Euripidean Geography in Seneca’s Phaedra

Keyne Cheshire

Davidson College

As scholars have long recognized, the messenger’s description in Seneca’s Phaedra of the monstrum emerging from the sea reproduces a brief geographical catalogue from Euripides’ account of the same event (Phaed. 1022-1024; cf. Euripides, Hipp. 1207-1209). Coffey and Mayer 1990 178 criticize Seneca’s appropriation of this catalogue, reasoning that while the features of the landscape suit the setting of Euripides’ version in Troezen, they are inappropriate to the Athenian setting of Seneca’s drama. This paper hopes to demonstrate that Seneca in fact puts this catalogue to good use, for it not only provides points of thematic relevance to his play but also looks ahead to the site of Hippolytus’ confrontation by the monstrum.

In Euripides’ Hippolytus, the messenger describes the bull’s rising from the sea as Hippolytus flees north from Troezen. The giant wave that carries the bull within it obscures geographical features along the coast of the Saronic Gulf: the shores of Sciron (just west of Megara), the Corinthian Isthmus, and the rock of Asclepius (unidentified, but presumed to be in the vicinity of Epidaurus; cf. Barrett 1964 383). The smooth movement of this catalogue west and south along the coast toward the fugitive Hippolytus gives the impression that the wave draws ever closer to the hero.

In appropriating this catalogue for his Pheadra, however, Seneca alters the order of its elements, rejecting Euripides’ neat movement for a more confused series that begins with Epidaurus far to the west, then shifts northeast to the Scironian rocks, and finally turns west again to the Corinthian Isthmus. This version, which utterly thwarts any attempt by the audience to visualize a gradually approaching wave, heightens the sense of chaos and presents a mass of water that has at once eclipsed the coastline of the entire gulf.

From a thematic perspective, Seneca’s catalogue yields also a dynamic series of temporal shifts. The initial element, the rock of Asclepius, looks toward the distant future, beyond the events of the play itself, to Hippolytus’ eventual restoration to life by that god. The second element, the Scironides, shifts attention toward the distant past to recall the death of the villain Sciron at the hands of Theseus, who has now motivated the monstrum to destroy his son Hippolytus. In describing the last element, the Corinthian Isthmus, as “that land squeezed by two seas” (quae duobus terra comprimitur fretis, 1024), Seneca focuses finally upon the present to emphasize the monstrum and this wave as an assault by the sea upon the earth, a fact that he stresses at several points in the account (1016-1018, 1026-1027, 1032-1033, 1050). Furthermore, according to Seneca’s messenger, the monstrum meets Hippolytus in his flight from Athens where a steep road leads from the beach toward Argos (1057-1058). This topographical detail, yet another nod to Euripides’ tragedy (cf. Hipp. 1197-1200), recommends the Corinthian Isthmus itself as the most natural point of Hippolytus’ confrontation by this monstrum.

In reorganizing Euripides’ topographical catalogue, therefore, Seneca crafts a wholly new version that heightens the sense of spatial disorientation, recalls thematically relevant events before and after the timeframe of the tragedy, and looks ahead to the locale of Hippolytus’ imminent confrontation by the monstrum, appropriately on that narrow strip of land that is ever threatened in geographical terms by the very waters that will bring the wave to land and the monstrum to the hero.