Phaedra

“There are two ways to be good. First: want the right thing, no straying.

The second is knowing and setting a limit to one’s sins.”

The Nurse explains her philosophy as she advises Phaedra on her sudden passion for her stepson, perhaps reflecting the Stoic sentiments of the play’s author. However, a true Stoic would hardly have approved of the excesses eventually perpetrated by the Nurse. The Nurse’s attempt to bring Hippolytus and Phaedra together and her suggestion that Phaedra accuse Hippolytus of rape show that she sets a very liberal limit to her sins.

“But even if the holy powers favour you, and hide

Your wicked sexual acts, and if adultery

Is guaranteed the safety that great crimes never get—

What of your instant punishments: bad conscience and fear,

And a guilty heart which always fears itself?

Women may sin unpunished, but never get off scot-free.”

The Nurse warns Phaedra of the dangers of guilt, even more terrible than the all-seeing power of the gods: Even if Phaedra escapes the gods, she can never escape her conscience. These words prove all too true; Phaedra will ultimately be driven to grief and suicide by her actions—all of which could have been avoided if she had managed to control her reckless passions.

“The fiction that love is a god was created by base lust,

Yielding to degradation. To give more license to sin,

The false name of god was given to burning desire.”

Phaedra conceives of her troubles in terms of divine forces, Venus and Cupid; they have inspired her passion for Hippolytus because of malicious spite, or because of desire inherited from her ancestors. The Nurse tries to steer her away from this view, advising her that it is foolish to grant power to what is no more than “base lust.” Phaedra views her emotional impulses as inspired by divine forces, which prevents her from trying to control herself. While impulses can be controlled, gods by definition cannot; this may be part of why Phaedra’s interpretation of her passions is so dangerous.

“Those who have too much power want no limits to their power.”

The Nurse highlights the importance of power—or the lack thereof—in Seneca’s play. Phaedra’s problems stem from the fact that she longs for a kind of power that she cannot have, but also from the fact that she lacks the power to control her own desires and passions. To be powerful, and thus to desire power, is itself a kind of powerlessness.

“The desire to be well is part of what makes us well.”

The Nurse emphasizes the instrumental role of willpower in ethical behavior, a notion with Stoic undertones: To become better, one must want to become better. Phaedra professes that she wants to become well, but she is too determined to see her situation as decreed by the gods to believe that she has any control over her passions, and for this reason sees suicide as the only way to control herself.

“No, Mistress! Moderate the urges of your untamed heart,

Control your impulses. Even this, I think, shows you worthy

Of life, that you deem yourself deserving only death.”

The Nurse dissuades Phaedra from using suicide as a way to escape her impossible desire for Hippolytus, urging her again to “moderate” or control her passions. But Phaedra’s inability to control her passions is the crux of the play: Indeed, it is precisely because Phaedra is so utterly unable to control her desires that she seeks death to keep her reputation intact.

“Scorn reputation, which is never kind to truth—

She treats the less deserving better than the good.”

The Nurse tells Phaedra to forget her fixation on reputation—throwing off reputation will allow her to seek a way to satisfy her reckless passions. Phaedra does seem to follow this advice for at least a little bit, but eventually fails to “scorn reputation” when she confesses the truth after Hippolytus’s death and ends her own life, apparently in an attempt to salvage what small bit of her reputation she can.

“Nature

Takes revenge on them all, and nothing is safe,

And hatred is dead, when love gives commands;

Old resentments yield to the fires of love.

What more can I say? Love conquers

Even the fiercest creatures: stepmothers.”

The Chorus concludes their first choral ode with humor, quipping that even stepmothers, notorious in myth and folktale for cruelty toward their children, are overcome by love. The Chorus establishes the totality of love’s virtually imperial domain, which encompasses all living things in the human, divine, and natural world.

“Shame is no good servant of royal power.”

The Nurse steels herself for what she is about to do. She reminds herself to shun honor and virtue, for only then can she hope to help her mistress as she must. We again are given a glimpse of the Nurse’s cynicism. She is conscious of ethical values and even holds them in esteem, but her practical nature allows her to disregard those values when necessary.

“When the fates are against you, unhappiness can be forgiven.

But if you make yourself wretched of your own accord,

Self-tormentor, you deserve to lose

The good you failed to use.”

The Nurse tries to persuade Hippolytus to change his ways by arguing that he is being too hard on himself when “the fates” are not even working against him. Hippolytus has no reason to suffer as he does. Hippolytus himself does not believe himself to be suffering, and it’s because of this that the Nurse’s argument fails.

“But Woman is the root of all evil. Full of her wicked schemes,

She lays siege to men’s minds. How many cities have burned

Because of her adulteries! How many wars they have caused,

How many kingdoms overturned, how many enslaved!”

Hippolytus blames all the woes of the world on women, alluding to the destruction inspired by women (especially women in myth). Hippolytus’s chastity is shown to spring not simply from a desire to retain his purity before Diana, but from a violent misogyny. Hippolytus’s hatred of women echoes traditional Greek ideas about the dangers of women in a male-dominated world. Seneca is repurposing Greek source material, so his use of such sentiments fits with the context.

“I have fallen in a terrible sort of love. If I press forward,

Perhaps I can hide my sin under the marriage torch.

Success sometimes makes wickedness look good.”

As Phaedra urges her soul on, she contemplates marriage to Hippolytus as a potential way to “hide” her sin—this way, her impure motives will be disguised by a semblance of propriety. Phaedra’s remark that “success sometimes makes wickedness looks good” hints that she is still very much fixated on her reputation, and that she is more interested in how she is perceived by others than in displaying moral qualities.

“Act as my witness, gods, I do not desire

What I desire.”

Phaedra emphasizes that she is acting against her will, highlighting again that she views her desires and impulses as something external to herself. Phaedra believes that she literally cannot control herself. She distinguishes between her intentions and her actions, and seems to believe that the distinction will allow her, on some level, to retain her good name.

“A kind of heat—or, love—

Burns up my mad heart. It rages like wildfire

In my marrow, through my veins. It scorches,

Buried in my belly, secretly running through me,

As a quick flame runs over timbered roofs.”

Phaedra likens her feelings of love to fire devastating and pervading her entire body, adding imagery to the symptoms of her love described throughout the play. The image of love as fire is familiar in ancient Greek and Roman literature. It is taken to new heights here, further developing the motif of nature that runs throughout the play and highlighting the way Phaedra views nature—as wild and hostile.

“I am untainted, pure, untouched by stain, and chaste:

Only for you I changed. I have stooped to prayer, and I know

This day will end my pain, or end my life.

Have mercy on me. I love you.”

In the scene’s climax, Phaedra confesses her love to Hippolytus, putting herself at his mercy and emphasizing that the only alternative to her pain would be her death. Phaedra is careful also to highlight—characteristically—that she is a virtuous woman, “untainted, pure, untouched by stain, and chaste,” and that it is only her overwhelming feelings for Hippolytus that have spurred her to behave in a manner directly antithetical to her character—or what she perceives as her character.

“Hippolytus, now you have answered my dearest wish:

You have restored my sanity. This is better than I hoped for,

That I should die at your hands, and keep my purity.”

After Hippolytus spurns her, Phaedra shocks him further by asking him to kill her. Phaedra’s desire to die with her “purity” intact highlights that she has not rejected her desire for a good reputation after all. She seems to feel something akin to an erotic thrill at the idea of not only dying with her reputation, but at “[Hippolytus’s] hands.”

“Beauty is a questionable gift for mortals,

A temporary blessing, which lasts a little while,

Then swiftly slips away on running feet.”

The Chorus meditates on the transience of beauty. They personify it with human qualities and as an entity with a life of its own that “swiftly slips away on running feet.” Hippolytus’s own beauty has harmed him by inspiring the lust of his stepmother, and soon it will lead to his death. The fading of Theseus’s beauty has also led to Hippolytus’s downfall, for it was the loss of the aging Theseus’s good looks, as well as his absence, that drew Phaedra to the younger Hippolytus.

“How life deceives us! You hid your real feelings,

You put a pretty face on your base thoughts;

Shame hid your shamelessness, coolness hid your daring,

Duty hid your wickedness. False men profess their truth,

Soft sybarites act tough.”

Theseus immediately believes Phaedra’s fabricated story of how Hippolytus raped her, without seeking corroborating evidence or even questioning Hippolytus. Theseus’s readiness to believe that his son has behaved treacherously and lecherously sheds a light on Theseus’s own character; he can believe that his son is violent toward women because he too has participated in violence toward women.

“Fortune rules chaotically over human life,

She scatters her gifts without looking, preferring the worse.”

By proclaiming the power of “Fortune,” the Chorus attributes the sad events of the play to transcendental and even divine forces, which operate blindly without regard to the moral qualities of the human beings they impact. Yet the play’s outcome can also be interpreted as resulting from the failure of the characters to control their passions and emotions. In the world of the play, Fortune and human responsibility exist side by side.

“If only we could escape

The link of nature, chaining parents to their blood!

We follow nature even against our will.

I wanted to kill him for his crimes, but now I mourn his loss.”

Theseus speaks of how all human beings are slaves to nature, “even against our will,” citing this as the reason for grieving his son. These lines reflect on the theme, so central in the play, of man’s impotence in the face of nature and natural impulses. This impotence is experienced not only by Theseus, but by the other characters.

“How many chances turn the wheels of human life!

Fortune keeps her temper with the lowly,

The blows of heaven are weaker on the weak:

Peace and obscurity keep simple people safe,

And those who live in hovels live to a ripe old age.”

The Chorus begins their final ode by declaring that those who are more powerful and wealthy are targeted by fortune, while the “lowly” tend to remain safer. The Chorus’s notion of “Fortune” as an external, impersonal force governing human life is belied by the play’s representation of powerful characters. Phaedra and Theseus succumb to their destructive passions and impulses, but their willful nature suggests that they may be able to control them if they tried. Perhaps it is not that the powerful are targeted by fate, but that they are more likely not to take responsibility for their actions.

“Ah, where is your beauty gone, your lovely eyes

Which were my stars? Can you really be lying there dead?”

Phaedra mourns the dead Hippolytus even though she is the cause of his death, showing how little control she exercises over herself and her behavior. Phaedra is still moved by Hippolytus’s beauty, even now that it is gone. Far from finding that Hippolytus’s death has solved her problems, she is so racked by guilt that she kills herself.

“Here, bring here the remains of his dear corpse,

That mass of body-parts, heaped up all anyhow.

Is this Hippolytus? I recognize my crime […]”

Theseus claims to “recognize” his crime, but the play suggests he hasn’t changed. Theseus’s uncontrolled emotions led him to curse Hippolytus in the first place, and now Theseus again gives way to his uncontrolled emotions as he mourns Hippolytus.