Euripides,Hippolytus732–75

Abstract

The centrally-placed second stasimon ofHippolytus, following Phaedra's exit (to die) at 731, is one of the finest features of Euripides' finest play, with complex imagery. The wish to become a bird and to fly away to a mythical far-western paradise is in line with a familiartoposas an ‘out of this world escape-wish’, here vicarious – echoing (while also transmuting) the desires for concealment, escape and death expressed by Phaedra. ‘Bird-transformation’ and ‘flight to the far west’ are funereal motifs, notably developed (recently?) by Sophocles, and the image of Phaedra as a ‘vanished bird’ will recur at 828. Then in the second pair of stanzas Phaedra's fate, with the predicted death by hanging, is integrally linked with the ‘white-winged Cretan ship’ that as a doubly bad ὄρνις brought her ‘through beating sea-waves’ from Crete to Athens, with ‘fastening of ropes’ for the ‘going ashore’ at the end of the voyage.Much has been sufficiently discussed (most recently by Halleran); but many points of detail, in both pairs of stanzas, invite further consideration. I give a modifed text, after Diggle, with modifications also of his apparatus.