On to Hippolytus

More to say about Ovid, but for now, we're over here reading Euripides' Hippolytus.

Blog for latest project: Hippolytus

As our group has turned to Euripides' Hippolytus, blogging about that text will occur on the somewhat spiffed-up old Sarasota Classics Blog. So far, it has two posts:

Some words in Euripides' Hippolytus 

Troezen, Argos and the Peloponnese

Living after life: Aesculapius and other remnants

With the tale of Aesculapius and his relocation to Rome from Epidaurus in Metamorphoses 15, it might help to bear in mind that after nearly being killed by his father Apollo, in some versions of his life he was "killed" by Zeus:

According to Roman era mythography,[14] the figure represents the healer Asclepius, who learned the secrets of keeping death at bay after observing one serpent bringing another healing herbs. To prevent the entire human race from becoming immortal under Asclepius' care, Zeus killed him with a bolt of lightning, but later placed his image in the heavens to honor his good works.

In Metamorphoses 2, Ovid has Ocyrhoe, the daughter of Chiron, blurt out the end of Aesculapius, changing into a horse as she speaks:

‘Grow and thrive, child, healer of all the world! Human beings will often be in your debt, and you will have the right to restore the dead. But if ever it is done regardless of the god’s displeasure you will be stopped, by the flame of your grandfather’s lightning bolt, from doing so again. From a god you will turn to a bloodless corpse, and then to a god who was a corpse, and so twice renew your fate.'

The act of healing that brought death and godhead to Aesculapius is usually considered to be his restoration of Hippolytus.

Rome's welcome of Aesculapius clearly echoes the paean of Athenians upon recognizing their strange visitor to be Aegeus's long-hidden son and the city's future king, Theseus. In the Olympian mode, Theseus occasioned the end of both his father and his son.

The juxtaposition of the death of Hippolytus with the transfer of Aesculapius to Rome suggests, once again, that the turn of the poem, and of the world, from Greece to Rome is linked both to an alteration of identity and to something like a metamorphosis of death. Italy emerges in book 15 as an after-living -- a wooded land in which the Trojan people, Pythagorean thought, the son of Theseus, and the son of Apollo do not die. Rather, having suffered a Glaucus-like sea-change, they appear new and strange. The power is there, but estranged from itself. The welcoming throngs don't re-cognize Aesculapius, he's new.

This life after life seems less an overcoming Hades and the Olympians than a distancing, a flowing away from them, an attenuation and a concealment. As forecast by Saturn's flight to Italy, who too lives on, in Latium.

Hippolytus at the Isthmus

Nec vires tamen has rabies superasset equorum.

ni rota, perpetuum qua circumvertitur axem,

stipitis occursu fracta ac disiecta fuisset.

Even then, the horses’ madness would not have exhausted my strength, if a wheel had not broken, and been wrenched off, as the axle hub, round which it revolves, struck a tree. Meta. 15.

The story Hippolytus tells of his own death has to be one of the more semantically charged moments in the Metamorphoses. It would go far beyond the bounds of a blog post to develop a full reading of his character and acts in book 15 and in the poem as a whole. Suffice it to say Hippolytus speaks, as we've noted, without preparation or introduction, and immediately strikes an odd note.

He's not very sympathetic to mourning Egeria, and goes on to recount his chariot crash scene, as if it somehow trumps the nymph's tale of loss. Coming as it does after the long song of Pythagoras, the physicality of the description of his crash, the uncanny appearance of the mountainous wave and the bull, all this narrative energy inserts a strange shock between the reflections and prescriptions of the philosopher and the serene journey of serpentine Aesculapius that follows.

The disfiguring death of Hippolytus is enigmatic at all points: he's one of the greatest horsemen in the world, yet he dies neither in a war nor in an Olympic race, but in an accident involving no other "drivers." He is the son of Theseus, one of the most just, beloved, and balanced heroes of Greece, but he dies cursed by his father for an alleged crime of Venus, though he's a follower of Artemis. He is of the line of Pelops, who was the lover of Poseidon. The god is also his grandfather, yet it's Poseidon's gift that visits Theseus's curse upon Hippolytus.

To unravel this knot, we need to follow threads leading back to violent kings, acts of treachery, and an abandoned princess.

A Dantean moment

There might be no more "Dantean" moment in the Metamorphoses than the sudden sound of Hippolytus's voice in book 15. For a comparison, consider the scene in Inferno 10 when, as Dante and Virgil are walking amid the open tombs in the City of Dis, they're suddenly interrupted by a deep voice from within a tomb:

O Tosco che per la città del foco

vivo ten vai cosù parlando onesto,

piacciati di restare in questo loco.

O Tuscan, thou who through the city of fire

Goest alive, thus speaking modestly,

Be pleased to stay thy footsteps in this place.

Farinata rises from his burning grave because he hears his native Florentine speech, and seizes the opportunity to hear of the living world. 

Ovid's Egeria is disconsolate at the death of her consort, Numa, when she is suddenly interrupted:

How often Hippolytus, Theseus’s heroic son, said, to the weeping nymph: ‘Make an end to this, since yours is not the only fate to be lamented: think of others’ like misfortunes: you will endure your own more calmly.'

The appearance of Hippolytus is doubly unexpected -- nothing prepares us for the fact that he did not die in his chariot accident, or that he's in Aricia. Being addressed by a dead person who speaks of how he perished puts the sacred grove of Aricia on a path to the afterworld of Dante. Except here, Hippolytus has returned to life, albeit in disguise so that, as he says, his gift of life would neither be a cause of envy, nor enable him to be found by Dis. He speaks to comfort Egeria, though his speech seems to use an odd calculus to measure his disaster against her loss.

Hippolytus is one of very few figures in Greek mythology who return to live on Earth after total disfiguration and death. With Hippolytus, Ovid is exploring the limits of mortality, as Dante is doing in a quite different way with Farinata in the circle of heretics who deny immortal life.

The next post will continue with Hippolytus in Metamorphoses 15.

Oikoi in the Arician Grove

By now we're used to the fact that anything can happen in the Metamorphoses. This "fact" shouldn't inure us to the singularly strange transitions and juxtapositions woven into the text, because we are probably meant to be perplexed by them. The rapid reader will find sheer arbitrariness in a segue that moves swiftly from the end of a 400+ line speech by an ancient Greek philosopher to a telegraphic note on the death of Numa, to the transformation of his consort Egeria, to the sudden intrusion of the voice of a figure who claims to be the dead Hippolytus, now restored and assisting Diana in Aricia under the new identity of Virbius. And that fast reader's reaction would be understandable. But perhaps there's more to it.

For purposes of making some headway here, note that Ovid has turned from the voice of Pythagoras to the texts of several of Euripides' tragedies -- the Orestes, Iphigeneia at Tauris and Hippolytus. These plays deal with the fates of two of the great Greek houses (oikoi) -- of Atreus and of Theseus. (Of course the Oresteia of Aeschylus is involved as well.)

Orestes and Pylades kill Aegisthus

These two tales couldn't be more different, and their differences are worth pondering. For example, Agamemnon's son Orestes (who was sent to live in Phocis after his mother, Clytemnestra, begins her involvement with Aegisthus) is ordered by the gods to kill his mother. Pursued by the Erinyes, he goes insane before being restored, judged not guilty, cleansed (by nine men at Troezen), and elevated to succeed his father as ruler of Mycenae. He also recovers Hermione, daughter of Helen and Paris, who was betrothed to him by Tyndareus, but who, after he went insane, was given by Menelaos to Neoptolemus.


In a nutshell, the concern with Orestes is with intra-familial murder, revenge, justice, and the recovering of kingly succession. The kingdom passes from Agamemnon to his son, but not in quite the ceremonial and orderly fashion most states would prefer.

Athena, Orestes, Priestesses at Delphi

The house of Theseus is not so much of a house. Through his human father Aegeus (who shares paternity with Poseidon), Theseus can trace his line to Erichthonius, the allegedly autochthonous early king of Athens. Theseus had a somewhat peculiar marriage with the Amazon Hippolyta (the only Amazon ever to wed any man), and Hippolytus was their child. After the death of Hippolyta, Hippolytus was sent to live in Troezen with his great-grandfather, Pittheus, while Theseus married Minos's daughter Phaedra, Ariadne's sister. Phaedra's unquenchable desire for Hippolytus leads to his brutal death. She lies to Theseus, claiming Hippolytus had assaulted her, and Theseus uses one of three wishes granted him by Poseidon to cause the death of his son.

The figure of a bull appears in a giant wave, frightening Hippolytus's horses, and fulfilling the apparent meaning of his name, which can mean "unleasher of horses," or, "destroyed by horses."

So, two stories of royal houses, fathers and sons, things going awry. In one, a son kills his natural mother; in the other, a stepmother brings about the death of the king's son. In one, order is restored, in the other, the house ends, but the son has a curious afterlife.

What brings these tales together in the Arician grove of "Oresteian Diana"? Why, after listening for quite some time to the voice of Pythagoras, do we suddenly out of the blue hear Hippolytus speaking to Egeria? What is at stake in this strange juxtaposition, and in the admittedly in-credible tale of how this tragic figure became Virbius? (Virgil's version of that tale is told in Aeneid 7).

To get a sense of the background, it might be useful to look at two of Ovid's Heroides in connection with this part of Metamorphoses 15: The letter of Hermione to Orestes, and the letter of Phaedra to Hippolytus.

Formless air: Motifs in Metamorphoses 15

When Egeria, consort of Numa Pompilius, disconsolately liquifies at Aricia (Metamorphoses 15:479 ff.), her transformation distinctly echoes the tale of Canens in Book 14, whose lover Picus was lost to her through the wiles of Circe. Canens, the daughter of Janus, evaporates at Rome's river:

The Tiber saw her last, with grief and toil
wearied and lying on his widespread bank.
In tears she poured out words with a faint voice,
lamenting her sad woe, as when the swan
about to die sings a funereal dirge.
Melting with grief at last she pined away;
her flesh, her bones, her marrow liquified
and vanished by degrees as formless air
and yet the story lingers near that place,
fitly named Canens by old-time Camenae!’

The Camenae were nymphs who came to be associated with the Greek Muses. They consisted of Carmenta < carmen (English: "charm") a goddess of childbirth and prophecy, and artificer of the Latin alphabet, her two sisters, Antevorta, goddess of the future, and Postvorta, goddess of the past, and, interestingly, Egeria.

Antevorta, Postvorta, Egeria

Thus the mourning of Canens and Egeria in 14 and 15 are joined not merely in an echoic pathos of vanishing nymphs, but also in linking Canens, lamenting her Picus, and Egeria, mourning Numa, to the fountainheads of Latin and ultimately Greek inspiration. But where the Greek often ends in an Apollonian, visual representation -- recall Circe's statue of Picus at her palace -- these Italic muses dissolve into air, flow, voice.

After Numa: "The ghastly priest"

Numa's trip to Croton gives us the opportunity to hear Pythagoras's speech. It's one of the longest of the Metamorphoses, comparable to that of Ulysses. (A comparative look at the philosopher from Samos with the hero of Ithaca might prove worthwhile, when time permits.)

More to the point for Metamorphoses 15 is to hear the voice of Pythagoras within the strange narratives that frame it. It's tempting, and far too simplistic, to take the philosopher's speech as in some sense a privileged "reading" of what has come before it. To be sure, Pythagoras does "cover" some of the same ground as books 1-14, with a strong emphasis upon mutability, along with an even stronger ethical argument against the eating of flesh. The Greek contemplative mind is here on display -- far-ranging, vivid, and eloquent. It is accompanied by claims of inspiration from Delphi, elements of prophecy, and extraordinary powers of conception and knowledge.

Yet if Pythagoras wants to have the last word, he certainly doesn't get to have it here. His speech is preceded by the tale of Heracles and Croton. It ends by reiterating the warning against devouring living creatures, beginning with an allusion to the high-flying Phaethon of Book 2 before going on to compare the eating of animals to Thyestean feast, and ending with a warning not to bite off more than we might wish to chew:

Let your mouth be free of their blood, enjoy milder food!

ora cruore vacent alimentaque mitia carpant!

Immediately following this, Numa returns to his people:

he taught the sacred rituals, and educated a savage, warlike, race in the arts of peace 

and dies, in the space of six lines.

Lake Nemi, John Robert Cozens

The "segue" that follows is complex and unexpected. Egeria, mourning Numa, melts into a spring in "Oresteian Diana's" sacred grove in Aricia, but not before receiving cold comfort from Hippolytus, who will vividly evoke the climax of the Phaedra. With no preparation or foreshadowing, we pass from Numa's "arts of peace" to a sacred place suffused with Greek nightmares about innocent sons of accursed royal houses: Orestes of the House of Atreus and Thyestes, and Theseus' blameless son Hippolytus, destroyed by Phaedra, daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë.

Ovid doesn't drop these references casually. Orestes, the murderer of a murderous mother, and Hippolytus, destroyed by his father's curse at this stepmother's behest, both had come to this Nemorean grove. It was here that Hippolytus instituted the office of Rex Nemorensis, priest of Diana, says Pausanias. The kingship was open to no freemen; only to slaves. To accede to the throne, the escapee had to kill the previous priest, also a former slave, in single combat. The tale attracted the attention of Macaulay:

From the still glassy lake that sleeps
Beneath Aricia's trees--
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain 

It inspired Sir James Frazer as well. As Wikipedia notes, the "successful candidate had first to test his mettle by plucking a golden bough from one of the trees in the sacred grove."

As Book 15 moves from Pythagoras to Numa to Hippolytus and eventually Aesculapius, Ovid gives us a good deal to ponder: A peaceable Sabine king dies, his consort hides in triform Diana's grove in Aricia, a place haunted by memories of powerlessness, of refugees from accursed feasts and Cretan labyrinths, the site of a lurid rite of passage and a savage succession of kings.