 Ancient Rome > Seneca the Younger > Phaedra

INTRODUCTION
Phaedra – Seneca the Younger
ANCIENT GREECE 
– Ancient Rome – Classical
Literature
ANCIENT ROME 

(Tragedy, Latin/Roman, c. 50 CE, 1,280 lines)

OTHER ANCIENT
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CIVILIZATIONS
Introduction | Synopsis | Analysis | Resources

TIMELINE
Introduction

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ALPHABETICAL LIST OF
“Phaedra” (sometimes known as “Hippolytus”) is a tragedy by the Roman
AUTHORS
playwright Seneca the Younger, written around 50 CE. Adapted from
“Hippolytus” by Euripides, it tells the story of Phaedra and her taboo love
INDEX OF INDIVIDUAL
for her stepson, Hippolytus, although with a much more sensual and
WORKS
shameless Phaedra than in Euripides’ Greek original. Today, it is one of

INDEX OF IMPORTANT Seneca’s most widely-read plays, a work of high passion reined in by

CHARACTERS carefully constructed language.

SOURCES

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 Synopsis

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The young Hippolytus is Dramatis Personae – Characters

organizing a hunt, and

HIPPOLYTUS, son of Theseus and an Amazon

invokes Diana, goddess of PHAEDRA, wife of Theseus and stepmother of Hippolytus

THESEUS, king of Athens

the hunt, to help his luck.

NURSE OF PHAEDRA

His stepmother Phaedra MESSENGER

SLAVES AND ATTENDANTS

confesses her burning CHORUS OF ATHENIAN CITIZENS

love for Hippolytus to her

nurse, who tries in vain to
dissuade her. The Chorus
observes that all things
yield to love: men of all
types, as well as animals
and even the gods
themselves. The nurse
complains that love can
result in evil consequences, diseases and violent
passions, but, realizing the hopelessness of the
situation, she resolves to try to help her mistress.


Phaedra appears, dressed up like an Amazon huntress
to please Hippolytus. Her nurse strives to bend
Hippolytus’ will towards the delights of love and to
soften his heart, but he is not willing to change his
mood, preferring hunting and the country life over all the
pleasures of human relations. Phaedra enters and
eventually admits her love directly to Hippolytus.
However, he flies into a rage, drawing his sword on her
but then casting the weapon away and fleeing into the
woods as the distraught Phaedra begs for death to put
her out of her misery. The Chorus prays to the gods that
beauty may be as advantageous to Hippolytus as it has
proved pernicious and fatal to so many others.

Phaedra’s husband, the great Atheneian hero Theseus,

then returns from his quest in the underworld, and,
seeing Phaedra in distress, seemingly prepared to kill
herself, demands an explanation. All the nurse will say in
explanation is that Phaedra has resolved to die.
According to the plan hatched by Phaedra’s nurse to
conceal Phaedra’s guilt by accusing Hippolytus of
attempting to rape his stepmother, Phaedra pretends
that she prefers to die than to admit to Theseus the
wrong that someone has done to him. When Theseus

threatens the nurse to find out the truth of what has
happened, she shows him the sword that Hippolytus
had left.

Consumed with
anger, Theseus
recognizes the
sword and,
jumping to the
conclusion that
Hippolytus has
in fact ravished his wife, curses his undeserving son and
wishes him dead. The Chorus laments that, while the
course of the heavens and of almost everything else
seems to be well regulated, human affairs are clearly not
governed by justice, since the good are persecuted and
the evil are rewarded.


A messenger relates to Theseus how a sea monster
(sent by Theseus’ father Nepture in answer to his prayer)
had emerged from the windswept sea and pursued
Hippolytus’ horses, and how the young man had been
caught up in the reins and torn limb from limb. The
Chorus relates a narrative about the fickleness of
fortune and deplores Hippolytus’ unnecessary death.

Phaedra declares Hippolytus’ innocence and retracts

her confession of his crime, and then kills herself in her
anguish. Theseus deeply regrets the death of his son
and gives him the honour of a proper burial, although he
deliberately refuses this same honour to Phaedra (a dire
sentence in Roman culture).

Analysis

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The myth underlying the story of the play is very old,

going back far beyond even the classical Greeks, and is
found in various forms all over the Mediterranean area.
The particular version involving Phaedra and her

stepson Hippolytus was the subject of several classical
Greek tragedies, including at least one by Sophocles
(lost) and no fewer than two by Euripides. Only the
second of Euripides’ plays, “Hippolytus”, has survived
and it has become one of the most famous and
enduring masterpieces of Western theatre. But it was
actually a toned-down version of his first “Hippolytus”,
now lost, which was apparently censured by classical
Athenian audiences and critics alike for its raciness and
explicitness, with Phaedra actually propositioning
Hippolytus on stage.

Seneca, for whatever reasons, chose to revert more to

the plot line of Euripides’ first “Hippolytus”, in which the
lustful stepmother directly confronts Hippolytus before
the viewers’ eyes. Seneca cuts the goddesses from the
cast, and shifts both the title and the focus of the play
from Hippolytus to Phaedra herself. His Phaedra is
much more human and more shameless, and she
declares herself directly to Hippolytus in the guise of an
Amazon.


 In addition to
Euripides,
though, Seneca
alludes to and
re-writes the
Roman poets
Vergil and Ovid,
particularly the former’s “Georgics” and the latter’s
“Heriodes”, and the whole is filtered through the lens of
Seneca’s own Stoic philosophy.

Seneca’s reliance on description of melodramatic action

is one of his most serious weaknesses as a playwright,
and it lends considerable support to the idea that he
intended his plays to be read rather than acted. In
“Phaedra”, for example, the denouement near the end of
the play where Phaedra, rejected by her stepson,
accuses him of rape to his father, Theseus, is

dramatically weak: Hippolytus is not present, and he and
Theseus do not confront each other over it in any way;
all we have instead is a messenger coming in to inform
Theseus that his son has been killed in an accident,
prompting Phaedra to confess the truth and Theseus to
forgive him posthumously.

Despite this seemingly anti-dramatic quality of

“Phaedra”, however, it (and Seneca’s other tragedies)
exerted a great deal of influence on the European theatre
that followed. In particular, Jean Racine’s well-regarded
17th Century “Phèdre” owes at least as much to
Seneca’s play as to Euripides’ earlier version.

Much of the power of the play stems from the tension

between the high emotionality, violence and passion of
its storyline, and the eloquent discourse through which
Seneca (a famed orator, rhetorician and Stoic
philosopher) communicates the narrative. “Phaedra” is
filled with stirring monologues, clever pieces of rhetoric
and characters who wield language as a weapon.


Although a celebrated hero from Greek mythology, the
character of Theseus is portrayed here as a rather
battered old man whose best years lie behind him, rash,
hot-headed and vengeful, with a terrible fury he does not
know how to check. His wife, Phaedra, is not entirely
sympathetically portrayed, but she does seem to be a
victim of her own emotions, and Seneca even goes so
far as to imply that her tormented feelings and
confusion may stem in part from Theseus’ harshness as
a husband.

The major
themes of the
play include lust
(Phaedra’s lust
for Hippolytus
is the engine
that drives the
tragedy, and the Chorus expounds on examples
 of lust
throughout history); women (Phaedra may be
considered an heir to the tradition of scheming, wicked
women in Greek mythology, such as Medea, although
she is undeniably presented as an empathetic character,
more victim than victimizer, and if anything it is her
nurse who receives the brunt of the play’s blame); nature
versus civilization (Hippolytus argues that civilization
corrupts, and he hankers for the “primal age” of peace,
before the rise of the city, warfare and crime); hunting
(although the play starts with Hippolytus setting out on
a hunt, it soon becomes apparent that he is being
hunted by Phaedra, and that Phaedra herself is a target
of Cupid’s arrows); and beauty (Hippolytus’ beauty is the
initial catalyst of the play, and the Chorus ominously
alludes to beauty’s fragility and the caprice of time).

Today, “Phaedra” is one of Seneca’s most widely-read

works. Tight and compact, following Aristotelian form
but more elliptical in its design, it is a work of high
passion reined in by carefully constructed language, one
of the simplest and most brutal of ancient tragedies.

Resources

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English translation by Frank Justus Miller

(Theoi.com):
http://www.theoi.com/Text/SenecaPhaedra.html
Latin version (The Latin Library):
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/sen/sen.phaedra.shtm

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