Hippolytus, son of Theseus and devotee of Artemis

Hippolytus is the son of Theseus and an Amazon, a young hunter devoted to Artemis who rejects love and the worship of Aphrodite. His stepmother Phaedra falls in love with him; in Euripides’ surviving tragedy, her nurse reveals the secret and Phaedra later leaves a false accusation. Theseus curses his son, Poseidon sends a bull from the sea, and Hippolytus is dragged to death by his own horses. A later tradition, however, has Asclepius revive him and gives him a second life in Italy as Virbius.

The son of an Amazon

His mother’s identity varies. Theseus, who joined Heracles against the Amazons or raided them on his own in other versions, carried off one of their queens: Antiope for most writers, Melanippe for some, Hippolyta according to Simonides (Apollodorus, Epitome, 1.16). That last variant is why the son is so often confused with the Amazon queen whose belt Heracles seizes in his ninth labour.

The boy was raised at Troezen in the Peloponnese by Pittheus, Theseus’ maternal grandfather and a son of Pelops. Pausanias says Theseus sent him there after marrying Phaedra, so that he would one day rule Troezen instead of competing for Athens with the queen’s future sons (1.22.2).

The hunter who spurns Aphrodite

In Euripides, Hippolytus first appears offering Artemis a garland woven from a meadow “no iron has ever touched”; he alone among mortals keeps company with the goddess, hearing her voice without seeing her face (Hippolytus, 73-87). He greets Aphrodite’s statue from a distance with cold courtesy. This is what the goddess punishes, as she explains in the prologue before he even steps on stage (1-57).

The refusal is more than a character trait. Hippolytus embodies a phase of Greek life, the adolescence of hunting and devotion to Artemis, which he tries to prolong forever. His tragedy is that of a young man who will not cross into marriage and who is destroyed by someone else’s marriage: his father’s.

Phaedra’s accusation and Theseus’ curse

Phaedra, daughter of Minos, burns for him. In the surviving Hippolytus, her nurse reveals the secret to him after extracting an oath of silence. He responds with a notorious tirade against women (616-668), but keeps his word. Phaedra, convinced she is ruined, hangs herself and leaves tablets accusing him. Theseus, refusing to listen, banishes his son and calls on one of the three wishes Poseidon owes him.

A messenger reports Hippolytus’ death in one of the most famous speeches in Greek drama (1173-1254). On the coast road a vast wave rears up and throws a monstrous bull onto the shore; the horses bolt, the chariot smashes against the rocks, and the young man, tangled in the reins, is dragged and battered. Carried back dying, he sees Artemis appear to reveal the truth to Theseus, and he forgives his father before he dies.

Brought back by Asclepius

Several traditions refuse that ending. Hippolytus appears in the list of those Asclepius raised from the dead, the offence that led Zeus to strike the healer with lightning (Apollodorus, 3.10.3). At Epidaurus, Pausanias saw an old inscribed slab recording that Hippolytus had dedicated twenty horses to the god in thanks for his cure (2.27.4).

Latin poets gave the resurrection an Italian sequel. In Virgil, Hippolytus, restored by Paeonian herbs, is hidden by Diana in her sacred grove at Aricia near Lake Nemi, where he lives on as Virbius; that is why horses are barred from the grove (Aeneid, 7.761-782). In Ovid, Hippolytus tells the nymph Egeria the story of his own death and return (Metamorphoses, 15.492-546).

The cult at Troezen

Hippolytus was not only a stage character: he was a worshipped hero. Pausanias describes at Troezen a large precinct, said locally to have been founded by Diomedes, with a temple, an old statue and a priest serving for life. Every girl, before her marriage, came to cut a lock of her hair and dedicate it to him (2.32.1). Euripides knew the rite: at the end of the play, Artemis promises Hippolytus that the unmarried girls of Troezen will offer him their hair and sing forever of Phaedra’s love (1423-1430).

The Troezenians, Pausanias adds, would not show his grave and denied that he was dragged to death; instead they identified him with the constellation of the Charioteer (2.32.1). In Athens, by contrast, a monument to Hippolytus stood below the Acropolis (1.22.1).

Legacy

Hippolytus passed through Seneca, Racine and Rameau. Racine’s Phèdre (1677) gives him a love for Aricie, which Racine explicitly drew from the Virgilian tradition; Rameau made the pair the subject of his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733). In 1890 James George Frazer opened The Golden Bough at the grove of Nemi and its strange priest-king, taking the cult of Virbius as one starting point for his theory of sacred kingship.

Further reading

For the tragedy from the queen’s side, read Phaedra, then her Cretan family through Minos and Ariadne. For the father and the god who granted his curse, see Theseus and Poseidon. For the two goddesses who fight over him, see Artemis and Aphrodite; for his second life, Asclepius.