A few miles northwest from Galatas, on the road to Corinth, you drive by a sign reading Trizina. A small country-road leads into the foothills of the mountains on your left.
Flying by that sign some years ago, I remembered that Trizina was the birthplace of Theseus, legendary hero, killer of the Minotaur, once a king in Athens. From a distance, there was nothing to see except some farms and chicken coops. How could the former home of a mythic hero appear this modest? I made a U-turn and drove back, turned onto that country road, and went to take a closer look at the place.
You may recall that Theseus was also the husband of Phaedra, stepmother to his grown son Hippolytus from an earlier marriage. Theseus traveled a lot. Often alone, his young wife Phaedra took a fancy to her stepson. They were close to the same age. The son probably looked like his father. The latter was absent, the former present. In Phaedra’s mind, one thing led to another.
Hippolytus, however, was a devotee of Artemis. He not only had no interest in his stepmother, but he did not care for women in general. He thought the world would be a better place without them. In his play Hippolytus, Euripides has him saying that women are a curse and that in a better world men would have children by buying seeds in a temple, presumably to plant in special gardens in which children would grow from them.
His stepmother’s passion for him therefore made for a situation that was doubly awkward. He vehemently rejected her after an attendant betrayed her secret to him. Phaedra responded by hanging herself. She left a suicide note that falsely accused Hippolytus of coming into her bed in Theseus’ absence and forcing himself upon her. Finding the note, an outraged Theseus banned his son from the city. As Hippolytus fled Trizina in a horse drawn chariot, a bull emerged from the waters of the Saronic Gulf and attacked his horses. The horses went wild. Entangled in the reins, Hippolytus was thrown from the chariot and smashed his head on a rock. He died almost immediately. The story, with additional details, including the role that Aphrodite, goddess of love, played in the whole affair, is told in Euripides’ play.
Footnote about that bull: Phaedra was the daughter of Queen Pasiphae, wife of King Minos of Crete. The Minotaur Theseus slew was her son. Pasiphae apparently conceived a passion for a particularly attractive white bull, a present to her husband from Poseidon, god of the sea. The animal returned her affections. With some engineering help from Daedalus, the two consummated the affair. The result, the Minotaur – half-human, half-bull – was Phaedra’s half-brother. She was married to his killer. It seems that, unhappy about what became of his gift’s offspring, Poseidon came up with another bull who killed Theseus’ offspring.
Trizina looked no better from close up than from afar – just a small village in the foothills. I did, however come upon a fenced off meadow identified by a sign as an archeological site. At one time it had apparently been the location of two large structures the limestone foundations of which were still visible. One had been an Asclepeion – a sort of medical resort or spa.The remains of the watercourses in the foundations indicated that it had featured healing baths. The original purpose of the other was less clear. A plaque suggested that it may once have been a temple to Hippolytus. According to other opinions, it had been a temple to Aphrodite Katascopia – “Peeping Aphrodite.” It supposedly marked the spot from where a lovesick Phaedra had secretly watched a naked Hippolytus performing his morning kalesthenics.
Walking in that meadow with its blood-red poppies, its yellow and violet wildflowers, the air filled with the buzzing of bees, I wondered why anyone would erect a temple to Hippolytus. To be sure, he had commendably declined to take physical advantage of Phaedra’s passion for him. But I found it amazing that this act of self-control would have been thought to warrant commemoration on this scale. Were the errant passions of stepmothers in those days so widespread that the ancient Greeks found it advisable to reinforce resistance to them with public monuments?
The thought would have been somewhat more plausible had that exercise in self-control by Hippolytus been a difficult feat for him. But he did not like women in the first place. He would have been only slightly less horrified by the prospect of sex with any woman than he was with Phaedra. So, self-control was not exactly the right word for his behavior. Militant indifference to women was. Seen from that point of view, a temple to Hippolytus became a disturbing monument to an entire culture’s feelings of unease about the sexuality of women.
A temple to Aphrodite Katascopia struck me as equally troubling. In this context, it would have reminded men that women are dangerous and that, rather unfortunately, there is no averting that danger by avoiding interaction with them. Aphrodite is always out there scheming; as she did Hippolytus, she’ll get you eventually no matter what you do.
Upon reflection, my reactions struck me as simple-minded. A man who has no erotic interest in women was one thing; perhaps he preferred other men. A man obsessed with women as a problem – as Hippolytus apparently was – was another. Chances were, he liked them too much. He did not hate women; he hated his susceptibility and vulnerability to their charms. That was why he was constantly out there hunting, wearing himself out, taking cold showers, as it were. He spent the rest of his time praying to Artemis. Just to keep his thoughts on safe tracks, he venerated her whose sexuality was not interesting and who, in any case, was not likely ever to be available. Differently put, his apparent abhorrence of women was his form of self-control. He had much to control.
It then struck me that modern men did not generally behave like that. Their patron goddesses were women like Marilyn Monroe, walking anatomy lessons, small-waisted busty creatures in high heels, which heels emphasize the spindle of the leg and bring the hips to visual life. How did modern men cope with this constant surfeit of sexual provocation? Where did the cold showers fit in?
They didn’t really. Modern men did not care about self-control. They had discovered another solution to Hippolytus’ problem. For the desexualizing of women – as in Artemis – they substituted the depersonalization of sex. They had sex with women’s bodies, not with their owners. Sex – a temporary thrill – posed no threat to their self-possession. Love did, with all its headaches, heartbreak, loss of perspective, and emotional storms.
Which suggested to me that there was a time when the distinction between love and sex, and between persons and their bodies, did not come so easily. Otherwise, why would Hippolytus not have availed himself of it?
So, perhaps a temple to Hippolytus did make some sense, as would one to Aphrodite’s possession of Phaedra. As both characters tragically discovered, love, inseparable from desire and sex, is an immense, uncontrollable power, one to be seriously wary of, and one of which you cannot get the better by ignoring it. An occasional pilgrimage to Trizina might have reminded people of that while they enjoyed the healing baths.
The moralists will say that Phaedra should have kept her eyes to herself, and Hippolytus, well, he should have found himself a wife. For moralists, nothing is ever truly complicated. But Aphrodite has their number too. If you don’t believe me, you may enjoy the film The Blue Angel (1930).
Meanwhile, say a prayer for Pasiphae, too. She only did what she had to do. (Thank you, Willie Nelson.)
It was getting late. I had to get back on the road and head for Corinth.