midterm paper

After Phaedra decides to kill herself, the chorus gives what I think is a little prayer or poem to free Phaedra from this consuming love but they talk about how she arrived to Athens from her homeland Crete and the fact that she’s found nothing but misery in Athens. Just before she commits suicide they finish it off with, ”And therefore her soul has been broken / by the terrible sickness of Aphrodite, / an unholy love” (762-765). In Hippolytus by Euripides, love is described as a sickness. A metaphor for her feelings towards Hippolytus and its illicitness. The metaphor today helps explain why people fall in love,but is mostly used to talk about the dark forbidden aspect of love.

Greek plays are what I consider to be very important text. That’s because they allow for people of the present to understand what Greek playwrights and their audiences thought or believed, as well as what life was like at the time. Nature was one of those topics that the Greeks found a way to explain, nowadays we have science to explain to us things like; why people get sick, or why does the sun rise and fall. For the people of Greece this was not the case, they were polytheistic and practically had a god for everything, some of the most popular being Zeus, Apollo, Artemis, and Aphrodite. These gods represented things like the sun, music, hunting and love. People used to pray to different gods, hoping to please them and that the specific god they called on would hear their pleas and grant them their prayers. Gods were also blamed for anything and were often seen as mischievous and intrusive in literature. Sometimes they played with the life of a mortal, or the emotions and usually this would result in a tragedy.

As a writer, Euripides uses the ...

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... consequences. I think that had Phaedra and Hippolytus began a relationship Theseus would have them both killed or exiled, because their actions would be deemed unforgivable.

The dark forbidden aspect of love, is highly looked down upon in both Ancient Greek times and current day. It’s considered a sickness, a consuming love that only leads to misery. In Hippolytus, Euripides uses the word sickness to describe the illegitimate desires that Phaedra had for her step-son Hippolytus. In current times love as a sickness can also be used to describe the illicit love that is still looked down on. Euripides’ use of gods to remove some accountability is excused due to the fact that in Ancient Greece it was common to believe that gods had control of human lives. Now that excuse just won’t do and in today’s society people hold all the accountability of their actions.