Seneca's Phaedra

Journal Prompt, class 2 only!

Based on readings through Seneca Phaedra part 2 (that includes your impressions of Greek tragedy since the beginning of the semester), what do you think Brill's New Pauly means when it says that "the content of Roman tragedy is not 'tragic' "? What assumptions seem to lie behind Brill's generalization? Does it seem a fair assessment?

Text Access

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Phaedra. Trans. E. F. Watling. Four Tragedies and Octavia. 2 ed. Penguin Classics. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966. 95-150. (Available via bookstore.)

Introduction to Senecan Tragedy, to Seneca's Phaedra

Times: The Early Principate

Politics

In 27 BCE, the soon-to-become Augustus, the last man standing after decades of violent and disruptive infighting between Rome's leaders, ceremoniously returned sovereign power to the Senate and People of Rome (the SPQR, or SENATVS·POPVLVS·QVE·ROMANVS), only to have it returned right back to him through a series a measures endowing him with close to monarchic — though not total — control of the state, or RES·PVBLICA. The emperor styled himself "first among equals" (princeps inter pares). The emperor's subjects, poets like Ovid, styled him son of a god, and destined to become a god. (Octavian-Augustus was the adoptive son of Julius Caesar, who, after his assassination in 44 BCE, was declared a god by the senate.) The name "Augustus" itself means "venerable," "majestic"; the emperor's guardian spirit, his genius, became the object of public worship.

Returning to the autocracy engineered by Augustus, it verifiably provided a welcome degree of political stability. But it also meant that the Senate, long the most powerful and aristocratic governing body at Rome, had its powers greatly reduced; the old Republic was, to all intents and purposes, dead. Things were better, but with so much power concentrated in one person, the ancestral Roman hatred of kings came face to face with the reality of one-man-rule, dynastic strife, and diminished power for the old ruling class.

Things deteriorated under the rule of the next four Caesars: the misanthropic Tiberius (r. 14 CE-37), the sociopath Gaius (aka Caligula, r. 37-41), the scholarly and capable, but too-easily manipulated, Claudius (r. 41-54), the and the more or less unhinged (a matter of debate) Nero (r. 54-68). This was a period when persons of rank had to watch their backs at all times. Any word or deed capable of interpretation as disloyalty to the emperor or his family could bring with it charges of treason. Members of the old senatorial class, because they could not openly criticize Caesar, i.e., the emperor, had taken to doing so covertly, for instance, through the writing of supposedly mythological or historical works. Hence tragedies with titles like Cato (Cato the Younger, Republican martyr) or Atreus (the extremely evil Greek king) as a way of maintaining "plausible deniability" when voicing protest. Yet even the faintest hint of disloyalty in a line of drama could prove lethal for the playwright.

Philosophy

At the same time, two philosophies from Greece were competing for the minds of Roman intellectuals. From a Roman perspective, neither philosophy appealed primarily for its contribution to ancient science, metaphysics, or logic (Stoic logic was actually a stupendous achievement unequaled until little more than a hundred years ago!). What really mattered was the concern of each with ethics: the art of living, which is to say, the path to happiness. Hence the Roman philosopher's — Seneca's — concern with questions addressing the possibility of a moral order in a seemingly chaotic world, of independent agency in the face of fate, the problem of suffering and evil, and so on — concerns arguably shared between Seneca's prose and tragedy.

As to the philosophies in question, they can be very briefly summarized as follows:

• Epicureanism, which taught that the gods exist but ignore human beings, who should imitate the gods by seeking to live lives totally free from disturbance: ambition, lust, but mostly the fear of death (the Epicureans believed in no afterlife)
• Stoicism, which taught that human beings should seek to "live in accordance with nature" (kata phusin, secundum naturam). Nature, the Stoics believed, is guided by rational principles: logos (Greek) or ratio (Latin). By living thus, one achieves both wisdom and virtue, and therefore, happiness. ("The mind, in its effort to gain wisdom, takes its start from those things that follow nature, and thus achieves knowledge of the good," Cicero De finibis 3.33.) Besides wisdom, nothing matters. Wealth, power, pleasure — all of it, though generally viewed as advantages, were viewed by the Stoics not as evil but as "indifferent" (adiaphora, indifferentia)
• Connected with early Imperial Roman Stoicism was a fashion for philosophical suicide: deaths staged as acts of protest against the corrupt rule of the Caesars. Especially for the Stoics, suicide could represent honorable release from intolerable situations. One of those to die in this way was our playwright, Seneca.

Note that Seneca was a committed Stoic though also clearly knowledgeable in Epicureanism; you'll find evidence of both philosophies in his works.

Rhetoric

Finally, a word about rhetoric. Higher male elite education in Seneca's day centered around two subjects: philosophy and rhetoric, with the emphasis ultimately on rhetoric. For even under the emperors, achievement in rhetoric, the art of persuasion, was the aristocrat's ticket to success in politics. (Yes, politics of a sort continued to be practiced.)

Young men were, accordingly, heavily schooled in rhetoric. At the same time, rhetoric itself came to be cultivated as an art form in its own right, with master rhetoricians composing and publishing demonstration pieces — "declamations" (declamationes) — on a variety of often fictitious or mythological topics. Rhetoric of this type penetrated all corners of Roman literature, both poetry and prose. Seneca's father compiled a collection of declamations for use by his sons (still survives); Seneca's tragedies and other works often betray evidence of this rhetorical training.

See the Introduction to Roman Tragedy page for sententia as a feature of Roman rhetoric and tragedy; also below.

Performance

We know next to nothing about whether Senecan tragedy was performed in public and, if it was, how it was performed. One recent discovery at the Roman city of Pompeii, in southern Italy, basically confirms that in the middle to later first century CE, it was common for Greek and Latin plays (tragedy? comedy? both? other?) to be staged for the public, though that's as far as it goes for that bit of evidence. Coffey and Mayer (Seneca. Phaedra. Introduction, text, and commentary, Cambridge 1990), though they allow that Senecan tragedy in its day could have been performed onstage, assert that it more likely will have been read for personal enjoyment or recited without staging, possibly at private gatherings — the term for that is, by the way, closet drama:

Though Seneca's primary intention was to provide a vehicle for animated recitation or declamation in which the audience was persuaded to share the illusion of an enacted drama, the possibility that his plays were performed in whole or part should not be excluded. A recent well-documented study suggests that scenes from Seneca's tragedies would make impressive, emotionally charged excerpts for the stage. (p. 15)

The study referred to in the preceding, by A. Dihle, dates from 1983. But for really ground-breaking work addressing the performability of Senecan drama, you should turn to C.J. Herington's 1966 article, "Senecan Tragedy" (Arion 5, pp. 422-471). On the question of performance, Herington writes:

Where the Senecan tragedies are concerned, therefore, our only resource is the texts themselves. In these I find nothing unactable, if allowance is made for a few stage conventions that would be moderate by Jacobean, let alone Aeschylean or Restoration, standards. But that decision is, admittedly, subjective; far less subjective, if subjective at all, is the question of the speakability of Senecan drama. Practical experiment in the tape recording of scenes from the Phaedra convinced me, and I believe would convince anyone else who tried it, that Senecan dramatic verse is designed, no less than the verse of Marlowe or Racine, for its effect on the ear, not on the eye; and that that effect is shattering. Retranslated, even by amateurs, into the sound-medium, the long speeches almost of themselves generated passion, the verbal epigrams (dull on paper [Herington means the sententiae]) acquired a cutting edge, the texture and forward movement of the scenes were restored. That the verse was intended for speaking, then, I have no doubt; and if that can be admitted, the conclusion inevitably follows that it was intended for speaking by different voices for the different parts. (p. 444)

Whether or not the plays were originally meant for public performance (though Herington considers them eminently performable in the Latin original), they were, in his view, meant to be heard, with the parts spoken by individuals taking on different roles.

On the question of performability, the jury may no longer be out. In 2013, the Barnard/Columbia Ancient Drama Group staged Seneca's Thyestes in Latin, arguably, successfully.

Seneca: Life

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ca. 10 BCE-65 CE) came from a wealthy Italian family (of not the very highest, but next-to-highest, rank, namely, "equestrian") that had settled in Roman Spain. His father was a land owner with strong interests in rhetoric and history. Relatives also achieving distinction included:

• L. Junius Gallio Annaeanus, Seneca's eldest brother, who served as governor of Greece and heard there a case against the Christian Saint Paul. This brother is actually mentioned in the Bible (Acts 18.12ff.)
• Lucan, a distinguished poet forced, like his philosopher-tragedian uncle, to commit suicide by the emperor Nero

Seneca himself, as would have been normal for any politically ambitious aristocrat, was educated in philosophy and rhetoric at Rome. Through family connections he reached the questorship during the reign of the emperor Tiberius (14-37 CE). Soon into the reign of the emperor Claudius (41-54), Seneca fell victim to a palace intrigue. He was, as a result, relegated to the island of Corsica for seven-and-a-half years. In 49, Seneca was restored to Claudius' favor, when the emperor's new wife had him appointed to tutor her son, the future emperor Nero (r. 54-68). It was probably during these years following relegation that Seneca composed his tragedies.

For a time, Seneca, together with Nero's mother Agrippina and others, was able to keep the emperor Nero's wayward tendencies in check. However, Seneca clearly played a less than honorable role in Nero's ultimately successful plot (it took a lot of attempts) to murder his mother (59). But Seneca, the philosopher preaching moderation and virtue, also used his connections to enrich himself hugely, becoming, as he did, one of the greatest landowners in the empire. Though we should not summarily dismiss Seneca's ethical and other writings on account of his actions and record, it is hard for those facts not to color one's interpretations of the man's thought and writings.

Anyway, Seneca's influence over Nero began to wane to the point that Seneca thought it best to go into retirement; note that Seneca sought but failed to get Nero to accept his considerable wealth. Finally, after the failure of someone else's conspiracy to kill Nero, Seneca (probably innocent) and his nephew Lucan (definitely guilty) were implicated in the conspiracy and forced to commit suicide. Seneca did so in high fashion. Inviting his friends and family to witness the event, he opened his veins and discoursed on learned topics as the life bled out of him.

Is there a relationship between the writer's life and the writings themselves? Let me quote C. J. Herington on that very topic as it applies to the extremely complicated and baffling case of Seneca:

What does seem relevant is the clear fact that Seneca himself lived through and witnessed, in his own person or in the persons of those near him, almost every evil and horror that is the theme of his writings, prose or verse. Exile, murder, incest, the threat of poverty and a hideous death and all the savagery of fortune were of the very texture of his career. (In Arion 5 [1966] p. 430)

However remote, bizarre, grotesque, or unnatural we may nowadays find Senecan tragedy, it was certainly "relatable," if to no one else, then at least to Seneca himself.

Seneca: Works

Seneca wrote widely: philosophical and scientific works, the "moral epistles" (letters of an ethical-philosophical character), tragedy, an outrageous send-up of the despised — but safely dead — Claudius.

Seneca's tragedies were probably all written in the years following his return to Rome under Claudius, thus 49 CE into the reign of Nero. Still extant are:

• Agamemnon
• Raging Hercules
• Trojan Women
• Medea
• Phaedra
• Oedipus
• Phoenician Women
• Thyestes
• [The Octavia, included in your collection and assigned for our class, probably dates from the early 100s, through transmitted with tragedies authentically by Seneca]

They are quite saturated with rhetoric and replete with philosophical musings; they can also be quite gruesome in terms of their action and its description. Yet despite all that, they show considerable connection with Greek — especially Euripidean — originals, for instance, in the use of a back-story prologue and of a chorus punctuating the action with reflective passages, in debates evincing political and/or intellectual concerns, and in exploration of human psychology and motivation.

Yet the gods appear almost completely absent from these mythological dramas. Thus their focus on the human element, on the corruptive influences of power and of passions like lust and anger, point to abstracted though still relevant meditation on the dilemmas of Seneca's world. Characters caught between fate, passion, and their own, better judgment, still seem tragic, though in ways different from their Greek precursors.

Senecan Schema

To explain the relationship of plot to theme in Senecan tragedy, C.J. Herington lays out what he terms its "scheme," what I'll call the "Senecan schema" or "formula":

The scheme of a Senecan tragedy is easily defined. Although the tragedy is formally divided into five acts by the choral songs, the course of the plot, viewed as a whole, falls into three movements only, of gradually increasing length. For short, I will give them titles: The Cloud of Evil (this coincides with a formal division, the Prologue); The Defeat of Reason by Passion; finally, The Explosion of Evil, consequence of that defeat. (Herington "Senecan Tragedy" p. 449)

In other words, Herington identifies a structural-thematic principal operative in Senecan and Pseudo-Senecan tragedy generally and Seneca's Phaedra specifically. That structure consists of three "movements" as follows:

1. THE CLOUD OF EVIL, which coincides with a given play's prologue, in which an atmosphere of horror and dread is carefully cultivated.
2. THE DEFEAT OF REASON BY PASSION, often concentrated in the second act, where in several plays a noble and a lesser character debate — though really, REASON debates PASSION, with victory disastrously won by the latter.
3. THE EXPLOSION OF EVIL. Self-explanatory, it is, of course, action inevitably resulting from passion's victory over reason. Here, "the shockwave of evil races outwards, prostrating both the wicked and the noble" (Herington 456).

By way of example, the following charts how that scheme plays out in Seneca's Phaedra:

Thematic Structure	Dramatic Structure
CLOUD OF EVIL	ACT 1. Hippolytus’ chaste joy, Phaedra’s love agony.
DEFEAT OF REASON BY PASSION	ACT 1 cont. Phaedra’s and nurse’s debate.
EXPLOSION OF EVIL	ACT 2. Attempted seduction, shocked rejection. Criminal plot – “crime must cover crime” (Nurse, p. 127)
	ACT 3. Phaedra executes plan.
	ACT 4. Messenger speech, Hippolytus’ death.
	ACT 5. Phaedra’s suicide, Theseus’ grief.

Worthy of notice is the link between Herington's schema and Stoic ethics. Thus the "tragedy" of Seneca's Phaedra lies in the failure of its key players to resist succumbing to the impulses of passion, impulses blinding them to right reason:

• Phaedra succumbs first to misguided sexual desire, then to anger when denied the object of her desire, finally, to regret causing her to commit suicide
• Hippolytus succumbs to anger towards women. Even granting the overall misogynistic tenor of Roman patriarchy of Seneca's time, Hipppolytus' passionate hatred of women seems really over the top
• Theseus, Hippolytus' father and Phaedra's husband, also succumbs to anger, in his case, rage prompting him to rash vengeance that he will soon regret

This pessimistic, moralistic take on (pseudo-)Senecan drama — tragic action as the failure of reason — arguably explains a lot. But it also seems to leave unaddressed the playwright's seeming willingness to appeal to the voyeuristic impulses of his audience, to a decidedly un-Stoic fascination with violence, suffering, and the grotesque. Perhaps, though, those two aspects, the moralistic and the voyeuristic, are merely two sides of the same coin.

Seneca's Phaedra

Dating from perhaps earlier on in the chronology of Seneca's tragedies, the Phaedra combines two story-telling motifs:

• That of the evil stepmother. (Hippolytus will die as a result of his stepmother's falsely accusing him of attempted rape), and
• That of Potiphar's Wife, a motif named after the Biblical story of how Joseph was falsely accused by married woman he had been propositioned by and had turned down

In the story, Theseus, son of the sea god Neptune and foster son of the Athenian king Aegeus, has a son of own: Hippolytus. His mother was the now-dead queen of the Amazons, a race of man-hating women warriors from far to the east. Hippolytus, addicted to hunting and to the outdoors, has sworn himself to eternal virginity. In the meantime, two things:

1. Theseus has married a woman from Crete, one Phaedra, who will fall in love with Hippolytus. Phaedra is the daughter of Pasiphae, notorious for her love affair with a bull, and is the sister of Ariadne, with whom Theseus had earlier eloped, and whom Theseus then abandoned on an island. She is also half sister of the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, the result of her mother's taurophilic tendencies.
• Hippolytus is son of Theseus by a previous wife, the Amazon Antiope (the Amazons were warrior women from the eastern Mediterranean). Theseus slew Antiope for reasons that, in this play, are somewhat obscure.
2. Theseus has set off with his friend Pirithous for the Underworld, there to kidnap Proserpina, queen of the dead.

In Theseus' absence, Phaedra has fallen in love with the handsome but standoffish Hippolytus. The complications that creates, and how characters in the play will deal with same, will be for you to find out, though suffice it to say that will involve Theseus wishing the last of the three wishes his god father had promised him. . . .

Important in this play is its rhetoric. Above, you'll have read about the importance of rhetoric at Rome during the time of this play's composition; in Seneca's text you'll want to be on the lookout for that. Among other things, keep look for pithy phrases and sentences loaded with often heavily ironic, and at times, riddle-like, meaning, what the Romans called sententiae. Noteworthy is the following:

A man who can do much would like to do
More than he can. (Nurse, p. 106)

That sententia is rather tamely translated in the Penguin edition. The Latin reads, "quod non potest vult posse qui nimium potest" (line 215), better rendered, "A man with excessive power desires a power that is unattainable" (trans. Coffey and Mayer). As such, the sentiment expresses something close to the Greek-tragic "law of hubris and ate." Yet, in compressing within itself multiple levels of irony (e.g., excessive power means a kind of stunning impotence — note the triple repetition of forms of posse, "to be able," "to be empowered"), it somehow moves into the realm of the (characteristically Roman) over-the-top.

Can you find more such quotes in your text?

Connected with that is, arguably, a fascination with the spectacular, the monstrous, the grotesque, the bizarre. That has been connected by scholars with the Roman interest in outsized, violent shows like chariot racing and gladiatorial combat. See if you can find evocations of that, too, in your text.

Themes, Issues, Further Questions

Genre

Basically, what is "tragic" about this tragedy? Now, we don't have to be essentialist about that. Still, how does this tragedy fit into the tradition examined so far: classical Athenian, Republican Roman? How does this play, understood as tragedy because somehow part of that tradition of tragic plays, nevertheless force us to rethink our definition of tragedy, especially given its over rhetoricism? What is tragedy anyway?

Character, Theme, Gender

Phaedra is a character who alleges a sexual violation and then, in full view of her husband, kills herself. How, then, is she like, how unlike, the Roman suicide Lucretia in Accius' Brutus? More generally, can we begin to detect specifically Roman and/or political themes in this Roman play treating Greek mythology, evoking philosophy, and ending with a grisly death off stage and a suicide on stage?

And what do you make of Theseus' final speech (pp. 149-150), in which he dwells at length on the death and soon-to-happen funeral of his wrongly accused son, and then devotes two lines to the less honorable burial of his wife? Does Phaedra deserve that? Is that simply a plausible reaction from Theseus, or what do you think?

The previous was a gender question. Also on the subject of gender, what do you make of Hippolytus' impalement through his groin on a sharpened tree stump — symbolic somehow? and what about Hippolytus himself: wholly innocent or culpable on any grounds?

Notes

Here follow notes keyed into the pages of your text. They should help with some of the more obscure references.

99 Note how this prologue, spoken by Hippolytus, doesn't really supply backstory, as in a tragedy by Euripides.

99 Land of Cecrops. Athens and its environs. In the lines that follow ("In the shadow of Parnes’ height," etc. etc.), Hippolytus simply evokes the countryside surrounding Athens. In movies they call that the "establishing shot." "Establishing shots" are big in ancient, and especially Roman, literature. Note also all the evocation of hunting.

100 Molossians, Spartans, etc. These are breeds of hunting dogs. The blood-lust of some of those dogs foreshadows the play's ending. Hippolytus will become the hunted.

100 "Huntress divine." Diana, the Roman virgin goddess of the hunt. (Cf. Greek Artemis.) Hippolytus has sworn to remain a virgin.

100 auroch. A kind of European bison.

101 top. Those are far-away places. This is how far Diana's power reaches.

101 wain. Wagon.

102 Phaedra's speech serves as a kind of delayed prologue supplying backstory. Her burning heart is her lust for her stepson, Hippolytus.

102 "comrade in arms / To an audacious suitor Seneca" — Theseus and his friend Pirithous are off to the underworld to kidnap Proserpina, queen of the dead. Phaedra is jealous.

103 Is this the evil spell That bound my mother" — Phaedra's mother, Pasiphae (a daughter of the sun), fell in love with a bull; Phaedra, with her stepson.

103 Venus. Goddess of love, = Greek Aphrodite.

103 Jove, aka Jupiter. Roman king of the gods, = Greek Zeus.

104 "In Lethe’s depths, walking the shores of Styx" — in the Underworld, land of the dead.

104 "– what of him who rules The hundred cities and the wide sea roads, Your father?" — Minos, king of Crete.

105 "The invincible winged god." Love, or Cupid, son of Venus. = Greek Eros.

106 Phoebus. I.e., Apollo.

107 "A true Amazonian." The Amazons were mythical women from the Russian/Central Asian steppe. They were dedicated to hunting and war. (We know of no actual Amazons from antiquity, though their myth might have had a basis in certain aspects — the position of women, etc. — of Scythian society.) Their society was matriarchal; to Greeks, they expressed threat to the patriarchal status quo. Theseus had to defeat an invading army of Amazons. Antiope, their leader, was mother of Theseus' son, Hippolytus. Hippolytus, averse to relations with the opposite sex (to sex altogether), and dedicated to hunting and the great outdoors, can thus be spoken of as, in a sense, "a true Amazonian."

108 "from the high rock of Pallas?" — i.e., from the Athenian acropolis.

108 Ariadne. Ariadne is Phaedra's sister. Theseus, after killing the Minotaur, fled Crete with Ariadne, his lover and accomplice. So she represents another example, along with Pasiphae, of illicit love connected to Phaedra.

109 CHORUS. Note how this chorus makes no pretense to any dramatic identity in the play; they're not "elders of the city" or "attendants of the queen" or anything like that. In their extended odes (as here), they're there to comment on action and themes and to divide the play into acts. Elsewhere, the chorus/chorus leader interacts with characters, as in Greek tragedy.

109 "daughter of the never gentle sea." Venus.

110 "Phoebus came down to Thessaly" — Phoebus = Apollo. This is a reference to the myth of Alcestis and Admetus.

110 neatherd. A herder of cattle.

114 a woman of Maeotis / Or Tanäis" — Maeotis = the Sea of Azov, bordered by Crimea and Russia. Tanäis = the river Don. The Amazons, barbarian warrior women, were believed to come from the RussianŪcranian steppe north of the Black Sea. Phaedra wants to be an Amazonian huntress and to join Hippolytus' hunt. Pontus = the southern shore of the Black Sea.

119 "So, I think, / Men lived in the olden days" — Hippolytus spends lines and lines describing (a) the progressive corruption of human kind, their fall from innocence and grace, as a development parallel to, and caused by, (b) their ever increasing technological savvy and, with that, their growing ambition. It might seem out of place but it's, I think, very much in character. This is mansplaining (and passive-agressive misogyny) on a grand scale.

120 "Stepmothers" — Hippolytus' misogyny and hatred of stepmothers certainly shocks. But maybe it's meant to. This is over-the-top anger and animus; Seneca the Stoic would disapprove. Hippolytus is no hero, but he's also hopelessly naive and tactless. If his aim is, perhaps, to tell the Nurse to bugger off, he could do it a lot more subtly.

124 "The Cnossian monster." The Minotaur, on Crete. Theseus killed the Minotaur.

124 "And in his face there was the face of Phoebe, Your ancestor – or Phoebus, mine" — this is poorly translated and confusing. "Phoebe" (= feminine "bright") refers to Hippolytus' patron deity, Diana. "Phoebus" (= masculine "bright") is Phaedra's ancestor, the Sun. As commentator's note, Phaedra plays with the idea of Hippolytus as possessing a kind of gender-ambiguous beauty.

124 "Scythian roughness" — Hippolytus' Amazonian ancestry.

127 Corus. Corus or Caurus was the northwest wind.

128 Phoebe. As before, the Moon.

128. Hesperus. The evening star, that is, the planet Venus.

129. Naiads, Dryads, Pan. The first two are woodland nymphs. The third is a god of the wilds.

130. "That neck is not less lovely than Apollo’s." Hippolytus' neck. Apollo was the paragon of youthful male beauty.

130 Parthian. The Parthians were an Iranian people renowned for their skill at archery.

131 Cerberus. The three-headed dog that guarded to entrance to the underworld. To bring Cerberus to the upper world was one of the labors assigned to Hercules (Latin = Greek Heracles).

132. Phlegethon. The underworld river of fire.

132. "THESEUS: Unbar the doors Of the royal house." For a Roman audience, this whole Phaedra suicide (split between acts 3 and 5) will have recalled the suicide of Lucretia, a theme treated in Accius' Brutus.

135 Worlds that lie upside-down beneath our feet." Seneca, with his interests in philosophy and science, knew perfectly well that the earth is a sphere.

136 Dis. Another name for Pluto, god of death and the underworld.

138-139 southern Auster ... Ionian waters ... the head of Leucas. Respectively, the south wind; the Ionian sea, between western Greece and Italy; Leucas = Lefkada, an island off the western coast of Greece.

139 "Was this the birth Of one more Cyclad?" The birth of another island in the Cyclades chain, in the Aegean sea. More references to Greek geography follow.

139 "As when the huge spouting leviathan’s / Wide mouth...." "Leviathan" here translates what in the original means "whale." The breathing of the sea-bull monster is compared to that of a whale.

141 Phaethon. Phaethon, the son of the Sun, wanted to have a chance to drive his father's chariot on its daily trip across the sky. Bad idea: Phaethon makes a mess of it. Chariot nearly totaled, Phaethon completely totaled.

143 Boreas. The north wind. (Or just the north.)

143 "Phrygian forests of the Mother Goddess." The cult of Cybele, here, the "Mother Goddess" (aka the Great Mother of the Gods) was important not just to Phrygia but to much of Asia Minor (= Anatolia = Turkey). Her cult was established in Rome in 204/3 BCE.

144 "Pallas, whom all the Attic race adore" Athena, worshipped by all Athenians.

145 Tethys. = wife of Oceanus, god of the ocean.

145 Sinis, Procrustes, Cretan Bull (i.e., Minotaur). These are monsters previously killed by Theseus in the course of his heroic exploits.

146 Stygian stream. Tartarean lake. burning river. Underworld bodies of water. I.e., the Underworld.

147 "Taenarus, and Lethe’s river." Taenarus, entrance to the Underworld. Lethe, the river of forgetting, in the Underworld.

148 "The father2 of my friend Peirithous shall rest." Ixion, punished by being bound to an eternally spinning fiery wheel.

149 "I had to ask my father for his aid." Theseus' father is often given as Poseidon-Neptune, god of the sea. Neptune granted Theseus three prayers, the third of which he unleashes on Hippolytus. But Aegeus, king of Athens, is also given as his father. In this play, both seem to be Theseus' dad — go figure.

149 "THESEUS: Yes, bring your burden, bring me those remains." The image of the dismembered Hippolytus cannot but evoke associations with Pentheus in Euripides' Bacchae. Theseus' effort to "re-member" Hippolytus (put him back together, pun intended) are ultimately futile; they'll all be consigned to the funeral pyre. Theseus' anger, and resulting poor judgement, have annihilated his world.