Comment on the philosophy of life as revealed in the play Phaedra by Seneca.

Seneca is a stoic philosopher, so the philosophy he puts into practice in Phaedra is stoic philosophy. The basic sayings of stoicism are that destructive emotions result from errors in judgment; that self control is essential to overcome such emotions; that human beings should be sincere to duty and guided by rational principles; and finally that only virtue itself is sufficient for happiness. Besides, later stoicism shows a preference for philosophical suicide to represent honorable release from intolerable situations.

Seneca wrote most of his plays specially Phaedra to bring these philosophical teachings into practice. For example, his central character Phaedra is obsessed with lust for Hippolytus. This obsession makes her neglect duty and commit errors of judgment which finally wrecks destruction for herself and others.   

To examine the issue more elaborately we may say that in the opening scenes, Seneca draws Phaedra as an essentially good woman who expresses her preference for being a faithful wife. But may it be for her hereditary curse or her husband’s philandering; Phaedra gradually gives into caustic passions and thereby declines to the point of destruction. As she gets poisoned by the passion of lust for her stepson, Phaedra begins to demonstrate nervousness and loses her rational stability. Seneca beautifully presents this instability of Phaedra by listing a series of household chores that she fails to accomplish due to her nervousness. The list begins with weaving, as Phaedra deplores: “The loom of Athena is empty / and the wool slips between my very hands”. The rest of the list covers such wifely activities as adorning temples and participating in Athenian dances or in the secret rites of Demeter. All these indicate that Phaedra is deviating from the natural courses of life and getting neglectful of her duties by losing rational control.

In her next development towards deterioration, Phaedra totally detaches herself from the touch of reason and loses her sense of good and bad. She becomes clouded with passion and in her way to errors of judgment, she rejects with unrealistic arguments all the Nurse’s sensible advice to abjure her love. ‘Love is uncontrollable’, she says and she needs not fear Theseus’ vengeance, because she believes, he will never return from the Otherworld.

From the second act, passion rather turns Phaedra a bad woman. In the notorious ‘mad seen’, she gets devoid of all rationality and let her hair down to flow loose on her shoulders. Having removed her royal robes, she thinks of running disheveled into the woods and literally throws herself at Hippolytus’ feet. Her fluctuation from virtue reaches its climax when we see her urging to Hippolytus to take her as a slave: “Mother – that name is too proud and high; a humbler name better suits my feelings. Call me sister, Hippolytus, or slave – yes, slave is better; I will endure servitude.”

However Phaedra’s decline does not end here. In stoicism good means extreme good and bad means extreme bad and Phaedra also has to complete her full cycle of viciousness. Therefore, when she is rebuffed by Hippolytus, Phaedra drives the last nail to her bad reputation by treacherously accusing Hippolytus of having raped her. Phaedra thus stands out as a classic example of human potential ruined by passion.

Finally, with Phaedra, Seneca also touches upon the stoic philosophical concept of committing suicide. For example, as Phaedra sees the grisly remains of Hippolytus’ dead body, things become intolerable for her and she commits suicide to release her from all sorrows.

For the rest, it can be said that besides Phaedra, unchecked emotion also spell doom for the other characters of the play as well. For example, Theseus does not stop to question his wife’s accusations, but readily calls for the death of his own son, so great is his rage. Even Hippolytus draws a sword on his own stepmother, merely because of her love for him. He then plunges into the forest, without considering the consequences of his hasty departure, and without thinking how his flight may be used against him to cover up Phaedra’s guilt.

Thus the world of Phaedra is a world where emotions loom large and reason is absent. According to Seneca a world devoid of reason means a world devoid of virtue which piles up nothing but horror after horror. A cool rationalist as he is, Seneca writes Phaedra to exercise his stoic philosophical teachings. He lets his characters poisoned with passions and then keeping himself in ironic distance, observes how passion leads man to bestiality which is an inherent human nature in general.

Justify that Phaedra (Seneca) is a tragic heroine.

Even though on moral grounds, Phaedra as a character deserves punishment for her incestuous dark desires, she can not de denied a tragic status for certain reasons. No doubt, the root cause of Phaedra’s tragedy is that she is a victim of unrequited love. However, a close inspection reveals that there are several other factors which drive Phaedra to indulge in sexual perversity which resultantly incurs her inescapable doom.

Firstly, Phaedra owns a hereditary curse upon herself. From mythology and from the play itself we know that Venus has loaded the whole race of Phoebus with ‘shame unspeakable’ as Apollo once exposed the love between Venus and Mars. As a result, Phaedra’s mother Pasiphae was doomed to fall in love with a bull and Phaedra with her stepson Hippolytus. As the play opens, we find that Phaedra has an anguished moral awareness about her bestial desires and she alludes to her bestial ancestry: “I recognize the deadly evil [that afflicted] my unhappy mother”.  Then when the nurse advises her to smother her incestuous passion, Phaedra declares, “I know, dear Nurse, that what you say is true; but passion forces me to take the worse path”.  She further complains, (“What can reason do? Passion has won and rules supreme, and a mighty god has control over all my soul”.  Thus it can be said that Phaedra is a victim of some independent fatal forces upon which she has no control.

Secondly and importantly in the Senecan version of the play, Phaedra’s husband Theseus is much to blame for creating scope of Phaedra’s illicit passion. At the outset of the play, Phaedra expresses her preference for being a faithful wife but fails because of her frustration about Theseus. She directly refers to Theseus’ sexual exploits and her accusations get strong proof when we learn that currently Theseus with his friend Peirithous has gone underworld in order to kidnap and rape Persephone. When Phaedra deplores, “Shame does not hold him back––in the depths of Acheron he seeks fornication and unlawful bed,”- we actually hear the voice of a neglected wife affronted by her husband’s constant philandering.  It can be argued that had Theseus been a more faithful husband, much of Phaedra’s perversity would have been averted.

Thus hereditary curse and Theseus’ unfaithfulness poison Phaedra with the passion of lust and thereby she commits a series of errors of judgment, the basic requirement of a classic tragedy. Phaedra’s first error is that she misinterprets her relationship with Hippolytus by laying more importance on biology than domestic and social codes. She being not the biological mother of Hyppolytus considers her position as a role playing mother. Therefore, she asks Hippolytus to take his father’s place. Then when Hippolytus calls her mother, she replies, “Mother – that name is too proud and high; a humbler name better suits my feelings. Call me sister, Hippolytus, or slave – yes, slave is better; I will endure servitude.” All these indicate that   Phaedra’s tragedy lies precisely in her lust driven role playing which transgresses the long drawn social establishments.

Phaedra’s next error is that she makes wrong response to the counsels of the Nurse. She refuses her counsels when she should accept and accepts them when she should refuse. Thus up to the point of revealing her desires to Hippolytus, she never gives a positive ear to the Nurse’s counsels, but when she is rebuffed by Hippolytus, she follows the nurse’s advice word for word: “Crime must be concealed by crime”. Resultantly, Phaedra treacherously accuses Hippolytus of having raped her and wrecks destruction both for her and others.

For the rest, Phaedra earns her tragic grandeur because she struggles with herself and changes in the course of the play. Even being so overcome by lustful passion, when she hears the fearful death of Hippolytus, her viciousness turns into remorse. She now faces up to her actions by taking responsibility for Hippolytus’ death, admitting her illicit love and deception to her wronged husband, and finally taking her own life as an act of self punishment. Besides, throughout her confession, she scrupulously avoids any mention of the Nurse’s role in her deception and false accusation so that no harms may befall on her. Seneca thus presents Phaedra as a courageous woman, who, though still driven by her passion, returns to her essential goodness and morality.

Thus it can be said that lust is the engine that drives the tragedy of Phaedra. However, like Euripides, Seneca does not present Phaedra as a lustful woman. By nature a good woman, Seneca’s Phaedra declines because she is a victim of unrequited love whose origins already been mentioned above. In the character of Phaedra, Seneca, the stoic, beautifully dramatizes how passion can lead man towards bestiality and throw him into the pit of hateful damnation.