Tedd A. Wimperis (Elon University)
Euripides’ choice to set his second Hippolytus play in Troezen, and that setting’s role in the tragedy, have long invited scholarly inquiry (Barrett 1964, Jeny 1989, Mills 1997, Wiles 1997, Kowalzig 2006). In this paper I re-evaluate Hippolytus’ Troezenian setting in connection with the play’s representation of liminality—the fraught condition of social ambiguity, marginal existence, and transitional movement across ideational boundaries, perhaps best emblematized in Hippolytus by the title character’s uneasy status between ephebe and adult (esp. Mitchell-Boyask 1999) and the play’s closing aetiology, which initiates a rite of passage for Troezenian maidens (1423-30).
The setting of Troezen, I argue, works in concert with the tragedy’s interest in the liminal condition by functioning as a “liminal landscape,” a concept developed, following Van Gennep (1960) and Turner (1967), through recent work in geography and anthropology (Preston-Whyte 2004, Andrews & Roberts 2012, Downey, Kinane, & Parker 2016). Liminal landscapes exist, in geographical or cultural terms, “not at the centres, nor outside the reach of main civilizational centres but exactly at the margins” (Thomassen 2012, 26); they are spaces often characterized by ambiguous, unfixed, or transitional topographical features, whose frustration of established categories marks them as places of heightened intersection, transgression of boundaries, hybridity, and negotiation. This paper examines the ways in which Euripides’ Troezen is rendered as a liminal landscape—a borderland of the Athenian civic sphere, representing freedom and purity, but also exile, contested identity, and danger.
I analyze Troezen’s liminal landscape according to its representation in two main contexts, topography and politics. Topographically, Troezen is depicted as a landscape replete with liminal spaces—notably sea, shore, and wilderness, three zones widely discussed in scholarship on liminality—that pervade the play’s imagery (e.g. the motifs of water and transition in the choral odes, and the marginal areas associated with the liminal goddess Artemis, 145-50) and provide important dramatic settings (e.g. the seashore where Hippolytus is attacked by Poseidon’s bull). In the speeches of Hippolytus (73-81) and Phaedra (208-231), the wilds of Troezen embody uncivilized purity and liberation from social constraints. Troezen’s political status is also marked, as the land seems poised on the ambivalent boundary of Athens’ political geography, a place both foreign and familiar. On the one hand, Euripides’ Troezen is demonstrably separate from Athenian civilization; although Theseus rules over the land, his stay there represents an exile, and both he and Hippolytus are characterized as ἔκδημος in their connection with the territory (32, 37, 281, 659). But even as Troezen is distanced from Athens, the text simultaneously draws the two cities into unison, from the prologue that locates Troezen in the view of the Acropolis (30-31) to the recurrent geographical linking of the two lands and conflation of Athens’ territory and citizenry with those of Troezen (e.g. 1093-97, 1157-59, 1161).
As a liminal landscape, Euripides’ setting contextualizes and underscores the similarly marginal civic status of his three main characters—Hippolytus, Phaedra, and Theseus—who themselves exist, in diverse ways, on fraught boundaries of the Athenian social order.