The Bastard Who Didn’t Want To Grow up

Introduction

The basis for this essay is L.A. Swift’s article “Mixed Choruses and Marriage Songs: A New Interpretation of the Third Stasimon of the ‘Hippolytos’” in the Journal of Hellenic Studies. The focus here, however, is more on the final interpretation than any particular section.

The third stasimon of Euripides’ Hippolytus presents challenges in the presence of a mixed chorus and the deliberate misapplication of wedding imagery to Hippolytus in a way seemingly contrary to his previous characterization. The contrariness is an illusion. Hippolytus himself establishes this misapplication in his initial speech when he appropriates and gatekeeps traditional imagery of premarital female sexuality as well as preventing the blossoming of the burgeoning sexuality. Hippolytus, despite his masculine bragging about hunting, frames himself as the female participant in marriage — or rather before marriage. He creates an imbalance. Since Hippolytus has refused to occupy the male part, Phaedra tries to take the male role when she expresses an urge to go to the Meadow of the bride. But she isnot in the ‘correct’ role. Thus by the time we reach the third stasimon the exile of Hippolytus, a bachelor, is framed as if it is the departure of a bride.

If all were as it ought to be, the death of the old life which a bridal departure highlights would be replaced by a new life with the husband. Since Hippolytus has placed himself in the female role and, furthermore, refuses to surrender his chastity, he cannot complete the process. He cannot die. He cannot be reborn into the new life. All he can do is die and remain as a ghost in his own hero cult.

Commentary

Hippolytus is defying a gender binary and the concept of change much like Peter Pan in modern media mythology for whom death will be an awfully great adventure and who, critically, ‘thins out’ the Lost Boys whenever they break the cardinal rule of growing up — an inevitability. This limitation in Hippolytus’ character is a hard limit in Euripides but the new life after death can be found in the stories told in Vergil’s Aeneid and the intermediate traditions. The dying Hippolytus finds a new life in the Virgilian tradition in far-off Italy as Virbius, ‘the twice-born’, even begetting a son of the same name. This son is the Virbius who appears in the Aeneid as a Trojan foe. Even in his second life, Hippolytus must remain apart from the profane world. The failure of Hippolytus to change, even in the face of death, but his worshippers’ resurrection, the ultimate change, is a fitting image for the role of a hero cult centered around someone who is not quite a God. The devotees of the eternal male virgin (pace Vergil) are female virgins whose current state is that of inevitable future change.