Excerpts from Kenneth J. Reckford, "Phaethon, Hippolytus, Aphrodite,"  Transactions of the American Philological Association, vol 103, 1972.

Critics have noted that the lovely escape ode (732-75) following Phaedra's last words in Hippolytus looks forward doubly to her death, not only with a prophetic foreboding that she will hang herself (the ship-cable turning to a rope for hanging), but by more subtle hints that Phaedra's aspiration for freedom, integrity, and purity of life can only be achieved in death.  Yet the fates of Phaedra and Hippolytus are constantly interwoven, not least in their shared idealism; so that the lovely picture at the end of the first strophe of the escape ode, where the unhappy maidens, in pity for Phaethon, weep tears of radiantly gleaming amber into the dark purple swell, reflects also the fate of Hippolytus, through allusion to a parallel myth (a common Euripidean device), and evokes a feeling and mood specially pertinent to his tragedy.  Wilamowitz pointed out in the introduction to his 1891 translation of Hippolytus how much Euripides was apparently inspired by the cult ceremony, surviving at Troezen, in which maidens cut their hair before marriage and sang a cult song in honor of Hippolytus. Their feeling, said Wilamowitz, is all-important here: for marriage involves loss as well as gain; the bride is separated from her parents and erstwhile companions; she must give up, often in special symbolic ceremonies, the things of childhood; and in losing her virginity she undergoes a kind of death, to emerge in the new married state as a grown woman.

We might develop the point further. For the Greek maiden, lacking the possibility offered today by "adolescence" of a gradual (if not always smooth) transition from childhood to adulthood, the abrupt initiation into the new life of marriage must often have been traumatic. So Euripides has Medea indicate in her penetrating comments on the unhappy condition of Greek wives.  All the more must the religious ceremonies preceding Greek marriages be taken seriously as initiation rituals, rites of passage necessary to the continuituing psychic integrity of the new bride. This is not to say that Greek marriages were always unhappy experiences: far from it. Many weddings were ultimately joyful; all were meant to be joyful. But to support the transition through the death of childhood to the re-emergence of personality in the new married life, the experience of loss and suffering had somehow to be expressed, as indeed it was at Troezen in the cutting of a lock of hair, the song, and the tears for Hippolytus.

In standing for the loss of maiden innocence, Hippolytus corresponds closely to Hymenalos, who obviously personifies the maidenhood which must "disappear" at the time of marriage. Like Hymenaios too, Hippolytus seems at an earlier stage of myth to have been an attendant spirit of Aphrodite. Still earlier, he may have been the Dying God who was loved by the Mother and was mourned by her after his passion and death. What matters for our purposes is that i Hippolytus, as elsewhere, Euripides related a recent legend, well known at Athetis, to an older and deeper i-nyth. The young man who resists temptation in the familiar " Potiphar's wife" story now takes on larger overtones, of a universal "loss of innocence " by which we all-women and men alike-must be deeply affected: hence, I think, the unusual success of this tragedy in achieving a "catharsis of pity and terror."

Artemis' prophecy, therefore (1423-29), that "unyoked maidens before marriage will cut their hair for you," that Hippolytus will reap the fruit of their tears through ages to come and receive their loving concern through song, is more than a requisite piece of learned aetiology dragged in toward the play's end or an earnest but rather lame attempt to console a dying man. Rather, it gives express form to something intimated throughout the play, returning us at last to the point of inspiration from which the second Hippolytus seems to have germinated.

In retrospect, we might notice how often the diction and imagery of ,Hippolytus reflect the mood and feeling of the Troezeiiian cult cere- mony. The cutting of hair, forexample,is anticipated in the"virgin meadow" to which "iron never came" (76-77), where the landscape suggests both Hippolytus' virginal nature and striving after purity and the perils to which these are exposed. It may give added point to the Nurse's curious and impractical suggestion (514) of obtaining a lock of hair from Hippolytus for her "magic charm." Again, the wedding ceremony in the background sheds light on the troubling lines (428-30) in which time is said to reveal bad people, holding up a mirror "as to a young maiden." Time not only reveals wrongdoers, as Phaedra here indicates.  It also brings what the mirror discovers: a loss of maiden innocence-whose metaphysical significance Euripides is extending to Phaedra, much as to Hippolytus, indeed to all mankind. And again: Hippolytus' farewell to Artemis (1440-41),

Farewell too and be happy, blessed maiden;
lightly you leave a long companionship.

seems unmistakably in its note of resignation yet gentle complaint to echo a familiar topos of wedding-songs. The bride is"deserting" the companions of her youth. Once more, the stress is on loss and separation, an aspect of marriage to which Euripides, like Catullus after him, was deeply sympathetic, and which must have had an ancient place in the marriage-song tradition previous to its literary developments.

Running through the play, but most fully developed here and in Artemis' later prophecy, the metaphor of the "yoke of marriage and destruction" is closely connected with the central theme of "loss of innocence." Critics have generally discussed the horses more than the yoke, showing for example how these symbolize Hippolytus' striving for purity and freedom-a striving which Phaedra significantly shares- but also, like the bull, come to embody the manner in which repressed emotions veer out of control and bring destruction.

In their hymn to Eros (525-640, following the Nurse's ominous exit), the chorus illustrates the power of Eros and Aphrodite by the examples of Iole, whose "bloody marriage" was to bring death to Heracles; and also of Semele, whom Kypris "married and bedded down to a murderous fate:" her destruction by lightning (561-62).  As so often, the chorus convey more than they intend: notjust love's might, but Aphrodite's power to destroy.

To return one last time to the great lamentation ode: the appeal of the united choruses to the "yoking Graces" (cf 1131) yokes together several disparate ideas, to great dramatic effect. The singers are complaining of the horses, who should not be bearing their master into exile. In fact, they are (in the space of time covered by the ode) carrying him to his death, an unkindness of which he himself will be heard to complain, and a dramatic embodiment of the loss of control and reversal of high aspirations that he must suffer. It all comes out in the messenger speech. Hippolytus fails to master his crazed horses, he crashes against a rock, the chariot is wrecked, he himself is caught in the reins and dragged, terribly broken, by the careening horses-until at last he is "loosed." When Artemis sees him, her first words state that he was "yoked to disaster" (1389). But the yoking Graces who draw Hippolytus to his fate are also marriage deities. The yoke of marriage is also a yoke of destruction, as it was for Iole and Semele: and if, in time to come, "unyoked maidens" will cut their hair and weep for Hippolytus, it is because the fate awaiting them, the loss of innocence and forced submission to marriage and maturity, was symbolically pre-suffered by Hippolytus. Thus the "yoke of marriage and destruction" helps reunite different levels of meaning in Euripides' play, fusing the traditional story of the hero "rent by horses" (the tempted youth, who may be derived however from the Dying God, companion of Aphrodite and loved by her) with the deep and universal experience of "loss of innocence " which finds religious expression in the ceremonies at Troezen. This is why we are so deeply moved by the Second Hippolytus, not the simple story of the idealistic youth (his name is legion) whom an older woman  attempts to seduce and, that failing, slanders to her husband. This is not to ignore Euripides' other accomplishments in the second version: for example, his subtle and ennobling, though realistic, treattment of Phaedra, and his complex interweaving of the actions, thoughts, and feelings of his principal characters.   Indeed, one of the deep-laid secrets of the play is that Phaedra suffers a "loss of innocence " such as Hippolytus embodies. It is "the fate man was born for," and  it is ourselves that we, like the maidens of Troezen, mourn for.