“Leave the matter to me, and if women can’t effect a cure, perhaps men can.”
Phaedra protests. The Nurse answers with a little very natural impatience (l. 490)
“τί σεμνομυθεῖς; οὐ λόγων εὐσχημόνων
δεῖ σ’, ἀλλὰ τἀνδρός.”
Phaedra admits this, but insists that it would be more respectable to die. The Nurse, however, persuades her to try a love-potion first, and with this excuse leaves her to look for Hippolytus. Hippolytus, as one knows, rejects the Nurse’s proposals, and Phaedra takes refuge in suicide, making, as she dies, one last desperate attempt to save her own good name at the expense of the man she is supposed to love (l. 715).
This, then, is the story of Phaedra. Where in all this is there a trace of what we now call love? Where is there a single expression of affection for Hippolytus, a single expression to show that she thinks of him otherwise than of one who has done her a great and irretrievable injury? She seems to think of him as one would think of a man from whom one had caught the cholera. “Love is all bitterness,” she says (l. 349); “and he is the cause.” The catastrophe comes, and she walks off quietly to murder him,
“ὥστ’ εὐκλεᾶ μὲν παισὶ προσθεῖναι βίον,
αὐτή τ’ ὄνασθαι πρὸς τὰ νῦν πεπτωκότα.”
If this is love, the world must be a poorer place than I gave it credit for.
Then follows the great argument between Hippolytus and his father, which to the Athenians was doubtless the chief point of the play. On the speech of Theseus we need not dwell, though it is perhaps just worth noticing the way in which he enunciates, as a sort of great discovery which his own experience and observation have enabled him to make, the theory that it is possible for the initiative in a criminal liaison to come from the side of the man (l. 966 seqq.).