomed. The passions are no longer omnipotent powers that can overwhelm hapless individuals. Indeed, the gods will have no power to condemn mortals to despair and destruction, for the means of salvation are in their own hands. The gods can no longer fly into our lives ex machina to overthrow our intentions and resolves. If the Athenian philosopher is right, then tragedy is truly dead. Some new kind of literature must emerge to take its place—in place of a literature of passion, irrationality, and destruction, a literature of reason, rationality, and instruction.[22] For all his enthusiasm for modern sophistry and natural philosophy, Euripides was profoundly conservative in his view of human nature. For him, the new science only confirmed the views of archaic poets that man was a puppet of higher beings or powers that held the strings.
For Socrates, by contrast, the notion that humans are helpless victims of divine plots, that gods would attack humans who were virtuous, even because they were outstanding in virtue, that the goodness of humans could be hubris, an affront to the gods, was unthinkable. Socrates held that to defend one’s reputation at all costs was disgraceful. That the gods would go to war against each other and use mortals as their pawns and targets for retaliation against each other was for him sacrilege (see ch. 23*). Yet these views Socrates opposed provided the premises of mythology, epic, and tragedy. Religion, art, literature, belief, culture stood in the balance. Was man a rational creature, capable of governing his actions by reason, or was he fundamentally irrational, a seething cauldron of emotions, capable only of speciously rational pretensions and instinctive reactions?
A titanic conflict was coming, to be played out on the streets and stages, the oracles and assemblies, and finally the courtrooms of Athens. Were human beings helpless victims of overwhelming religious (or natural psychological) forces, or were they autonomous moral agents? Socrates is likely to have been in the audience when Euripides staged the Hippolytus and to have perceived the challenge, as the groundlings did not. But it would take more than a goddess in a flying machine and a reimagined fable to change his mind. Ultimately he would make his own case against irrationalism in reasoned arguments, and perform them before small gatherings in the streets of Athens.
[a] A cult name of Aphrodite, goddess of love.
[1].Bieber 1961:76. Euripides had used the crane in the Medea in 431 to carry off the protagonist, but this seems to be the first time a deity flew in the theater.
[2].Euripides Hippolytus 1-16, 21-22.
[3].See Barrett 1964:10-45 for evidence of the earlier play and also a similar (lost) play, the Phaedra, by Sophocles.
[4].Euripides Hippolytus 1400, 1402.
[5].Euripides Hippolytus 373-83, following the interpretation of Kovacs 1980.
[6].Wilamowitz 1907:24 and n. 44; Snell 1948; Dodds 1951:186-187; criticized by Barrett 1964:229; defended in detail in Irwin 1983. See now Wildberg 2009.
[7].Dodds 1929:98.
[8].For parallel utterances, see Dodds 1929; Irwin 1983.
[9].Euripides Hippolytus 359-60. Aphrodite is “more than a god,” with Dodds 1929:102.
[10].Euripides Hippolytus 383 ff. There is a debate about whether the discussion in 385 ff. is about pleasures or kinds of shame (see Barrett, ibid., whose own interpretation seems inadequate to me). Surely it is about the former, the topic of the previous sentence. Thus Kovacs 1980.
[11].Kovacs 1980:301-303.
[12].On Euripides’ irrationalism, see Dodds 1929.
[13]. Nails 2002:309-12.
[14].The reference of Ion of Chios (see ch. 4*) is prior to 421, but not further datable, and in any case carries no specific information about Socrates’ teachings.
[15].See Irwin 1983:197.
[16].E.g. Chiapelli 1891;Ferguson 1964.
[17].Diogenes Laertius 2.18, 22.
[18].Diogenes Laertius 2.33.
[19].Teleclides fr. 41 Kassel-Austin; cf. Callias fr. 15 K.-A. probably from The Captives, with Diogenes Laertius 2.18.
[20].Aristophanes fr. 392 K.-A.; cf. Frogs 1491-99, in a play produced in 405 BC.
[21].See Wildberg 2009.
[22].A literature that Socrates’ follower Plato will eventually claim for himself.