Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

ATTIC COMEDY

beautiful stepson Hippolytus that rises to a crime is the axis round which the whole play turns. It is the oldest example of a Greek love-tragedy in the proper sense of the expression. We may assume that the brilliant representation of the frenzied lovepassion made a powerful impression upon the spectators and became a strong stimulus for the later treatment of erotic stories. Not only did Euripides employ the same motif in two dramas, one of which is preserved, but according to Pausanias (i, 22, 1), it was the very same story of Phedra and Hippolytus that later became everywhere known “even to non-Greeks, if only they had learnt the Greek language”. Euripides turned his attention by preference to erotic material, and thereby transferred heroic tragedy into a kind of bourgeois play with an unhappy ending; for although he frequently enough kept the names and characters of the heroic age, yet the men were men of his own time, and the feelings and passions represented by the poet are the common possession of all humanity, no longer connected with a definite period.

Erotic had now taken possession of the Greek stage, and Euripides and the later tragedians were never tired of describing, in constantly renewed variations, the almighty power of love—the highest bliss and the most burning passion—and allowing the spectators to explore all the depths and abysses of this greatest of all riddles which men call love.t Euripides was also the first who ventured to represent the motif of incest on the stage, in the Aolus (fragments in Nauck, TGF?, p. 365), which had for its subject the love of Canace and her brother Macareus with its tragic consequences. Similar motifs were then more frequently employed by the tragedians of later times; and in connection with

* For erotic motives in the Greek tragedians see E. Rohde, Der Griechische Roman (1900, p.31), although he does not take into account the numerous homosexual motives.

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