When the nurse in Euripides’ Hippolytus first discovered the nature of Phaedra’s love she was horrified: ‘‘Aphrodite is no mere god, but something more than a god,’’ who is destroying us all (359-61). In the speech that will concern us (433-81) she puts that horror aside: yet the memory of it survives, with the suggestion that this, rather than the casualizing approach she now adopts, may be the more appropriate response, and perhaps the more sincere one, to so shattering a predicament. For peithO (persuasion) often has an erotic tinge (Buxton 1982), and here the nurse is a sort of vicarious seducer (Goff 1990, 48). Yet it is so evident that such talk, urging Phaedra to give in to her desire, has an altogether skewed relation to the realities of the situation. It is just not going to work, for Hippolytus himself is certain not to play.
Several features mark her speech as artful, contrived, over-clever - the attributes which cluster together, as with Cleon’s speech in Thucydides’ Mytilenean debate, and can reasonably be called ‘‘rhetorical’’ (Gould 1978, 56). That is partly a matter of style: the self-conscious beginning which contrasts the speech she is about to make to what she has said or thought before, just as Clytemnestra does in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon at 1372-73 (discussed below), or as Cleon begins that Thucydidean speech with reflection on what ‘‘he has often thought before’’ (3.37.1; Macleod 1983, 92), or as an orator may start by comparing the tone he must strike now with his words or behavior on previous occasions (Antiphon 6.7-10; Lysias 22.1-4; Demosthenes 5.5-12, 15.1-4, 41.1-2, 48.2-4; Isaeus 3.3-4; Thucydides 1.68.2, 1.140.1; Aristophanes Clouds 1401-5; Fraenkel 1961).
Then the argument moves on in two-step, with a series of carefully balanced antitheses. Time and again the nurse makes a generalization about life - human life, divine life - and matches it to the current situation: yet a listener in the theater will surely suspect that the parallel does not work, or works in ways which are less cozy than she suggests.
You are in love - what’s strange about that - many people do it; will you then die for the sake of love? There’s no benefit for those who love people near them, and those who will do so in future, if they must die for it. (Hippolytus 439-42)
Two lines there for love and death, but with a further internal contrast stressing that Phaedra is not alone in loving, phrased as a bullying, ‘‘epiplectic’’ (Mastronarde 1979, 13) rhetorical question. Then two further lines in which she and those ‘‘many people’’ are consolidated into a single ‘‘those,’’ and love and death are brought together again, and absurdly. But are those lovers’ predicaments all so similar? ‘‘People near them’’ (ton pelas) is comfortably vague: but in this case the man is far too ‘‘near’’ for comfort. Others fall in love, that is true; but this is not just any love, but a desire for her own stepson, something close to incest.
How many husbands do you think, if they are sensible, turn a blind eye to the sickness in their marriages? How many fathers help their sons to find a way of coping with their love-affairs when the boys have gone astray? This is a mark of sense among mortals, to let dishonorable things remain hidden. (462-66)
Yes, there may be complaisant husbands in the world, but who is the relevant husband here? Theseus. And who is the indulgent father? Again, Theseus. The nurse goes on, with an emphatic mix of metaphors:
For neither should mortals toil too much over crafting their lives, nor would you spend time on perfecting the roof of a house. Falling into fortune like yours, how do you think you could swim away? (467-69)
Again, the close antithetical structure, putting together two points as if they are evidently and comfortingly equivalent, is anything but comforting. Athenian listeners, like modern, would probably prefer their house-roof to be the object of some concern, for otherwise one gets very wet when it rains. And the house-imagery, so frequent in this play, marks exactly why this is so wrong. It is the house which is so threatened, to its foundations as well as to its roof.
Other features too mark the unease. The gods too behave badly: why should you be different? That is a style of argument we find elsewhere. It was there already in Eumenides, where the Erinyes ‘‘resort to mythologized mudslinging’’ (Lebeck 1971, 135) against Apollo (640-51); it is used by Helen in her exchange with Hecuba in Trojan Women (948-50); Theseus adopts it in his attempt to argue Heracles out of suicide in Heracles (1313-19), in a way that Heracles himself in famous lines finds morally unacceptable (1341-46). Aristophanes makes it one of the disreputable arguments in the mouth of‘‘Wrong’’ in Clouds:
If by chance you are taken in adultery, this is what you will reply to the husband, that you have done nothing wrong. Then transfer the responsibility to Zeus, saying that even he is a slave to love and women, and how can you, a mortal, be stronger than a god? (1079-82)
So - a pretty clear marker of suspicious rhetoric. But notice too how the nurse even outdoes the exaggeration of Aristophanes’ parody. Not merely is resistance hopeless (Clouds), it is actually hubris even to try - ‘‘for this is nothing other than hubris, to want to be superior to the gods [kreisso daimonon einai thelein]’ (475-76). The bullying tone is clear, but also again the slipperiness of the argument, helped by the breadth of the word kreisso, ‘‘more powerful’’ as well as ‘‘better.’’
The slipperiness continues in the end of the speech (Mills 2002, 63). Tolma d’ erosa, says the nurse: ‘‘Bear up under your love,’’ as Barrett translates it (1964, 246) - or is it rather ‘‘Be bold in your love,’’ pointing to a ‘‘daring’’ which will be more a question of action, seizing the initiative rather than simply submitting? Then the nurse talks vaguely of ways it can be coped with: there are charms and spells, and some pharmakon for this disease will be found... (478-81). Charms, spells, cures (Goff 1990,48-53; McClure 1999, 140-41) - but for what? For Phaedra, to treat and heal her love? Or for Hippolytus, to instill love rather than repress it?
So the ‘‘rhetorical’’ cast of this speech - its antithetical smoothness, its concatenation of different analogies and metaphors, its carefully modulated rhythm as it builds to its final appeal - goes with the ‘‘sophistic’’ nature of the case it makes (Knox 1952a 10-12; Gregory 1991, 68-70), casualizing what is not to be casualized, using arguments which are transparently inadequate. What does this contribute to the play? This is not a case that maps straightforwardly onto contemporary life: the corrupt speakers of Orestes might have reminded an audience of politicians they had heard, but they are unlikely to have much acquaintance with smooth-speaking and sophistically adept household servants. The psychology of the speaker matters (we need to know that the nurse is not reflecting her deepest or at least her initial feelings), but that cannot be as important as it might be with Electra’s tortured imaginings: the nurse is not sufficiently important a figure for that, and her suffering, however real, is only tangential to the downfall of the house. There may well be some suggestion again of a travesty of role-playing: the nurse has to serve as confidante and aide, just as Orestes is cast as avenger or Clytemnestra as villain, but all those roles sit uncomfortably on the needs of the situation: this aspiring go-between has nowhere realistic to go. We will get a similar, and even more elaborate, travesty of roles later in the play, when Theseus and Hippolytus confront one another in what is effectively a trial scene, with many touches of forensic rhetoric (Barrett 1964, 348; Lloyd 1992, 34, 47-51; Hesk 2000, 276-77, 286-89). It is there chilling that father and son should have to indulge in public rhetoric at all: family members should be talking to one another as intimates, not as if at public meetings (Halliwell 1997), and here Theseus’ refusal to communicate is particularly clear (Mastronarde 1979, 78). It is even more chilling that, even as a trial, it is a false trial: Theseus has given his verdict before the start, Hippolytus is doomed because of Aphrodite, because of his oath, because of his lack of contact with his father. The unspeaking, solid testimony of the tablet is eventually more persuasive than anything artful speech can achieve (Zeitlin 1985) - and no less misleading. This is a play about failed communication, and rhetoric that misfires is central to it.
But rhetoric may misfire in one way but not in another. In this case the direction of the speaker is skewed, for the nurse does not believe her own arguments; the direction to the situation is skewed, because it travesties the issue; but the direction to the hearer is all too well judged. Phaedra says:
This is what destroys fine cities of mortals, and their houses too - over-fine words:
For one should not say what’s pleasant to hear, but what will make one respected.
(486-89) ‘‘Over-fine words’’? Our audience connoisseurs would not have found the nurse’s case so impressive. ‘‘Pleasant to hear’’? Not, presumably, just because of the beautiful turns of the language, more because Phaedra at some level wants to believe the nurse. There will soon be more talk of pharmaka, still ambiguous, but with an ever-clearer hint that the charms will be love-philters, things to ‘‘weld together one joy from two people.’’ Phaedra suspects as much, suspects even that the nurse may be planning to approach Hippolytus himself (520: ‘‘the child of Theseus,’’ she calls him there, stressing that near-incestuous element that the nurse is eliding). But she does not stop her. Perhaps she is simply overborne, sick, confused, and exhausted as she is, by the stronger character’s bullying (Michelini 1987, 303-4); but there is no need to shy from that psychological dimension of what she really desires (Mills 2002, 55, 59-60; Griffin 1990). After all, Phaedra does not shy from it herself:
I am so worked over by desire, and if you speak such foul things fairly I shall be caught
And spent on doing the very thing I am trying to avoid. (504-5)
So psychology matters here, but more the psychology of the character who is listening and persuaded than the character of the person who speaks. Such cases are not rare where ‘‘rhetoric’’ is in point: the rhetorical power of Philoctetes is interesting for its effect on Neoptolemus; that of Theseus in Heracles is interesting for the way it plays on Heracles rather than for anything it tells us about Theseus.
Here rhetoric misses the mark in not being true to the world, to what it describes; but it hits the mark completely in its gauging of the person to whom it is addressed. It is that mismatch which makes it so important to the play.
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