'Hie "Tyrant of Gods and Men"

17

negotiable everyday experiences of that world, the necessities that defined it and
the place of humans in it. So when we discuss such imagery from. Greek literature, we have to project ourselves imaginatively into a world more directly and
frequently subject to nature's power than is ours.

Madness and the Irrational

Although we still trade in the debased imagery of madness to describe our feelings and condition when we are in love, we don't really believe in any fundamental connection between mental derangement and erotic passion, despite the daily
reports of women stalked and murdered by estranged and deranged husbands and
boyfriends. The Romantic idealization of the irrational, moreover, the positive
charge it gave to madness as a creative and expressive state liberated from the
shackles of bourgeois convention, reduces any serious or threatening import in
our assertions that we are "crazy" about someone or "mad" about her. Indeed,
such assertions are a warrant of sincerity, a testimony to the transforming power of
the attraction. When madness and the erotic do mingle, as in the film Fatal Attraction, the erotic obsession is simply the form the madness takes, rather than expressing itself in pyromania or kleptomania. There is no link between the essential nature of sexual passion and of madness.
But for the Greeks, madness is not just a metaphor for describing what sexual
passion does to the consciousness. Excessive passion is fundamentally a form of
insanity, a destruction of the rational mind's control over the body, a suspension of
reason's power that allows the soul to be overwhelmed by the chaos of the natural
appetites and emotions. As the fifth-century Sophist Prodicus put it, "Desire doubled is love, love doubled is madness." The imagery of madness, then, in Greek literature is more than just imagery: It is the revelation of the true nature of eros.'2
This fundamental connection between sex and madness underlies the character
of Phaedra in Euripides' Hippolytus. Phaedra, as Aphrodite herself tells us, has been
stricken by the goddess with sexual passion for her stepson Hippolytus. He,
though, is a celibate, a worshiper of the virgin goddess Artemis, a devotee of the
hunt, a prim, insufferably superior control freak horrified by the messy world of
sex and women. That's why Aphrodite is going to destroy himhe doesn't acknowledge her power, and so implies that he is something more than mortal. In
describing Phaedra's passion, Euripides doesn't say that she is "like" someone insane because of her desire for this smug prig. She literally is insane, "astounded out
of her mind," the word one used frequently to describe someone out of control
because of fear. Thus Phaedra is described in terms of total mental derangement.
The Chorus speculates that perhaps she is possessed by a god, Pan or Hecate or
Cybele, the Great Mother, goddess of the earth and fertility. When Phaedra is
brought outside, she orders her maids to loosen her haira breach of feminine
decorum no respectable Greek woman in her right mind would indulgeand