Misogyny New and Old: The Darkest Corners of the Web... and Euripides

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Notes

1. Why mention this? Previous Roman elegists had named their amicae after Sappho herself (Catullus’ Lesbia, as Zuckerberg notes with no notice of Sappho’s prestige) or beautiful goddess virginal Diana (Tibullus’ Delia, the Cynthia of Propertius: Zuckerberg inadvertently attaches the feminine epithet to Diana’s brother Apollo). According to her, choice of these names is only a specious hint at actual power belonging to their so-called dominae, “mistresses” as of slaves. The complaining poor, slighted poets cancel the women’s upper hand by reducing them to their manipulated literary creations (132).

2. Zuckerberg notes how Plato’s Republic asserts without qualification that women can be intellectual peers of men. In fact, the same Plato in Symposium had already cast the woman Diotima, whether real or imagined, as Socrates’ teacher about the purest “love,” that of wisdom.

3. The pimp-owner of female slaves is a nasty-hilarious character in many a surviving Roman comedy, e.g., Ballio in Plautus’ masterpiece Pseudolus, as he must have been in countless lost Athenian ones.

4. Zuckerberg here tells us that “In addition to the two Hippolytus plays and Stheneboea Euripides probably wrote at least two lost plays with similar themes: Peleus and Tennes.” She is in a minority of scholars who believe that Tennes is likely Euripidean. Only a single tiny fragment remains. Cultured Greeks of later centuries did not quote it as they did authentic plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Neither the names of its characters nor the gist of their tragedy is recorded in any of the myth compendia like those of Hyginus and Apollodorus that we routinely use to reconstruct other plots of the three great Athenian tragedians’ lost plays. Nevertheless, I treat it as Euripidean in what follows. Zuckerberg would have done better to adduce plays in which married women throw themselves at young heroes who reject them but whom they do not have the chance to charge with molesting them: Euripides’ Cretan Women and Phoenix are two. Or any or all of the Disloyal Princesses. These would be added fuel for the attitude that a blog at Red Pill’s reddit.com named SlutHate promotes, toward condemnation of women—and simplistic praise of Euripides for misogyny.

5. We come below to the question of whether, given their cultural blinders, his contemporaries were right about him. Red Pill adopts comparable blinders; on the other hand, certain feminists have blinders of their own and should not be so stern in judging a literary figure as elusive as the author of both Helen and Orestes.

6. One striking difference between Hippolytus I and II is that in the former Theseus was not in exile from Athens for a mere year’s purifying term, but gone alive to Hades on a sinful errand and easily presumed dead. Phaedra I was thus in a Penelope-like position. Though no Penelope, she may have thought she was eligible to marry, and was probably no older than her stepson.

7. Zuckerberg discusses the poet’s probably preceding treatment of the ‘same’ tragedy in a note (224f n. 60). She is less sure than a majority of Euripidean scholars that the two plays’ roman numbering as I have given it is accurate. She cites a couple of published doubters. However, an ancient scholar’s notice, the same who gives us the year of its performance, calls the extant Phaedra-Hippolytus play “the second”; another ancient scholar who composed a biography of the playwright calls the one now lost to us “the first.” Furthermore, metrical analysis of the fragmentary play’s iambic dialogue lines—36 of them—strongly suggests that the play belongs to the earlier work of the playwright-poet, from 455 to ca. 430. After the extant Hippolytus Euripides’ iambic metra become much less rigid. This has been contested, though not refuted. Any who would postulate a tendency of the poet to become more misogynistic as he passed through middle to old age need more than an improbable down dating of the lost version. I therefore treat the extant play as the poet’s radical revision.

8. On one view, that of the Budé editors Jouan and Van Looy, Aphrodite spoke the prologue to Hippolytus I. There are, however, several reasons to doubt this. (1) No trace of a divine prologue survives; (2) It is hard to believe that Euripides would have begun his two very different treatments of the story the same way, likelier that the appearance of Aphrodite in the second version would have been his up-front surprise; (3) Budé Frs. 2 and 4/Kannicht-Loeb Frs. 433 and 430, which must be spoken by Phaedra, look very much like a prologue’s exposition; in the second of these fragments the speaker declares that Eros has been (her) teacher of evil. Budé Fr. 22/Kannicht-Loeb Fr. 431, if it does belong to this play, is consonant with this, again naming and blaming Eros for bad inciting behavior, even by Zeus. The Loeb editors Collard and Cropp are silent on the prologist. Barrett thinks Fr. 22/431 is from Sophocles’ Phaedra. However, I cannot parallel its irreverent thought content with anything that anyone says in Sophocles.

9. Widowed Alcestis could not give the girl in marriage. Only a male relative of Admetus had that authority, the same who would also control Admetus’ “estate.” He could even marry her. Admetus belongs to the generation before the Trojan War, in which his and Alcestis’ son Eumelus fought (Il. 2.713-715). Furthermore, Euripides’ audiences knew all about the problems Penelope and her son had when Odysseus was presumed dead, and about how Andromache’s worst fears for their infant son Astyanax after her husband Hector’s looming death were all too accurate.

10. Medea’s audience in 431 BCE knew this impending near catastrophe well from previous 5^th-century tragedy and visual arts. See Gantz, pp. 255f, and Loeb vol. 1, pp. 4f on Euripides’ lost Aegeus.

11. Abuse of a married woman was as dishonorable to her father or brother as to her husband; indeed, an attempt to seduce her was more insulting to her family of birth. In the Iliadic form of the story of Bellerophontes (as he is called there), the alleged victim’s husband Proetus sends the hero to Iobates, the father of the accuser (here named Antaea), for punishment (Il. 6.165 on the attempt to seduce; and 168–170 on travel by the alleged sex offender to Antaea’s father Iobates “so he might die/be killed”).

12. The word aidōs is mentioned exactly three times in the script, twice by Hippolytus (at 78, with reference to his obsession with it, and at 998, to characterize his male friends) and here. The cognate verb also appears. Phaedra “feels shame” not to respect the coaxing hand of her loyal Nurse (335). That she felt adulterous and quasi-incestuous lust for her stepson while her husband, his father is alive would be embarrassing to confess and right to resist by any moral code, not only by an obsolete patriarchal one. She and others also speak the language of the shameful/ugly (adjective aiskhros and cognate abstract noun and denominative verb) and of the key ancient virtue sōphrosunē, “sound mindedness,” which is patriarchal in application. For everyone, the adjective sōphrōn generically denotes “prudent,” but for a woman specifically “chaste.” The daughter of King Minos also has much to say (and to fear) about fame/reputation.

13. In his posthumous Iphigenia at Aulis Euripides either follows an otherwise unknown tradition or invents when his Clytemnestra protests that in order to marry her, he slew her first husband and baby son, and that nevertheless she has been a good wife to Agamemnon and borne him several children one of whom he is now about to slaughter. Might the father of any of the young wives have married her off not only far from home (as they all were) but also to an old husband of his own generation after annulling her betrothal to a younger man whom she loved?

14. False claims of divine compulsion in Greek epic and drama are a recurrent motif. The Helen in the Trojan Women who makes one is so different in character from the Iliadic Helen (whom Aphrodite does control but who tries to resist her) that we may well believe Hecuba in the play when she says that the “Aphrodite” whom Menelaus’ wife blames for her adultery was merely the sex appeal, glamour, and wealth of Hecuba’s regrettable son Paris (Tro. 987–997). In Euripides’ Medea Jason declares that for Medea’s life-saving help he has Aphrodite to thank, and Eros, not the Colchian princess (Med. 526–531). This kind of thinking, modernized of course by substituting hormones for those gods, is quite Red Pill-ish in denying that a woman’s love for a man has anything to do with her intention or consent, only with her “nature.” Jason’s self-assured manipulation of the Corinthian princess, is (a) of a piece with this; and (b) suggests how wrong passionate Medea is to suppose that Jason reciprocates the naïve girl’s love. Jason loves only himself.

15. These are such appalling examples of deity that some scholars in every recent generation have theorized that Euripides slyly advocated atheistic rejection of the entire Pantheon. That suspicion is as wrong as it is venerable. Euripides believed in gods who are mostly immoral, hypersensitive to dishonor, or culpably negligent. Athena is an exception for him, and maybe Demeter.

16. Barrett proposes that Budé Fr. 13/Kannicht-Loebe Fr. 435 indicates that Hippolytus also takes an oath of secrecy in Hippolytus I. The Budé editors agree. If so, Phaedra must be constraining him in some way. The Loeb editors suggest that either an oath or obligating supplication is indicated. The latter seems much likelier, since the “[male] having been released” referred to (lutheis) should relate to a suppliant’s grasping of knees. Under the circumstances, an oath with continued grasping of right hands for reciprocal oath-taking seems improbable.

17. The Greek says literally “nor without renown will Phaedra’s erōs that fell upon you [sc. Hippolytus] be kept in silence” (Hipp. 1429f). This litotes “without renown (anōnumos)” describes a positive fame. Moreover, it is not lies (pseudea) nor treachery (doloi) for which she will be remembered, but for that passion inflicted upon her which she resisted with all her mortal woman’s might. No male character in Euripides shows such willful albeit futile resistance to an Olympian god. Although Medea is the Euripidean female most often and obviously likened to a Sophoclean heroine like suicidal Antigone or Electra, who is barely forestalled from a suicidal attack on her father’s killers, Phaedra, though not so obviously in that class, also belongs there. She belongs with Sophocles’ suicide Deïanira (in a tragedy that has intriguing structural correspondences with Hippolytus II) or Ajax (another suicide) or Philoctetes (who attempts and intends to die but, like Sophocles’ Electra, is prevented from doing so by an unexpected person’s entrance).

18. The women’s gathering and conspiring in Scene 1 of Aristophanes’ much better known Lysistrata pretty surely takes place at a fountain where early in the morning housewives are getting their day’s supply of cool water. The comedian’s late play Ecclesiazusae, when the women organize a coup d’état for later that morning, certainly begins at a fountain.

19. Titles of plays were fluid. Sometimes the same play took its name from a chorus or theme, other times after a leading character. Sophocles wrote a Phaedra (as ancient scholars named it) that dramatized the same basic story as that of Euripides’ two plays both of which we now know as Hippolytus I and II. It is possible that Euripides’ “I” was also known as Phaedra, since the character of that name likely spoke the prologue and was around till its end. Hippolytus enters in the second scene of Hippolytus II, after Aphrodite exits up to the sky or down into Theseus’ house at Troezen. Phaedra enters from the house only in the first episode, after the chorus arrive; and the dying youth is present through the final scene. In the earlier play, Phaedra therefore appears before her stepson and is certainly alive longer than he, probably into the last scene, whether or not it included the hypothesized deus or dea ex machina. If her victim was present as well, it was as a corpse. “Phaedra” would have named that play aptly. Can the first play have gotten Hippolytus as an alternative name to mark it as Euripides’ first of two treatments of the story, possibly to distinguish it from Sophocles Phaedra? The Greeks identified the Hippolytuses not by roman numerals, of course, but by added words that referred to the young man’s self-veiling in I, shocked at Phaedra’s proposition, and in II to the garland he brings for (a statue of?) Artemis in the second scene of the play’s Prologue.

20. The “Melanippes” reference there is too complex and elusive to treat in a note. For one thing, Euripides seems almost certain to have written two plays named after their dominant character by that name; however, they did not treat the same episodes of her eventful life. She does not seem to fit any of the evil woman types, certainly not the Potiphar’s Wife model. In one play she seems to have been smart and aggressive, perhaps manipulative (like smart Medea, though hardly as lethally so). There is no guarantee that both plays characterized her in exactly the same way.