In Hippolytus, in Cant. II, 3 we find the Georgian term შჯულ-ი (šǯul-i) several times. G. Garitte rendered it in his Latin translation always as lex, causing quite a bit of obscurity in Hippolytus’ lines. The solution appears when we recognize that it can be traced both to the Greek νόμος and to διαϑήκη. If we take this into account, the text now flows harmoniously with other passages in the works of Hippolytus and with the literal tenor (...) of the terms chosen by the Greek epitomist from the Interpretatio Cantici canticorum of Hippolytus. (shrink)

Lines 25–30 of the hypothesis to Euripides′ Hippolytus read as follows.

The following is excerpted from Sean Gurd’s translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus published with Uitgeverij this year. Though he was judged “most tragic” in the generation after his death, though more copies and fragments of his plays have survived than of any other tragedian, and though his Orestes became the most widely performed tragedy in Greco-Roman Antiquity, during his lifetime his success was only moderate, and to him his career may have felt more like a failure. He was regularly selected (...) to have his plays performed in the annual festival of Dionysus at Athens. But the plays were performed in a competition, and in the competitions he lost and lost, winning first place only five times in a career that spanned more than forty years. His corpus reads like the remains of a life spent trying to get a few things right and never being quite satisfied: scenes and schematized combinations of elements recur again and again, each time slightly changed. Hippolytus itself is an example: it contains two scenes in which a sick or dying character lies on a couch or a stretcher and is surrounded by silence and grief; he had experimented with such scenes in Alcestis, and would work with them again in Herakles and Orestes. Nor, judging from appearances, was he immune to the desire to score a hit, or to satisfy the audiences and the judges at the competition. Hippolytus is a rewrite of another Hippolytus, performed several years earlier, which scandalized the audience and certainly did not take first place. In that earlier Hippolytus (called by later writers Hippolytus Veiled), Euripides fashioned a Phaedra who was neither ashamed of loving her stepson nor incapable of taking steps to satisfy her desire. The forwardness of her approach to Hippolytus so outraged him that he covered his head with a robe (hence the play’s later title). Euripides liked to write energetic and self-confident women like this. He staged his Medea in 431, just three years before he revised Hippolytus, and in it the jilted title character murders her children in revenge for Jason’s new marriage to a more politically advantageous wife. Another flop: the play came in third of three. Evidently the judges did not like their women showing agency, especially when the consequences were transgressive. “The ornament of women,” wrote another great Athenian a little earlier, “is silence.”i Euripides’ Medea and his first Phaedra had other decorations. So three years after Medea crashed and burned and some time after the first Hippolytus suffered the same fate, he produced another Hippolytus play with a different setting and story. How could this one not have been a reaction to the failure of the first? “Second thoughts are always better,” he has one of his characters say, as though he were offering an apology for his first thoughts on the same story. In this new version, Phaedra is suicidally ashamed of her love, choosing to die rather than have it discovered, and willing to bring down her beloved Hippolytus in the service of the same end. Now it is Phaedra herself who covers her head in shock and horror at her desire. Only an intermediary, a slave of the house and an old crone with her fingers in all sorts of illicit pots, communicates Phaedra’s secret – against orders – and in consequence brings about the demise of two resolutely moral figures. It worked. For his tale of two well-born nobles with an unswerving commitment to moral action, destroyed by the meddling of a slave (and by the hostility of some particularly uncaring divinities), the judges crowned Euripides winner. It was the first time he had won, after almost thirty years of work. *** What Hippolytus wants more than anything else, as he protests with outrage just before leaving Trozen for the last time, is the benefit of due process – oaths, witnesses, an investigation that would reveal who really lusted after whom. Ironic, given that in the first Hippolytus, as far as we can make out, he did get a trial – but too late, and Theseus’ successful processing of Hippolytus failed to prevent his death. I cannot help hearing in the second Hippolytus’ complaints the anger of his authorial semblable who lost year after year by a process of judging that might have seemed brutal to him. Judges took no cognizance of how he worked, how long or hard or why; they just voted, and Euripides lost. But then I hear, in the fate of the first Hippolytus, an even grimmer commentary. Processed or not, we lose. We run aground. At the very least, this might cast a darker shadow on the business of watching or reading a play: in that twilight, things move too fast to make a fair assessment and, in any case, the reasonably high definition of what you see and hear belies the truth of indistinction, the multiplicities just below the surface. Watching is a constrained activity, a form of captivity, but reading is plastic. This translation was begun to supply the script for an audio version of the play, recorded in the spring of 2012, and here and there it sacrifices literalness for sayability and the voices and passions of the actors on that occasion. But it was finished to be read, and engineered to create a reading caught between the poles of specificity and non-specificity that the play itself conjures and relies on at its generative core. Thus two texts: the one clear, perhaps overprecise, respectably modern in its presentation, and the other ancient, a reasonable approximation of the classical reading process, and indistinct in vital ways. Like early modern dramatic texts, the exact provenance and original function of the scripts that have made it down to us are unknown. We do know that the ultimate survival of Hippolytus was thanks to its wide-spread use as a school text. But its relation to the first performance in 428 BCE is a matter only of speculation. Euripides presumably had a fair copy before production began; it was probably modified during rehearsals. The actors may have had copies, too (probably the young men who served in the chorus did not). The chor?gos, a wealthy Athenian who paid for the production, might have been presented with or just made sure to get his hands on a high-quality text, to commemorate the play’s success. Fans might have been able to buy copies. Any one of these sources might have provided the ultimate progenitor of our text. Several of them might have, in fact, if later editors compared and conflated traditions. The plays toured extensively in the Greek-speaking world, and were restaged as repertoire for centuries afterwards. In the process they were subjected to enough modifications by producers and actors that in the later fourth century the Athenian statesman Lycurgus had a law passed prohibiting performances at Athens from deviating from the official “city” text of the tragedies (which he had commissioned). It is unlikely that the city text was the last word; but it marks an important moment in Athens’ role in their dissemination, since after this the major sites of textual curatorship moved overseas, to Alexandria, Pergamum, Rome, Antioch, Constantinople. Any single text of any single play is thus no more than a moment of clarity and stability, crossed and subtended by multiple vectors of change, including that of textual flux (from Euripides’ first drafts to the latest printed text) and that of Euripides’ life work as a writer, in the light of which the Hippolytus is just one attempt to produce something exactly right, to win the prize or finally satisfy himself or prove to himself that all this longing for perfection was a waste of time. I am intrigued by the possibility that a single text might somehow serve as a lens onto this wider zone of indistinction, representing a small region clearly but nonetheless containing a blurred image of the whole, like a Leibnizian monad. After all, no text is a witness: it is, rather, a perception and a performance, and what every Hippolytus must perform is the awkward overlay of singular and plural, social practise and subliminal drive, that structures the tragedy. Modern critical editions can do this by juxtaposing a (relatively) clean and simple text with a textual apparatus reporting variants and theorizing the relationship between textual instantiations. A translation lacks the resolution to catch the fine variations which feed into the construction of an apparatus. But there are other means to hand. Guessing at the exact words of the original text is always just that – guessing – though Hippolytus is less problematic than plays like Iphigenia at Aulis. But we can make a pretty secure guess at what such a text looked like. Texts read by fifth-century readers were fundamentally different from what is presented in the best medieval MSS and printed in modern publications. The texts of Euripides’ time and for many centuries afterwards did not indicate word division with spaces (or by any other means) and were extremely sparing in punctuation, often avoiding it altogether. There was only one “case” of letters – what we call “capitals.” Musical sections were inscribed as though they were prose, without line endings to reflect their rhythm or their rhetorical structure. There was no indication of the speakers within a dramatic text, either. The earliest surviving dramatic texts, which come from over a century after Euripides’ death and a time which was much more elaborate and precise in its textual culture, indicated speaker-change with a little line or paragraphos below the line and a double-point [:] at its end. This convention almost certainly does not date back to Euripides’ own time; it may not even date to Lycurgus. In any case, such indications were understood to be readers’ marks: they did not have the same authority as the text and they were subject to readers’ revisions. At least ideationally, if not in concrete and distinguishable fact, a dramatic text was understood as containing no indication of speaker-change (and certainly none of who was saying what). The reader had to figure that out for him-/herself. The clear, legible, easy texts we are accustomed to reading are the fabrications of medieval and modern reading cultures. The first text, then, presents the translation as the text would have been in the mid-fourth century, perhaps decades after Euripides’ death. The second text processes Hippolytus, makes sense of it and makes it “readable.” That is: too distinct, dangerously so. It gets in your way, conjures fantoms, tries to make you see. Fragments of the Hippolytus Veiled, otherwise almost entirely lost, are juxtaposed with similar passages in the text – not to suggest a reconstruction, but a dialogue and a complex set of reassessments. I have not tried to represent the full variety of textual variants, but I have signalled where, for one reason or another, the text is soft and different editions propose excisions or changes. The two texts must be read together: you, reader, form the bridge between the distinctly seen and the indistinct invisible. You, in the end, will be its mask. *** illsandhateddiseaseswhatcanidoforyouwhatshouldinotdohereisthelightandthebrightairyoursickbedisnowout s idethehouseyoureverywordwastocomeherebutyouwillrushbacktoyourbedroomagainyoufadequicklyyoudelig htinnothingyoudislikewhatyouhaveyoulovewhatyoudontitsbettertobesickthantendthesickthefirstissimpleto the secondattachesheartspainandhandsworkeveryhumanlifeispainfulthereisnoendtotoildarknesshidesbehindclo udswhateverisdearerthanlifeweproveunhappyloversofwhatshineshereforlackofknowledgeofanotherlifethere isnoproofforthingsbeneaththeearthonlystoriessustainus liftmybodystraightenmyheadthebondsofmylimbsareloosenedtakemyhandsandmypalearmsthishatistooheavy formyheadtoweartakeitoffspreadmyhairovermyshoulders couragechilddonttossandturnsoviolentlyyouwillbearyoursicknessmoreeasilywithpeaceandanoblemindallmort alssuffer aiaiiwanttodrinkpurewaterfromadewyspringiwanttoliebackandrestunderthetreesinsomegrassymeadowchildw hycrydontsaythesethingsnearthecrowdhurlingwordsmountedonmadness sendmetothemountainiwillgototheforestwherebeastkillingdogspressthespotteddeergodsilongtoshouttothedo gstoshootthethessalianjavelinpastmyblondhairtoholdthebarbeddartinmyhandwhythisanxietychildwhatdoyouc areabouthuntingwhydoyoulustforflowingspringstheresahillwithwaterjustnexttothetowerwecangetyouadrinkt h ereartemismistressofthesaltlakeandthecoursethunderingwithhorseshoovesiwishiwereonyourplainsbreakings t uds whythrowthesefrenziedwordsaboutjustnowyouweresettingoutforthemountaintohuntandnowyoulongforhorses onthewavelesssand thesethingsneedanoracletotellwhichgodreinsyouinanddrivesyoufromyoursenseschild whathaveidonehowfarhaveibeendrivenfromgoodthoughtsiwascrazyiwascursedbysomepowerpheupheualasn ursecovermyheadagainimashamedofwhativesaidcovermeatearmovesdownfrommyeyeanditembarrassesm eithurtstostraightenourmindanditisterribletobeinsanebesttodiebeforeyoubecomelucidagain illcoveryoubutwhenwilldeathcovermeimoldivelearnedalotmortalsshoulddrinkoffriendshipmoderatelynotfrom th edeepestmarrowofthesoulamindslovecharmsshouldbeeasytoundoorthrustawayortiemoretightlyitisaverydiffic ultweightforonesoultolaborovertwopeopleasiamwrackedbypainforhertoomuchdisciplinecausesmoreharmthan pleasureandwarswithhealthipraisetoomuchlessthannothinginexcessandthewiseagreewithme *** Scene 1 Enter Phaedra and the Nurse; the former is recumbent on a couch while the latter bustles about her with gestures that might be those of a caregiver or a guard. NURSE Ills and hated diseases! What can I do for you? What should I not do? Here is the light, and the bright air; your sick bed is now outside the house. Your every word was to come here, but you will rush back to your bedroom again. You fade quickly. You delight in nothing. You dislike what you have. You love what you don’t. It’s better to be sick than tend the sick – the first is simple. To the second attaches heart’s pain and hand’s work. Every human life is painful. There is no end to toil. Darkness hides behind clouds whatever is dearer than life. We prove unhappy lovers of what shines here for lack of knowledge of another life. There is no proof for things beneath the earth. Only stories sustain us. PHAEDRA Lift my body, straighten my head: the bonds of my limbs are loosened. Take my hands and my pale arms. This hat is too heavy for my head to wear. Take it off, spread my hair over my shoulders. NURSE Courage, child; don’t toss and turn so violently. You will bear your sickness more easily with peace and a noble mind. All mortals suffer. PHAEDRA Aiai. I want to drink pure water from a dewy spring. I want to lie back and rest under the trees in some grassy meadow. NURSE Child, why cry? Don’t say these things near the crowd, hurling words mounted on madness. PHAEDRA Send me to the mountain. I will go to the forest where beast-killing dogs press the spotted deer. Gods! I long to shout to the dogs, to shoot the Thessalian javelin past my blond hair, to hold the barbed dart in my hand. NURSE Why this anxiety, child? What do you care about hunting? Why do you lust for flowing springs? There’s a hill with water just next to the tower; we can get you a drink there. PHAEDRA Artemis, mistress of the salt lake and the course thundering with horse’s hooves: I wish I were on your plains breaking studs! NURSE Why throw these frenzied words about? Just now you were setting out for the mountain to hunt – and now you long for horses on the waveless sand. These things need an oracle to tell which god reins you in and drives you from your senses, child. PHAEDRA What have I done? How far have I been driven from good thoughts? I was crazy, I was cursed by some power. Pheu pheu. Alas. Nurse, cover my head again. I’m ashamed of what I’ve said. Cover me – a tear moves down from my eye and it embarrasses me. It hurts to straighten your mind and it is terrible to be insane. Best to die before you become lucid again. NURSE I’ll cover you. But when will death cover me? I’m old; I’ve learned a lot. Mortals should drink of friendship moderately, not from the deepest marrow of the soul. A mind’s love-charms should be easy to undo, or thrust away, or tie more tightly. It is a very difficult weight for one soul to labor over two people, as I am wracked by pain for her. Too much discipline causes more harm than pleasure and wars with health. I praise “too much” less than “nothing in excess,” and the wise agree with me. ***. (shrink)

The character of Hippolytus, as it is drawn by Euripides, usually receives but half-hearted praise. His coldness, inherited, no doubt, from his Amazon mother, and his consciousness of virtue, inevitably allied to priggishness in the eyes of a society which tolerates any extreme of self-depreciation, are not attractive. It is, perhaps, more surprising that no surprise seems to be provoked by the dramatic portrayal of a disposition unique in Greek literature. The association of holiness with a life of celibacy (...) is so familiar from the history both of Christianity and of other faiths that it seems natural to us that one who aspires to the highest purity, like Hippolytus, should allow no place in his life for sex. Hippolytus is pure, we are apt to imagine, for the same reason that a monk is pure, because such purity is pleasing to the god whom he serves and favourable to the life of the spirit. (shrink)

A new assessment of the philosophical traditions Hippolytus depends on and of his method of presentation. This book deals with the reception of the Presocratics, Plato and Aristotle in the first centuries CE, and is a major contribution to our knowledge of the various currents in Pre-Neoplatonic Greek philosophy.

An analysis of Hippolytus' Refutation of All Heresies, to discover his practices and motivations in preserving and quoting extracts from Greek Philosophy, in particular his important contribution to our knowledge of Presocratic Philosophy. The work argues that such sources must be read as embedded texts, and that fragments must not be extracted and treated in isolation from the quoting authority whose interests and knowledge are important in interpreting the material.

Barrett finds lines 1010–15 difficult. He says that ‘hovers between “an heiress as my wife” and “marriage with an heiress”’, that ‘a Greek heiress did not inherit property as her own: it passed not to her but with her, to her husband and ultimately to her children.—In Attic law a widow was never : a man's property went to his legitimate children.

A study of Hippolytus of Rome and his treatment of Presocratic Philosophy, used as a case study to argue against the use of collections of fragments and in favour of the idea of reading "embedded texts" with attention to the interpretation and interests of the quoting author. A study of methodology in early Greek Philosophy. Includes novel interpretations of Heraclitus and Empedocles, and an argument for the unity of Empedocles's poem.

In beginning to speak of Euripides in this University of Manchester, one's thoughts naturally turn to the work of Professor Norwood in this direction, and it is with an especially keen sense of pleasure that I find myself not only following in his footsteps—a long way after!—but helping in a small way to contribute some further confirmation to the views on Euripides established by him and Professor Verrall.

A timeless rule for the community’s well-being consists in the compliance of the social rules that regulate the city’s arrangement. However, what would happen if those rules were broken? The Hippolytus of Euripides reflects the social inaptness of the central character, Hippolytus, who consciously neglects the rules of his community, mainly the divine nomoi, setting off his own death and the ruin of the other characters of the play.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews Catherine Osborne. Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy: Hippolytus of Rome and the Presocratics. London: Duckworth, 1987. Pp. viii + 383. NP. A quick look at Kirk, Raven, and Schofield's standard The PresocraticPhilosophers(Cambridge University Press, 1983) or Barnes's recent Early GreekPhilosophy (Penguin, 1987) reveals a clear distinction between (a) direct quotations (ipsissima verba) of the Presocratics and (b) testimonia (doxographic or otherwise) about their thought. This bifurcation into (...) original fragments and testimonia is called into question by Osborne in her book. For Osborne, the standard procedure of identifying fragments within a larger context and then interpreting the fragments without reference to that context is to be put aside "in favour of reading the text of the Presocratics as embedded texts within the context of the interpretations they were selected to illustrate" (183). This new methodology is not offered by Osborne as applicable across the board, for all the Presocratics. It is a nonstarter for, say, Parmenides, for whom we have (obvious) verbatim quotation in Simplicius (and consequently no need to take into account the Simplician context). But in the case of some other Presocratics we are not on such secure grounds. Or so Osborne thinks, and the book illustrates her hermeneutical principles with reference to Heraclitus and Empedocles as their thought is embedded in the text of Hippolytus of Rome's Refutation of All Heresies. Osborne's strategy proceeds in two distinct stages: (1) She first offers us a couple of examples of Hippolytus's interpretive skills, both of which, in different ways, reveal him as a pretty reliable (if biased) and interesting philosophical and textual exegete. In this regard she presents Hippolytus's discussion of Aristotle's doctrine of substance in the Categoriesand Metaphysics Z (in the context of Hippolytus's refutation of the heretic Basileides) and, secondly, his reworking of Irenaeus's life of Simon Magus, the reputed founder of gnosticism. Aristotle is a particularly good test case because we can, of course, check Hippolytus's report against the original. Having done so, Osborne is led to conclude that "little of interest can be derived from the limited amount of material that is quoted directly from Aristotle" (183; cf. also 66). Nonetheless, for Osborne comparison with Aristotle's text reveals Hippolytus as not bereft of philosophical acumen, even though his interpretation is colored by the particular polemics in which he is engaged. In sum, then, Osborne understands Hippolytus as an intelligent (if biased) interpreter of Aristotle and not a particularly good source for ipsissimaverba. (2) On the basis of these conclusions about Hippolytus as a source for Aristotle's metaphysical theory and for the life of Simon Magus, Osborne turns to Hippolytus's discussion of Heraclitus and Empedocles (in the context of his refutations of the [ll9] 120 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28"1 JANUARY ~99 o heretics Noetus and Marcion). Her goal is to urge a new nonfragment-based methodology for the study of the Presocratics, grounded in the conclusions she has just reached about Hippolytus as an interpreter of Aristotle and Irenaeus. The major obstacle which she faces in validating such a methodology is that in the cases of Heraclitus and Empedocles we have no original text by which to judge Hippolytus's reliability or interpretive skills. In lieu of such original texts all that Osborne has at her disposal is her own conclusion just reached about Hippolytus as a generally reliable (if biased) interpreter of Aristotle and Irenaeus. But just here is the major problem with Osborne 's proposed methodology: granting for the sake of argument that Hippolytus is a pretty good interpreter of Aristotle and Irenaeus, this does not entail that he is a reliable exegete of anyone else. He might be, he might not. We don't know and, more importantly, we have no way of finding out. Osborne assumes that Hippolytus had a greater knowledge of the relevant texts than we do (67, 185), and thus interpreted the Presocratics on this basis. He might have, he might not. In any event, Osborne's assumption is a case of special pleading. Equally plausible is that Hippolytus possessed no more of Heraclitus or Empedocles than we do and, consequendy, had... (shrink)

L'A. étudie l'oeuvre d'Hippolyte de Rome qui présente, moins qu'un véritable intérêt philosophique, l'avantage d'une certaine connaissance de l'histoire de la philosophie, sur laquelle il fonde sa défense de la doctrine chrétienne. Le débat s'articule autour de l'originalité de l'interprétation de la philosophie grecque, des Présocratiques en particulier, par Hippolyte. Il s'agit, par comparaison avec Plotin, de délimiter les sources philosophiques de son oeuvre empreinte d'un moyen platonisme traditionnel.