THE MALE CHARACTERS LF EURIPIDES

THE MALE CHARACTERS LF EURIPIDES

CHAPTER 3

THE AMAZON’S SON

SAINT PAUL, Epistle to the Romans, 12:3

For by the grace [of God] given to me I say to everyone of you not to think more highly of himself [and of his importance and ability] than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has apportioned to each a degree of faith [and a purpose designed for service].

The moralists' have had a busy time with the Hippolytus.
Starting with the assumption that Euripides is out to attack something, or to teach something in the play, they have reached some strange conclusions. "The ex hypothesi moral of the story, writes J. A. Spranger, is a warning against extremes in love: woe to those who love so passionately as Phadra, woe to those who avoid love so entirely as Hippolytus! Moderation, moderation, in all things is best.' What sort of Freudian solution of the problem Euripides is supposed to have in mind is not suggested. Surely the old nurse is not his mouth-piece! Spranger goes on in the same article to explain that a second moral to be found, subtly underlying the doctrine of the whole play, is that 'circumstances alter cases. The tragedy turns on the fulfilment of the obligations of an oath, or, more correctly, of two oaths, one sworn by Hippolytus, one swor by Poseidon. In another place" Spranger professes a discipleship of Verrall, and it is easy to see how such an allegiance colours his views. Aphrodite, Artemis and Poseidon undoubtedly come off badly in the Hippolytus, but the play was not written expressly to damage them, nor to teach 'advanced" views of morality. Euripides' 'moral hatred of the Olympian gods, as Gilbert Murray puts it, is doubtless very real, but not the guiding motive of the drama. We must at all costs, writes David Grene sanely avoid an interpretation based upon what we believe the artist should have wondered to express. “The remark should be born in mind by all readers of the Hippolytus and the Bacchae.”

Grene proceeds to answer very effectively Linforth’s argument, which repeats Spranger in more modern terms.
Hippolytus is alleged, in the Greek view, to have aimed at a degree of virtue which was in fact a blasphemy against the nature of man. Kitto, in different language again, follows Spranger and Linforth. It is quite evident, he writes, "that this is no tragedy of character..... To Aeschylus the law of Zeus does not tolerate partial adherence; Euripides puts the same idea into psychological rather than moral terms, and will show us that there are laws of nature which demand obedience as well as the laws of morality? Which, of course, brings us back to Freud! But surely the end of Kitto's paragraph contradicts the beginning. If the play is a psychological study, it is by way of being a tragedy of character. Grene very pertinently compares the Bacchae. Neither with Pentheus, nor with Hippolytus is Euripides interested in finding a way of escape. He has no adjustments to suggest which might have enabled the tragic figures to disentangle the toils of their fate.
Both plays show a rigid character caught in a mesh of circumstance. Both characters come to ruin, but to maintain that for this reason Euripides believed and taught that Pentheus and Hippolytus carried what they imagined to be righteousness to the point of sin, and sin that earned a just destruction, is to attribute a didactic aim to him which has no place in his dramatic work.
Euripides is more detached. There were times, undoubtedly, when he wrote to preach. The Troades and the Andromache are examples of such work, but from the Alcestis in the Bacchae Euripides prime interest is in men and women at grips with live and circumstance. If he stays from that interest here and there to write romance, or the pamphlets of patriotism, he ever returns to it, and that is why, in any typical play from his pain, the shortest method of criticism is to seek the simple facts of his environment. Euripides, furthermore, was a realist and observer of life and character. The men and women of his age must inevitably have been his study, and it is illuminating, as we have already seen, to examine as far as that is possible the society in which the poet lived, the mental climate, so to speak, of his age, and to endeavor to reconstruct from the remnants of its written thought and the records of its history, the sort of character which might have grown in it. Does not, Hippolytus, for instance, like Admetus, step straight from Athenian life?