Hippolytus

There are at least three different approaches to honor represented in the play. Hippolytus, Phaedra, and the Nurse each exemplify their own definition of honor, showing that honor can mean different things to different people and in different social contexts. Far from having a simple meaning in Euripides’s play, honor is shown to be a complex and often conflicting concept.

Hippolytus, regarded by many scholars and critics as the moral paragon of the play, regards honor as an inner quality. For Hippolytus, honor means personal integrity and the pursuit of self-control, duty, and piety. This is an aristocratic approach to honor, prizing the values of the ancient Greek upper classes. Hippolytus takes pride in his devotion to Artemis and his chastity. He values his honor and refuses to compromise his principles, addressing his father with respect and refusing to break his oath even when it means he cannot defend himself against the false accusations of his stepmother Phaedra. Not that Hippolytus is beyond reproach: He boasts that he is “pure and temperate” (1100), but there are sexual overtones lurking behind his devotion to Artemis, and his cruel rejection of Phaedra and misogynistic tirade show that he is far from temperate. These shortcomings notwithstanding, Hippolytus’s approach to honor defines the concept in terms of distinctly aristocratic values.

The Nurse, representing the lower rungs of Greek society, approaches honor very differently. She places her duty to Phaedra above honor, and though she praises traditional values such as temperance, her occasional praise of moral qualities is always purely practical: If it is best to be temperate, it is not because temperance itself is of value, but because those who live an “unbending” (261) lifestyle are more likely to be tripped up. The Nurse dismisses Phaedra’s concerns with her honor as “high moralizing” (490), urging her to act on her feelings for Hippolytus and telling her bluntly that “what you need / is not fine words, but the man!” (490-91). The Nurse feels no scruples about propositioning Hippolytus in Phaedra’s name even when Phaedra forbade her from doing so, and her justification of immoral behavior on a few occasions echoes the moral relativism that had come to be associated with the sophists of Euripides’s day, itinerant teachers whose lessons emphasized rhetoric and persuasion over strict morality.

Phaedra’s approach to honor falls somewhere in the middle. Unlike the Nurse, Phaedra is not amoral, but her approach to honor is more concerned with the appearance of honor than with honor in itself: In contrast to Hippolytus, Phaedra defines honor as a purely external quality, rather than as an inner one. Phaedra knows that her passion for Hippolytus is morally unacceptable, but the reason she resists her desire is because she wants to maintain her reputation. She contemplates ending her life because she “cannot bear that [she] should be discovered / a traitor to [her] husband and [her] children” (420-21), and ultimately does die by suicide to avoid social dishonor. Phaedra’s equation of honor with reputation is ultimately exposed as shallow and hypocritical, spurring Phaedra’s false accusation of the innocent Hippolytus as a way of maintaining her good name.