The Bastard and the City:
Euripides’ Hippolytus as a Social and Sexual Outcast

Erin Taylor (Indiana University)

At first reading, it may seem that Euripides’ Hippolytus has but two defining characteristics: he reveres the goddess Artemis above all others, and consequently he despises mortal women and abhors the idea of sex. However, Hippolytus has another important attribute – he is a bastard, or nñyow. Though characters in the play mention his illegitimacy only three times (in lines 310, 962, and 1083), the accident of his birth is, in fact, the predominant shaping force of his life.

As a devotee to the goddess of the hunt, Hippolytus frequents the areas outside the city boundaries. In and of itself, roaming the countryside is not an unusual activity for a young man in ancient Greece. Young men are isolated from society by an institution called ephebia, which places them in paramilitary camps around the city’s borders. At the end of their service, young men are initiated into adulthood and participation in the life of the city (Vidal-Naquet 1986). However, as a bastard, Hippolytus cannot undergo this initiation into citizenship.

Because his illegitimacy bars him from ever becoming a citizen, Hippolytus is permanently restricted to the role of an adolescent in Greek society. He can never become a true man, and thus cannot marry and father (legitimate) children. So he pays court to an eternally virgin goddess, who serves as a safe way for him to deflect his natural desires onto an unattainable object.

Hippolytus reacts to his physical and metaphorical exclusion from social institutions by pushing back against them with a hatred of women and an embrace of his own marginality.