Love In Euripide's Hippolytus

Love can manifest itself in many ways, but some types of love are socially unacceptable, like a romantic or erotic love between family members. This type of taboo love occurs in the ancient Greek play Hippolytus and the 1962 film Phaedra when a stepmother falls in love with her stepson. And although the situations and themes appear similar on a surface level, when analyzing them further, it becomes easy to see that they are quite different. Hippolytus, written by Euripides and first performed in 428 BCE, is a Greek play about a stepmother, Phaedra, who falls in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. Hippolytus is the son of the Amazonian warrior Hippolyta and Theseus, the Athenian hero and king who is married to Phaedra. Hippolytus is a devout follower of Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt, and he has completely written off having sex and getting married, which angers Aphrodite, the goddess of love and sex. And even when he is warned on page 196 by a servant in line 107, “The honor of gods you must not scant, my son (Euripides),” Hippolytus makes no attempt to appease Aphrodite, as he has no interest in her powers of sex and desire. And this public shunning is a great disrespect to Aphrodite, so to punish Hippolytus, she makes his father’s wife Phaedra fall in love with him. Phaedra, knowing how wrong it is to love her stepson, tries to conceal her feelings and confines …show more content…
Thanos is a wealthy businessman who helps run a shipping company in Greece, he is married to a woman named Phaedra, they have a son named Dimitri. But, like Theseus, Thanos has a son named Alexis from a previous marriage. Alexis is in London studying art, but Thanos wants to get him involved in the family business, so he sends Phaedra to get to know him better and to convince him to come back to Greece. But she is hesitant to go because as a boy, Alexis never liked