SOURCE: George B. Walsh, "Enchanting Praise: Euripides and the Uses of Song," in The Varieties of Enchantment: Early Greek Views of the Nature and Function of Poetry, The University of North Carolina Press, 1984, pp. 106-26.

[In the following essay, Walsh discusses the relationship between enchanting poetry and poetry of praise as they are defined, developed, and divided in Euripidean drama.]

Poetry has two virtues according to Homer. It is truthful and also pleasing, truthful in commemorating "famous deeds" and pleasing because it enchants: men are freed from self-consciousness, from the sense of present trials and personal need, as long as they hear the poet's song. Hesiod's poetry offers similar benefits, which he calls "memory" and "forgetfulness of cares." Pindar offers his audience a charm against anxiety, disappointment, and strife by truthfully displaying the splendor of human excellence. Apparently, then, the archaic poets describe their art according to a common pattern, endowed by Homer with the force of tradition. In this traditional pattern, the two virtues of song ideally coincide: song pleasantly enchants because it truthfully commemorates. Thus, poetry is a complex yet unified art, the art of pleasing truth, which is to say, of truthful enchantment.

There is an inherent tension, a source of instability, in this archaic program, however. Enchantment is a kind of diversion, which turns men away from their present condition, but the information that truthful song transmits is valued for its pertinence to present reality: as products of song, diversion and information seem to point in different directions. Therefore, as the archaic poets attempt to justify their art as consistent in its aims and effects, they must conceal, or else explain, an apparent anomaly.¹ In the Pindaric program, for example, it is praise that mediates and reconciles the tasks of diverting and informing an audience. Pindar's encomiastic poetry is diverting because the objects of praise are always splendid and exceptional, distant from ordinary, banal reality; it is informative and pertinent to the experience of its audience because it offers, with its timeless models of excellence, a practical guide to present conduct.

In Aristophanes' Frogs, however, the poets who compete for supremacy in the underworld speak for two distinct, apparently incompatible notions of poetic art. "Aeschylus" works the spells of enchantment, but these spells are now deceptive rather than truthful. "Euripides" offers a practical guide to conduct, but he has abandoned the task of praising excellence in favor of merely truthful description, the description of familiar, banal things; his poetry claims validity precisely to the extent that it is not enchanting. Thus, the model of a single art that offers enchanting, truthful praise has been purposefully abandoned, or else it has become unattainable.

The singers and consumers of song who appear in Euripidean drama also seem to envision two kinds of poetry, one devoted chiefly to enchantment, the other chiefly to a new, disenchanted sort of praise. Poetry traditionally achieves its double object by mediating between two conflicting motives—an unworldly desire to escape from the human condition and a worldly concern with the facts of human experience; in each of the new Euripidean poetic forms, one motive prevails over the other. Thus, enchanting poetry is defined in Euripidean drama by its unworldliness; it is prized or disparaged as an art opposed or irrelevant to mundane experience, an art that discounts, for better or worse, the reality of banal needs and banal satisfactions. Worldly motives, on the other hand, dominate the new poetry of praise. While the enchanted poet's morality requires a god as different as possible from human beings, for example, the encomiast's morality requires a god who is good in the same way that human beings are good, a god as much as possible like the encomiast himself, who will confirm his judgment and understand his need. Enchanting poetry makes men quiet and forgetful; the encomium makes them active and self-conscious. The new encomiastic poetry is prized for its utility, and it can be useful in two ways: as a truthful, morally valid account of human behavior and as an instrument of ambition, a source of strength and honor for the poet or the men he praises.

The validity of both poetic forms is a topic for debate in Euripidean drama. The poets and their audiences have become critics: the consumers of poetry argue with singers, and singers, in a private, reflexive way, struggle with their own uncertainty. It is this chapter's immediate purpose to clarify the issues and to identify the uncertainties in the Euripidean debate about song's validity. It is the chapter's thesis that the debate about song is generated by a single, fundamental problem, which Euripidean critics approach from different directions: when enchantment and praise are divided and their archaic unity is broken, the validity of both is diminished. The various sorts of dissatisfaction that Euripidean critics feel are symptoms of this loss, and they indicate that a valid art of poetry must offer truthful praise and enchantment combined. Euripides' own poetry seems to be such an art.

The aesthetic of enchanting poetry can be reconstructed from a group of fragmentary texts that have been associated, more or less certainly, with Euripides' lost Antiope.² Amphion, the play's protagonist, was traditionally identified as a poet, and Euripides has made him the type of the unworldly man,³ appealing, it seems, to the notion that poets are typically quiet, contemplative, unworldly men. More specifically, Amphion seems devoted to the poetry of pure enchantment, a descendant of Homer's art that has been radically altered, with an escalating series of refinements, to suit post-Homeric sensibilities.

Amphion begins by excluding from his poetry "the city's ills" (fr. 202), the particular troubles presently faced by men around him. Evidently, he has applied a lesson taken from the eighth book of the Odyssey, where song enchants only those listeners to whom its subject matter bears no immediate relevance.⁴ Next, following a more stringent aesthetic standard, Amphion shuns troublesome things categorically, for his art apparently ignores everything that is related to war,⁵ and so it abandons Homer's effort to preserve for human audiences the memory of human trials suffered and overcome. Since the poet cannot commemorate the experience of men, he must turn, it seems, to the gods for his subject matter. Enchanting poetry offers its audience an illusion of sharing the god's felicity, and so with the Sirens' help (with song), men leave the world behind:

I have golden wings upon my back,
and the Sirens' winged sandals on my feet
and I shall rise to the roof of aether
to mingle with Zeus.⁶
(fr. 911)

A final refinement of poetry's subject matter makes the gods surrender their human qualities in obedience to the moral requirements of Xenophanes and Theagenes. When Xenophanes objected to Homer's stories of divine immorality,⁷ Theagenes (and other allegorists of the sixth and fifth centuries) defended Homer by interpreting his gods as symbols for impersonal cosmological substances;⁸ in the Antiope, apparently, anthropomorphic gods are replaced by Aether and Earth,⁹ and so Theagenes' allegory becomes explicit. The enchanting vision that poetry now offers may be regarded as scientific and philosophical,¹⁰ the "ageless order of immortal nature" (fr. 910)¹¹ that is purified of everything human, including the Homeric gods, whose happiness could be imagined as some perfect version of a man's.

These refinements of subject matter, which are designed to make poetry pleasing, are motivated by two assumptions. It is assumed first that the facts of human life are mixed, fortunate and also inevitably unfortunate (cf. fr. 196); thus, as a topic for song, human experience can never be made to seem simple or untroubled. It is also assumed that the poet's audience experiences directly what the poet sings about. Thus, a song in which there remains any trace of humanity cannot be pleasing because audiences will experience the song's description of the mixed condition of other men as if it were their own.¹² Amphion seems to have built his life entirely upon such principles. He believes that he must free himself from contact with mundane things in order to live pleasantly, for "things" are the cause of human trouble: true prosperity, unmixed and independent of changing fortune, is immaterial (fr. 198; cf. fr. 910). Amphion also believes that it is possible to escape from "things" because an experience of untainted, immaterial prosperity—an experience as real for the spirit as the experience of things is real for the senses—can be created in song. Song, then, becomes a place that Amphion can inhabit undisturbed, safely neglecting the palpable world (fr. 193; cf. frr. 187, 184).

The critics of enchanting poetry deny the possibility or the value of an immaterial experience such as Amphion's song promises, a spiritual life alternative to the life dependent upon things. Because enchantment cannot provide this, according to one critical argument, it is useless and provides nothing; according to another argument, enchantment can be pleasing, but pleasure does not justify the poet's pursuit of enchantment. The nurse in Euripides' Medea (190-203) denies that poetry provides any sort of satisfaction that a feast does not also offer; thus, there is no purpose in singing at a feast and no use for poetry when real, material pleasures are available. On the other hand, in the nurse's view, poetry cannot compensate for the loss of such pleasures or cure men's pain; that is, it cannot enchant. Thus, since song's virtue does not differ from a feast's and yet is nothing like a feast's, there is no utility at all in song, and the "men of earlier times"¹³ who brought music to the feast were fools.¹⁴ Amphion's brother Zethus discovers a different sort of fault in the poet's pursuit of enchantment, for he believes that enchantment distracts men from something valuable in themselves. Pleasure, it seems, is the only benefit that can be derived from enchanting poetry or from the purely contemplative spiritual life that enchantment makes possible. Because the souls of men possess a natural capacity for something more than pleasure, however, a man denies his nature when he devotes himself to song (frr. 186, 187). The enchanted life is a diminished life, and human nature can achieve its proper sort of excellence only in relation to the world of material things (cf. fr. 184). Thus, if poetry (or the poet's developed intellect) has any value in Zethus's view, it must contribute to the struggle with things: Amphion should sing about worldly human activities (fr. 188)¹⁵ and so contrive some useful counsel for other men (fr. 185).

Zethus's program for song anticipates the arguments offered by "Euripides," the author of didactic, realistic poetry in Aristophanes' Frogs, and his quarrel with Amphion turns upon the same basic issues as the quarrel between "Euripides" and "Aeschylus."¹⁶ For Zethus, the utility of poetry does not depend upon its enchanting power, the power to make a "place" furnished with immaterial objects so that an audience will respond to the poem as if to the experience of some palpable thing. Enchanting poetry promises an intrinsic benefit, the pleasure inherent in listening to song, and so enchanting poetry validates itself, if only as long as men remain enchanted. Worldly, realistic poetry, on the other hand, points beyond itself to the material world in which its audience lives, and so its validity is measured extrinsically, in the poem's clarity or truthfulness, and also in its practical utility, as a reflection of something else.

Worldly poetry is vulnerable to two kinds of criticism, which are inverted forms of the criticism applied to enchanting poetry. According to Medea's nurse, enchanting poetry fails in its own terms because it fails as a source of pleasure; according to the competing, worldly standard invoked by Zethus, it fails because it ignores the facts of human experience. Conversely, worldly poetry fails in its own terms when it is inaccurate or unclear as a reflection of the world; and, of course, it fails implicitly by Amphion's standard if it does not enchant. The chorus in the Medea seems to be concerned with the distortion of fact in worldly poetry and also with the perversion of enchantment as a condition of social life affecting poets and their audiences. The remedy it favors for these disparate problems seems to be the archaic art of enchanting, truthful praise.

The chorus complains that male poets have falsified their art to slander women and so to conceal their own misconduct; women have been unable to defend themselves because Apollo, the god "who initiates songs," has not allowed them the skill to sing (421-30). Thus, men have violated the worldly requirement that poetry should offer a truthful account of the facts, and they have also violated the special canons of encomiastic poetry by misrepresenting human vice and virtue. Since their art has become an instrument of ambition, the ambition to seem virtuous, their motive for spoiling song's validity as a reflection of the world has been worldly. Apparently, then, some kinds of poetic worldliness are self-defeating: song forfeits its claim to validity when it serves the narrow interest of person or faction.

Factiousness also troubles the chorus in the Medea. It is related to enchantment in some way, for it is a symptom of Aphrodite's influence upon the social relationships of human beings, and enchantment, by convention, is Aphrodite's function.¹⁷ More specifically, according to the chorus, Aphrodite makes "temperaments disputatious and strife insatiable" when she is violent and excessive (627-41); she enchants when she is moderate, and her charms make men peaceful and honest. Men abide by their oaths, for example, when they feel a "spell"¹⁸ cast by the sanctity of oath-taking; oaths have an attractive, compelling power (kharis, "grace," 439) that Aphrodite embodies more than any other goddess (cf. 631).¹⁹ Thus, factious strife and enchantment are antithetical; they are also interchangeable because both are the work of Aphrodite, a goddess of double capacity.²⁰

The chorus in the Medea wishes to be temperate (635), to be free of Medea's destructive fury, and so it wants an enchanting influence of the sort that Aphrodite in her moderate aspect provides. In the ideal society, as the chorus imagines it, poetry is the immediate source of this influence: at Athens, where Aphrodite is moderate (835-40), the Muses have given birth to Harmony (830-32),²¹ a quiet condition antithetical to strife.²²

The food of the Athenians is sophia, the poet's art, as if they had made enchantment the stuff of daily life, and by this means, perhaps, they are enabled to breathe "most resplendent aither," the element of the gods.²³

Thus, the chorus in the Medea wants truthful encomiastic poetry (an art that represents fairly the virtues and vices of men and women), and it wants enchanting poetry (an art that inspires honest, harmonious social behavior). Apparently, the chorus wants truthful, enchanting poetry, the archaic art, worldly and unworldly at the same time. Athenian society exhibits the double influence of this complex art, for it is active and successful by worldly standards as well as harmonious and quiet, sustained by the impalpable pleasures of song: Athens is a place where areta (excellent achievement) thrives (844f.). The Athenians, then, are not as enchanted as Amphion, whom Zethus charges with having neglected every kind of practical, manly virtue (frr. 184, 185, 187, 188), but they are enchanted enough to be peaceful, safe from "insatiable strife." In the Medea's terms, poetry saves them excessive eros, an appetitive obsession with worldly, palpable things; in traditional terms, it makes them forget their quarrels and their cares.²⁴ The Athenians remain conscious of their material condition, however, and they continue to feel erôs in moderation, for their areta is the product of a collaboration between erôs (desire and worldly ambition) and sophia (the poet's art) (844f.).

Thus, at Athens the poets have discovered a middle ground in which the requirements of Amphion and Zethus can be reconciled, and this reconciliation is embodied in areta. Under the influence of his own enchanting poetry, Amphion does not pursue areta, apparently because he feels no worldly erôs and therefore sees no profit in struggling with material things; he claims only a quiet, inactive sort of virtue, which Pindar would call aidôs, restraint, and respect for gods and men.²⁵ At the other extreme of temperament, obsessive, appetitive men cannot achieve areta according to the chorus in the Medea (627-30). Areta, then, thrives only among men who have struck a balance between unworldly abstraction and worldly obsession; if poets foster areta, as they do at Athens, their songs must be balanced also.

Since the enchanting effect of Amphion's song seems to depend upon its unworldly subject matter, it is reasonable to suppose that the topics of balanced, worldly-unworldly songs must be mixed, or intermediate between Amphion's abstractions and the palpable objects of erôs. Areta, which Athenian poetry fosters, seems ideally suited to be the subject matter of a balanced art. It is a fact of human experience, inextricably rooted in the material world, and so it is an appropriate topic for poetry of the kind that Zethus wants, realistic and useful as a guide to conduct. (Areta is also, of course, the traditional concern of encomiastic poetry, and the validity of the encomium depends upon its truthfulness or fairness as an account of areta.) On the other hand, areta seems to be something more than a material, worldly thing because it is beyond the reach of men who are obsessed with palpable satisfactions (Medea 627-30). Thus, its nature is ambiguous, endowed with two kinds of reality. Pindar²⁶ suggests that areta is at once human and divine, ephemeral and eternal, a manifestation of "grace" from the gods in the world of things. For this reason, areta has a unique value for poets and for critics or consumers of poetry: a song that represents areta truthfully (an extrinsically valid, encomiastic song) should also be enchanting (an intrinsically valid, pleasing song).

Conversely, areta's special quality as an enchanting, instructive topic of song makes it problematical, a touchstone of the poet's art and also of his temperament. Thus, the abstracted poet Amphion ignores the topic of human excellence and so displays an imbalance and a weakness of unworldly song; the factious male poets of the Medea give a false account of areta and so display an imbalance and a weakness of worldly song. Apparently, it is possible to devise a valid representation of areta (in a poem of enchanting praise) only if the poet has reconciled within himself the disparate impulses of worldliness and unworldliness.

The chorus of the Heracles professes its dedication to a balanced art, an art that derives validity as a source of pleasure and a medium of praise from its subject matter, the hero's areta (673-700). Ideally, according to this chorus (655-72), the encomiastic function normally associated with song might be otherwise performed if the gods were to reward areta by granting virtuous men a second youth: renewed youth would become a symbol of unmistakable clarity, and "by this means, it would be possible to tell the noble from the base" (665f.). Youth best qualifies for this symbolic use because it is also intrinsically desirable: as the negation of grim, hated old age (638f., cf. 649f.), youth is the remedy for "hateful pains" that Medea's nurse misses in song (195); since it is "always dear" and "finest in prosperity and in poverty" (637, 647f.), it meets her desire for something that will please men in difficulty as well as at ease.

Song is valuable to the extent that it serves as a substitute for youth: the old men of the chorus have aged irreversibly, but their grey beards do not diminish their paean to Heracles (691-94). Rather, their song defeats time and compensates for old age because it celebrates (and so preserves) Memory (eti toi gerôn aoidos keladei Mnamosunan, 678f.). In this way, like youth, it becomes a source of pleasure as well as a medium of praise. The chorus's song contrives the "sweetest joining" (675) between the Muses (Memory's children, according to Hesiod), who may be regarded as patrons of the encomium, and the Graces, who represent the song's pleasing,²⁷ enchanting²⁸ qualities. Heracles' areta is the unique and sufficient source, the material cause, of this double validity in the chorus's song (68of.; cf. 659, 697 supp. Nauck).

Thus, the chorus in the Heracles describes its musical vocation according to a traditional scheme and also according to the various requirements of the critics in Euripidean drama, for its song of enchanting praise seems to embody a compromise between the worldly and unworldly, extrinsic and intrinsic poetics of Zethus and Amphion. Since the chorus defines its vocation as a response to areta, it confirms the Medea's (and the tradition's) evidence of a natural connection between areta and song.

Therefore, it is tempting to suppose that the old men of the chorus speak for Euripides himself²⁹ or that the virtues of their song directly represent the virtues of Euripidean drama. This does not seem likely, however. The old men are confused in their singing; they are uncertain of themselves and uncertain also of Heracles' areta, and their uncertainty points to the difference between an ideal type of Euripidean poetry and their own version of enchanting praise. Their vision is subtly distorted by worldliness, and so their songs are deficient in enchantment and equivocal in praise.

The old men value song to the extent that they value Heracles' areta, but they also disparage song (and their song is flawed) to the extent that they do not value or understand Heracles' areta. The chorus's regard for areta and for song is changeable and contingent upon circumstance, alternately faint and overconfident. When the hero is absent (and seems likely never to return), he is no longer "great" (443f.); when he returns from Hades to save his family, he is to be praised not merely as the son of Zeus but as something greater (696f.),³⁰ perhaps because he is more "present" than Zeus and serves his family's needs better.³¹ As long as Heracles' strength and courage are visibly present to the chorus, the chorus seems to believe that the song of praise can be potent enough to replace the reward of redoubled youth: the song implicitly renews Heracles' areta by commemorating it, and it seems to renew the chorus's strength as well because the old men, once feeble, now feel inspired to dance like a band of Delian girls (685-94; cf. 107f.). On the other hand, when Lhey believe that Heracles is dead, the old men feel no confidence in their singing; rather, song seems an old man's pastime, "words only and the fancy of nocturnal dreams" (epea monon kai dokêma nukterôpon ennukhôn oneirôn, 111f.).³²

Apparently, then, the chorus has only a tenuous grasp upon the archaic program of enchanting praise,³³ and its doubts about song seem to originate in its sense of areta as a human, worldly thing. Pindar protects himself against such doubts with the notion that victory and good fortune, because they come from the gods, are more real than failure; thus, in Pindar's accounting, even the commemoration of victory, the reflection of past splendor as it is preserved in song, seems more real than present, actual "darkness" or pain. Pindar's song derives its power to enchant regardless of circumstance from the prepotent, divinely enhanced, unworldly reality of areta, its subject matter. Euripides' chorus, on the other hand, ascribes to Heracles' virtue a power that is purely human (because it does not come from Zeus), and this human virtue can be eclipsed by misfortune because it is no more real or memorable than any other fact of human experience. Thus, as a topic of song for Euripides' chorus, Heracles' virtue cannot wholly support the Pindaric program of enchanting praise.³⁴

Conceived as a purely human phenomenon, Heracles' virtue might support another kind of enchanting praise, more secular than Pindar's odes: hypothetically, as the topic of Euripides' play, the hero's virtue endows Euripidean poetry with instructive, pleasing qualities. As Amphion suggests, however, the state of enchantment requires an unworldly (if not specifically divine) object of contemplation; therefore, human virtue must display some unworldly charm in order to make the poetry that commemorates it enchanting. As the chorus understands it, Heracles' virtue is a worldly thing, for it is defined chiefly by its palpable, present efficacy; conversely, Heracles cannot be "great" if he is dead. Thus, although the old men profess their dedication to the Graces' art, their song is not enchanting according to Amphion's standards.³⁵

According to Amphion's standards, the Hippolytus comes to terms more adequately with the problematic of worldly and unworldly virtue; it also offers better models for a hypothetical Euripidean art of enchanting praise. Like Amphion, Hippolytus pursues the refined pleasures of an unworldly life, and his troubled confrontation with the world he wishes to shun suggests what difficulties an enchanted poet must encounter when he tries to adapt himself to mundane human expectations. Hippolytus's story is not, of course, an allegory for the poet's, but it exposes with unique clarity the charm of abstraction (which poetry evokes), and it displays the pattern of a reconciliation between abstraction and experience (which poetry ideally accomplishes). At the same time, the spectacle of Hippolytus's unworldly virtue made relevant to worldly life provides an exemplary topic for Euripides' own enchanting praise. This the playwright seems to acknowledge, for he presents Hippolytus explicitly as an object of awe persistently renewed in musical commemoration.

Hippolytus's qualities are defined partly by opposition. Phaedra's nurse, Hippolytus's antitype, is a disenchanted reader³⁶ of poetry and a determined pragmatist; like Zethus, she is contemptuous of unworldly pleasure that answers no present need. Her opinions are all modern. In her view, stories of the marvellous make no sense; they are irrelevant to the known conditions of life (muthois d'allôs pheromestha, 197), like the story of Helen's birth condemned by the chorus of Iphigenia at Aulis (798-800). There is at least one awesome figure of legend who seems real and relevant to the nurse, however: Aphrodite is "more than a god" (359f.), an immanent fact of human experience (cf. 447f.). Thus, the nurse salvages practical knowledge from myth.³⁷ She believes that morality must be based upon need: virtue is less important than survival³⁸ or physical well-being, for with the first one wins only a "name" (onoma) or a "tale" (logos), with the second something real (tourgon, 501) and palpable (ho aner, 491).³⁹ Such lessons can be learned and taught by people who read books: the nurse cites two groups as her authorities (451f), the poets and readers of poetry,⁴⁰ and she places herself among the learned, literary class, the few who know the legends of the gods.⁴¹ These are the tools with which she undertakes her own sort of enchanting arguments (logoi thelkterioi, 478), practiced first upon Phaedra and then upon Hippolytus. Her speech to Phaedra (451-78) is a reductive, inverted sort of praise: since poetry testifies that the gods are susceptible to love yet still inhabit Olympus, Phaedra's continued chastity would be presumptuous, her adultery venial (473-75).⁴²

Temperament as much as dogma accounts for the nurse's modernism: she resists emotion that is too deeply felt, including her own sympathy for Phaedra (253-63), and, given the chance to collect her thoughts, she refuses to regard anything in this world as wonderful or mysterious (353-61; 433-38; 704f.). She clings to her sense of herself, to her sense of the present, even when this is painful, because, like Medea's nurse, she anticipates no "cessation of toils" (190), nothing in this life or the next (196) that brings relief. Therefore, she cannot understand Phaedra's yearning for "the absent thing" (to apon, 184f.), for rest in the distant meadow (anapausaiman, 211; cf. anapausis, 190) or a draught of pure spring water (208f.; cf. 225-27); similarly, Medea's nurse ridicules escape from the "present thing" (to paron, 202f.) in song.

Phaedra's nurse, then, is a disenchanted reader of poetry because she is worldly in every other way, and what she does not understand or feel in her reading she misjudges in Phaedra and Hippolytus, their vision of some unworldly "absent thing" (184), "dearer than life" (191), and the aidôs it inspires. Both are drawn to the meadow in which Hippolytus worships his goddess. For Phaedra, it has a double charm: it is the place where her passion might be satisfied and also where her passion might harmlessly depart⁴³ if she shared Hippolytus's chaste pleasures, if she became manlike in the hunt, for example (215-22). Thus, in her delirium, Phaedra conjures up an equivocal fantasy, one aspect of which is worldly, inspired by an obsessive material need, for which untempered sexuality is the conventional paradigm, and the other unworldly, an enchantment that promises escape from need and forgetfulness of self. The first is vicious, and the nurse learns gradually to accept it; but the second is virtuous, it confuses her (cf. 236), and its final product, the suicide that erases Phaedra's passion and painful self-consciousness completely in favor of the thing literally "dearer than life," takes the nurse by surprise.⁴⁴

For Hippolytus, the meadow's attraction is simple and unworldly: Aphrodite's charms do not enter there. It is irrigated by aidos, the quiet virtue of Amphion. It is a place set apart, forbidden to ordinary men whose moderation (sôphronein, 80) is learned, not natural, so that the meadow is most particularly closed to people like Phaedra's nurse; the lessons she has drawn from mundane experience (252) or from the poets' tales of banal, erring gods (451-58)—her ways of withdrawing from pain and accommodating vice—do not apply there. As long as he remains in the meadow, Hippolytus need never learn the sort of moderation (sôphronein, 730f.) Phaedra wishes to teach him, the worldly virtue of yielding to circumstance.⁴⁵ The meadow is "untouched" (73) and, as the term is qualified elsewhere in the Hippolytus, this signifies two things: "untouched" by moral blemish, a quality that Theseus ironically ascribes to Hippolytus (949), and "untouched" by pain, a state to which the chorus aspires in prayer (1113f.). This double immunity is a privileged condition of gods so defined that they are as little as possible like men in character and experience; for Hippolytus, the essence of the difference is found in the purity of Artemis, a virgin beyond the range of the nurse's stories, whom he worships in the meadow on terms of special intimacy.

Hippolytus's intimacy with the goddess is limited, however, and its limits also define what the meadow offers: Artemis speaks to him but does not show herself (86); he has only logoi (85), nothing real or substantial, as the nurse would say (490f.). Thus, if Aphrodite is "more than a god" according to the nurse because her presence is universally manifest in the events of life, Artemis (or Artemis as Hippolytus knows her) might be called "merely a god" because she is less than present. Although the meadow provides physical props for physical activities—water for drinking, flowers for making garlands, wild animals to be hunted—its chief attraction consists in absence (its "untouched" purity) and near-absence (the spirit's experience of divinity made wholly from speech), something less than a life. As the chorus seems to suggest, this is all that the gods can normally offer men: spiritual experiences, conditions of the phrenes, that last only as long as inexperience of living. Purity is one (ouketi gar katharan phren' ekhô ťǎ par' elpida leusson, 1120 Hartung, Murray) and the comforting belief that gods care for men is another (e mega moi ta theon meledemath', hotan phrenas elthei, lupas parairei, 1104f.).⁴⁶

The negative, chiefly spiritual blessings to be found in Hippolytus's meadow are characteristic of the class of such places and characteristic also of enchanting song. Thus, the meadow resembles the precinct in which Sappho imagines meeting Aphrodite (fr. 2 LP), an apple grove, shadowed with roses, where cold water flows (cf. Hipp. 208f.) and horses pasture (cf. Hipp. 230f.); she expects to be granted enchanted sleep there (kôma), a spiritual respite from passion and a feeling of divinely beguiled ease,⁴⁷ like the kôma induced by Apollo's music, which enchants the phrenes of Olympian gods (Pindar, P 1). Ibycus looks for a similar charm against the tempestuous erôs of his phrenes in an "untouched (akêratos) garden of the Maidens" (286 PMG). And it is reasonable to suppose that images of this kind provided the model for Pindar's description of paradise, a place of purified, musical delight for disembodied souls that was filled with horses and roses, and watered by smoothly flowing rivers,⁴⁸ and for Choerilus Samicus's description of the Muses' "untouched meadow" (akêratos leimôn, fr. 1 Kinkel).⁴⁹

In none of these places, including the "place" evoked by song, may human beings remain and live; rather, their local qualities are like the songs enjoyed by audiences in the Odyssey, antithetical to the active experience of life, to appetite and effort, for the blessings they offer are negative, impalpable, and, except for the souls of dead men, necessarily intermittent. But for Hippolytus the meadow is a place to live, not an object of contemplation, the desired thing itself rather than its emblem; his devotion is active and unremitting.⁵⁰ In this respect he differs from other men, and the difference points to the play's major problem: the proper⁵¹ relation between the meadow and daily life, between contemplation and conduct, enchantment and practical virtue,⁵²to apon and to paron.

Hippolytus's virtue is tested, when he faces first the nurse and then his father, by the need to assess judiciously the impurity he encounters in the world and to communicate the authenticity of his own pious, unworldly condition to an audience ignorant of the meadow. His task is encomiastic and rhetorical, like Pindar's, and he must choose, as Pindar chooses, between speech and silence about crime. If he accuses Phaedra, he breaks an oath of secrecy (656-58) and offends the gods (cf. 1033); he might also diminish his own purity because the words condemning Phaedra would carry the taint of the deeds they picture. (He must wash his ears when he has heard the nurse's proposition because in the realm of the spirit where Hippolytus lives, even representations of sexuality are dangerous and offensive.)⁵³ On the other hand, if he does not speak or speaks ineffectively, Hippolytus confirms his father's delusion and forfeits his honor.

With doubly fatal effect, Hippolytus vacillates between the two extremes avoided by Pindar.⁵⁴ His disgust at the revelation of Phaedra's weakness makes him furiously denounce all women (616-50),⁵⁵ and his blaming speech elicits from Phaedra a vengeful, defensive accusation in return. With Theseus, Hippolytus remains inhibited and ineffective in representing his own virtue. Piety makes him suppress the truth about Phaedra, and something similar apparently frustrates his attempt to tell the truth about himself. He is, he says, not "musical" when speaking to the crowd but "wiser" or better skilled in the company of a few young men (986-89); nevertheless, he must speak to Theseus (990f): Theseus is the "crowd." More precisely, Theseus makes Hippolytus feel less than eloquent because he does not belong to the select group intimate with the meadow, whose virtue is natural, not learned (79f.); he belongs (with Phaedra's nurse) to a worldly audience that knows only what it learns and learns only from mundane experience or perhaps from reading. Thus, Theseus cannot recognize what devotion to the meadow entails, and because such virtue is exceptional, Hippolytus cannot prove that it is real: all young men are lustful, and therefore, Theseus reasons, Hippolytus must be too (966-70).

Hippolytus's failure confirms his belief that teaching is vain (cf. 921f.), and so, it seems, he forfeits his life to the exclusive principle, speaking, like Pindar, only to the wise (O 2.83-85). But with his unskillful "music," he has failed in the poet's first task: because he does not communicate his unworldly virtue, he does not enchant; he is a "charmer" and a "wizard" according to Theseus (1038), but his charms are ineffective, as the result indicates. Disenchanted and unenlightened, Theseus commits the crimes that he ascribes to Hippolytus: he violates the sanctity of their kinship⁵⁶ and disregards the sanctity of Hippolytus's oath (cf. 1320-22, 1307-9).

When Hippolytus has been mortally injured, however, this pattern reverses itself: Theseus learns aidôs (1258f.) as if death has begun to make Hippolytus's virtue palpable to worldly senses even before Artemis arrives to proclaim it ex machina; Hippolytus learns to pity Phaedra and Theseus,⁵⁷ and Artemis retreats from his suffering, leaving him nothing but human affinity and worldly experience.⁵⁸ The compensation Hippolytus receives for his suffering (1423) reflects this late reconciliation between unworldly virtue and worldly experience. As he lies dying in his father's arms, Artemis promises him a cult in which virgin brides shall sing his story forever and make him offerings of their hair (1423-30). The honor seems unsuitable judged by the meadow's standard, for it celebrates (as it mourns) virginity's loss in conjunction with Hippolytus's death. But the cult provides what Hippolytus could not give Theseus, a musical (1428f.) expression of the "absent thing" Hippolytus cherished and a fair, explicit judgment of the "present thing" he shunned: it preserves at least a memory of purity, encapsulated in ritual within the context of normal sexual life, and grafted upon this enchanting vision, in place of Hippolytus's silence (1430), it offers the story of Phaedra, made harmlessly into praise.

By entering in this qualified way into the desire for enchantment, the cult defines a middle ground where ritual, like art, attenuates human suffering without effacing it and where divine felicity is made visible and pertinent to human aspiration. There is a psychic geography implicit here in which the emotional claims of present and absent things are balanced,⁵⁹ and its landmarks have been figuratively defined by the chorus. In their imagination, the women fly from the familiar and the real, from Phaedra's trouble, over the Adriatic to the edge of the world and the boundary of heaven (732-51). Human beings cannot reach this place by physical means (744f.); it contains inhuman objects of enchanted contemplation, Zeus's marriage bed and the song of divine singers. But there is an intermediate stage in their journey that retains a memory of suffering and transforms it into something immortal and fine: by the fabulous river Eridanos, Phaethon's sisters forever weep "amber beams" of tears (737-41), mourning their mortal brother who, like Hippolytus, tried and failed to live with the gods.⁶⁰ Grief thus purified and distanced would offer the chorus an accessible refuge, and it signifies the best that art may accomplish while still remaining in contact with the conditions of human life—the distance of enchantment and the nearness of remembering praise. Perhaps, then, the image may serve as a model for understanding the poetics of Euripides' tragic play.⁶¹

Notes

¹ See above, chapters 1, 2, and 3.

² Frr. 910, 911, and 1023 N² are assigned to the Antiope by T. B. L. Webster, The Tragedies of Euripides (London, 1967) 207. He cites 1023 as 182a; for its place in the Antiope, see also Philostr. Imag. 1, 10.

³ Cf. E. R. Dodds, ed., Plato. Gorgias (Oxford, 1959) 275f.

⁴ The lesson might also have come from the more recent example of Phrynichus's Capture of Miletus. For the limits of enchantment in Homer, see chapter 1. In fr. 202, Badham's conjecture (voέι̂ for voσει̂, cited by Nauck) would make the limitation of Amphion's subject matter more radical.

⁵ Fr. 188; cf. fr. 185. Historically, this omission corresponds to the program of a post-Homeric muse, who celebrates the marriages of the gods instead of human battles: cf. Stesichorus 210 PMG [D. L. Page, ed. Poeti Melici Graeci. Oxford 1962] ed.. An erotic muse replaces the martial one in Anacreon fr. eleg. 2 West: cf. the two topics of song in Hom. h. Apollo 186ff.

⁶ This image makes explicit what was implicit in Hesiod's account of song: see chapter 2.

⁷ Frr. 11, 12 DK⁸ [H. Diels and W. Kranz, eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 vols., 6th ed., Berlin 1952]. For Amphion's similar sentiment, see fr. 210; cf. Ion 338-41; HF 1340-46.

⁸ Earth seems to have been regarded as a primary substance by Xenophanes, Theagenes' contemporary (frr. 27, 33 DK⁸). Felix Buffiere, Les mythes d'Homere et la pensee grecque (Paris, 1956) 101-22, taking the Venetus B Scholium to n. 20.67 as a starting point, discusses the early origins of the notion Zeus = aither and its possible influence upon allegorists. See also Giuliana Lanata, Poetica pre-platonica (Florence, 1963) 106-11 and Michael Murrin, The Allegorical Epic (Chicago and London, 1980) 8f.

⁹ Fr. 1023 N². Webster (above, n. 2) suggests that fr. 941 also belongs in this context. Cf. fr. 985; Ion 1078f.; and chapter 5 for Euripides and aither.

¹⁰ For the equivalence of poetry and philosophy, cf. Alc. 962-66.

¹¹ According to Webster (above, n. 2), fr. 910 might naturally follow the performance of Amphion's song.

¹² For the notion of enchantment in the fifth century, see chapter 5.

¹³ For the identity of these poets, see Denys Page, ed., Euripides: Medea (Oxford, 1938; repr. 1964) ad 191.

¹⁴ With this statement, the nurse seems to associate herself with Hesiod's uninitiated shepherds, "bellies only" who know nothing of the Muses' gift (Th. 26), men who eat but cannot sing.

¹⁵ For the possibility that Zethus favors some form of poetry, see Dodds (above, n. 3) 278f. ad Gorgias 486c4-8.

¹⁶ See chapter 5.

¹⁷ See chapter 5 n. 90 and section on Euripides' Helen; cf. Bacch. 404f.; Aesch. Supp. 1034-40.

¹⁸ This is the interpretation of Page (above, n. 13) ad 439. Cf. the kharis of aidôs, IA 563-67.

¹⁹ Thus, Aphrodite is conventionally associated with the Graces: see In. 5.338; Od. 18.193f., 8.362-66; Cypria fr. 3 Kinkel; Hom. h. Aphr. 58-63; Pindar Paean 6.3f. Aphrodite seems to be interchangeable with one of the Graces at A. 18.382f. and Hes. Th. 945f.; cf. Od. 8.266ff.

²⁰ For a more explicit treatment of Aphrodite's double influence upon social behavior, see Pindar N 8 and chapter 3.

²¹ For the genealogy, see Page (above, n. 13) ad loc.

²² Amphion too sees a social benefit in enchantment and therefore in poetry: temperate men make steadfast friends (fr. 194); men who have surrendered themselves to the enjoyment of palpable, ephemeral thing make bad citizens (fr. 201). Cf. fr. 910: contemplation of "immortal nature's ageless order" prevents immoral behavior. For the social significance of "musical" harmony, see chapter 3 on Pindar Pythia 1.

²³ See chapter 5 on the Helen.

²⁴ Hesiod, Th. 102f., e.g.

²⁵ Cf. fr. 200. However, it is not clear whether Amphion speaks these verses; fr. 185 suggests that he does not.

²⁶ See chapter 3.

²⁷ Cf. Pindar O 9.27f.; Eur. Helen 1341-5, and Rosemary Harriott, Poetry and Criticism before Plato (London, 1969) 125f.

²⁸ Cf. nn. 17 and 18 above.

²⁹ Cf. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, ed., Euripides: Herakles, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1933) 358f. ad loc.

³⁰ The chorus's joy will be confounded after a short interval, when Heracles murders his wife and children; the song, which praises Heracles for areta "exceeding his birth" as Zeus's son, is a foil for the hero's downfall, which demonstrates the superior power of gods. For this pattern of joyful lyric anticipation and confounding dramatic event, cf. Soph. Ajax 692-718 and the death of Ajax.

³¹ Cf. Amphitryon's complaint (339-47). The old men judge the gods in the same way that they judge Heracles, according to present utility (cf. 655-59, 757-59), and in this respect they may be distinguished from the poet of frr. 910 and 1023 N², who worships gods who are admirable because of their difference (and distance) from human beings. The religious controversy surfaces in the encounter between Theseus and Heracles: see HF 1313-21, 1340-46. (fr. 201).

³² For the connection between this passage and the encomiastic ode for Heracles, cf.…(692) and … (110); and for these images, see James Diggle, ed., Euripides: Phaethon (Cambridge, 1970) 104 ad 78; cf. IT 1104f.

³³ The chorus claims no enchanting power for the song with which it commemorates Heracles' virtue when it believes that Heracles is dead: this song is a dirge rather than a celebration, a symbolic measure of lost felicity rather than an intrinsic source of present strength or joy; see 348-58.

³⁴ The chorus's song differs fundamentally from Pindar's because it is explicitly a human thing like the areta it celebrates, a blessing contrived by men as a replacement for youth, which the gods would have given had they the insight and the art (xunesis kai sophia) of human beings; see 655-72.

³⁵ Judged in this way, the chorus's song falls short of Euripides' play to the extent that Euripides illuminates Heracles's virtue even when it is contradicted by worldly circumstance, when Heracles has fallen into dishonor for having murdered his family. At least part of the charm Heracles retains in dishonor (as Euripides represents him) comes from his stubborn adherence to principle, for example, the unworldly purity of his belief in gods as beings wholly unlike men.

³⁶ For reading and disenchantment, see chapter 5 on the Frogs.

³⁷ Cf. Teiresias's interpretation of Dionysian legend in Bacch. 272-97 and the comments of E. R. Dodds, Euripides: Bacchae, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1960) ad loc.

³⁸ Cf. the sophist Antiphon, DK⁸ 87B44 frag. A col. 3, 25-col. 4, 8.

³⁹ Cf. Felix Heinimann, Nomos und Phusis (Basel, 1965) 43-56.

⁴⁰ According to the interpretation of W. S. Barrett, ed., Euripides: Hippolytus (Oxford, 1964) ad loc.

⁴¹ Barrett (above, n. 40) ad loc. For the nurse's reliance upon authority, cf. 266.

⁴² Cf. Theseus's argument (HF 1313-21).

⁴³ The chastity of life in the meadow is its more obvious quality, but it need not for this reason be regarded as irrelevant to Phaedra's imagined release there. However, cf. B. M. W. Knox, "The Hippolytus of Euripides," YCS [Yale Classical Studies] 13 (1952) 6; C. P. Segal, "The Tragedy of the Hippolytus: The Waters of Ocean and the Untouched Meadow," HSCP [Harvard Studies in Classical Philology] 70 (1965) 124f.; and J. M. Bremer, "The Meadow of Love and Two Passages in Euripides' Hippolytus," Mnem. 28 (1975) 268-80.

⁴⁴ For enchantment and death, cf. chapter I on the Sirens and chapter 5 on Eur. Helen.

⁴⁵ In this respect, the meadow recalls areta and poetry as Pindar values these things, for areta grows like a plant fed by wisdom (N 8.40-42), a product of nature like the poetry that praises it, distinct from the forced, impious success of men who use learning (cf. 0 2.86).

⁴⁶ Or, the chorus's own piety by itself provides the comfort, perhaps a more exact parallel to Hippolytus's experience. For interpretation of the passage, cf. Barrett (above, n. 40) ad loc.

⁴⁷ Cf. Denys Page, ed., Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford, 1955) 37 ad loc.

⁴⁸ Threnos VII (frr. 129, 131a, 130) Maehler = 114-116 Bowra = Plut. consol. ad Apoll. 35 p. 120c. According to Alexander Turyn, "The Sapphic Ostracon," TAP A [Transactions of the American Philological Association] 73 (1942) 308-18, Pindar's paradise is Orphic and indicates an Orphic source for Sappho's fr. 2, but it seems more likely that the Orphic element, if any, is itself derived from an earlier, perhaps literary source; cf. Thomas McEvilley, "Sappho, Fragment Two," Phoenix 26 (1972) 327-31. Perhaps an Orphic association might attach itself subsequently to the description of such places: for the (hostile) suspicion that Hippolytus engages in Orphic practices, cf. 952-54. (The question Barrett addresses ad loc. is different: Hippolytus may display some affinity for Orphic attitudes even if he does not follow Orphic practices consistently.) For the common (and vain) promise of an escape from necessity in poetry and Orphism, cf. Alc. 962-71.

⁴⁹ Cf. also the Graces' kapon where the poet dwells (Pindar 0 9.27); for the intimacy of gods and men in song, cf. Eur. fr. 911.

⁵⁰ Thus, in the nurse's terms, Hippolytus is "dangerously in love with this thing that shines on earth" (193f.), but the earthly thing is at the same time "dearer than living" in the ordinary way.

⁵¹ There is also a corollary problem, the actual relation between the meadow and daily life, and the difference between Artemis and Aphrodite; the structure and the imagery of the play suggest that the meadow is less exceptional than Hippolytus knows: see the detailed argument of Segal (above, n. 43).

⁵² Phaedra acknowledges one aspect of this problem, the failure to act in accord with one's moral sensibility (380-84).

⁵³Hipp. 653-55; cf. 1004-6. Cf. Pindar's concern with the double force of mega eipein, dangerous speech about dangerous deeds, in N 5, which is discussed above in chapter 3.

⁵⁴ Cf chapter 3 on N 8.

⁵⁵ Cf. the bacchants' pious intolerance. For the space of this single speech at least, Hippolytus has been drawn into a worldly conflict, and he abandons sôphrosune, as E. R. Dodds remarks in "The AIAQE of Phaedra and the Meaning of the Hippolytus," CR [Classical Review] 39 (1925) 103.

⁵⁶ See Barrett (above, n. 40) ad 1258f.; cf. 1315-17.

⁵⁷Hipp. 1403-5: it is possible that Artemis corrects him at 1404, insisting that Phaedra belongs among Aphrodite's pitiable victims; Hippolytus's own statement (1403) ambiguously suggests that Artemis herself has been harmed.

⁵⁸ Hippolytus discovers two things that keep him rooted in the human condition, an inherited pollution (1379f.) and vulnerability to the gods (which he would like to invert, 1415).

⁵⁹ Cf. Pietro Pucci, "Euripides: The Monument and the Sacrifice," Arethusa 10 (1977) 165-95, especially 184-86.

⁶⁰ For the myth of Phaethon, see Diggle (above, n. 32) 4-32.

⁶¹ Whatever contribution hero-song may have made to the historical development of Attic tragedy (cf. A. W. Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy, 2d ed., rev. by T. B. L. Webster [Oxford, 1962] 105-7), it is at least possible that Euripides might imagine himself to be working in the tradition of the choruses who mourned Adrastus at Sicyon (Hdt. 5.67).