Phaedra, daughter of Minos and wife of Theseus

Phaedra is the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae, sister of Ariadne and wife of Theseus. In Euripides’ surviving version, she falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus, but it is her nurse who reveals the secret to him. Phaedra then leaves tablets accusing Hippolytus of attempted rape and hangs herself. The father curses the son, Poseidon grants the curse, and Hippolytus dies. The plot is short; the telling is everything, which is why Phaedra has been rewritten for the stage more often than almost any other woman in Greek myth.

A daughter of the Cretan house

Phaedra comes from a family in which desire arrives as a curse from the gods. Her mother Pasiphae, a daughter of Helios, was struck by Poseidon with a passion for a bull; her sister Ariadne betrayed their father for a foreigner; her half-brother was the Minotaur. Apollodorus lists her with Acalle, Xenodice and Ariadne among the daughters of Minos and Pasiphae (3.1.2).

Homer names her once, among the heroines Odysseus sees in the underworld: “And I saw Phaedra and Procris and fair Ariadne, daughter of baneful Minos” (Odyssey, 11.321-322). That is enough to show the figure is old, but the love story that made her famous only appears later, in Athenian tragedy.

Married to Theseus

After Minos’ death, Phaedra’s brother Deucalion made an alliance with Athens and gave his sister to Theseus in marriage (Diodorus, 4.62). Theseus already had a son, Hippolytus, by an Amazon, named Antiope or Hippolyta depending on the source. Phaedra bore him two sons, Acamas and Demophon (Apollodorus, Epitome, 1.18), who would later fight at Troy.

The marriage was political: it sealed peace between Crete and Athens after the war and the tribute. It also brought into Theseus’ household a young queen, a stepson of about her age, and a contested succession.

Desire for Hippolytus

Hippolytus had been raised at Troezen by his great-grandfather Pittheus. A chaste hunter devoted to Artemis, he scorned Aphrodite. In the prologue of Euripides’ Hippolytus, Aphrodite herself announces her revenge: she has made Phaedra love him in order to punish him, and Phaedra will be destroyed with him, “with her good name intact, but destroyed all the same” (47-48).

Pausanias saw at Troezen a myrtle whose every leaf was pierced: Phaedra, sick with love, was said to have stabbed them with her hairpin while watching Hippolytus exercise (2.32.3). In Athens, a shrine of Aphrodite by the Acropolis was said to have been founded by Phaedra, facing toward Troezen (Euripides, Hippolytus, 29-33; Pausanias, 1.22.1).

Two plays by Euripides

Euripides dramatised the story twice, and the difference matters. His first Hippolytus, called “Veiled” (Kalyptomenos) and now lost, showed Phaedra declaring her love to her stepson herself, while Hippolytus covered his head in shame. It seems to have scandalised Athenian audiences.

The second, Hippolytus “Garlanded” (Stephanephoros), won first prize in 428 BC and survives. Here Phaedra struggles against her passion and starves herself so as to die without speaking, until her nurse drags the secret out of her. The nurse reveals it to Hippolytus under an oath of silence; his furious tirade convinces Phaedra that she is ruined. She hangs herself and leaves writing tablets accusing him of rape.

Sophocles also wrote a Phaedra, surviving only in fragments. The mythographic tradition summarised by Apollodorus keeps a harsher version: fearing exposure, Phaedra breaks open her own chamber doors, tears her clothes and accuses Hippolytus; when the truth comes out after his death, she hangs herself (Epitome, 1.18-19).

The curse and the bull from the sea

Theseus believed her. Poseidon had promised to grant him three wishes, and he spent one cursing his son. As Hippolytus drove his chariot along the shore away from Troezen, a bull surged out of the sea, the horses panicked, and he was dragged to death. In Euripides, Artemis appears at the end to reveal his innocence, and the dying son forgives his father.

Pausanias reports that Polygnotus, in his great painting of the underworld at Delphi, showed Phaedra on a swing, a transparent allusion, he says, to her death by hanging (10.29.3).

An old pattern: the rejected wife who accuses

Phaedra’s story belongs to a narrative type Greek myth tells more than once. Bellerophon, a guest of King Proetus, refuses the queen Anteia (Stheneboea in later writers), who then accuses him to her husband (Iliad, 6.155-170). Peleus suffers the same from Astydamia, wife of Acastus. The pattern is best known in English as the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. With Phaedra, though, the focus shifts from the young man’s virtue to the conscience of the woman who desires him.

From Seneca to Racine

Seneca, in the first century AD, made Phaedra the undisputed centre of the play: she confesses her love to Hippolytus in person and, after his death, tells Theseus the truth and falls on a sword. Ovid gives her a love letter in the Heroides (4).

Jean Racine’s Phèdre (1677) fixed the modern image of the character. He shifts the accusation onto the nurse Oenone, gives Hippolytus a love of his own, the princess Aricie borrowed from Virgil, and has Phaedra die by poison after a final confession. Her line “C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée” (“It is Venus, wholly fastened on her prey”) restates Euripides’ idea of a passion imposed by Aphrodite. In his preface Racine claims Euripides as his model while admitting he softened Phaedra’s guilt to make her more pitiable.

Further reading

For Phaedra’s Cretan family, read Minos, Pasiphae and Ariadne, then their ancestor Europa. For her husband and stepson, see Theseus and Hippolytus. For the two goddesses whose rivalry drives the tragedy, see Aphrodite and Artemis.