Arcadian Nights

by John Spurling

  The elder of her attendants, Evadne, seeing that her mistress was now sick with lust, refusing food, lacking sleep, unable to concentrate on anything but the view from that window, at last dared to speak:

  ‘You love him, don’t you?’

  ‘And if I do?’

  ‘You should do something about it.’

  ‘What can I do? He’s my stepson.’

  ‘No blood relation.’

  ‘Does that make it better, when I’m his father’s wife?’

  ‘Better or worse is not the question when love strikes so hard. You have to find a cure.’

  ‘There’s only one cure for this.’

  ‘For him to make love to you.’

  ‘Out of the question,’ said Phaedra.

  ‘Is it really? It’s obvious that this boy has never slept with anyone. He doesn’t have any idea of what pleasure it would give him. You could show him.’

  ‘Yes, if he were willing. But he’s not. Aphrodite means nothing to him.’

  ‘You would be Aphrodite’s ambassador, to bring him to her altar.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Let me speak to him!’

  ‘Never! He’d be appalled.’

  ‘Not if I found the right way of introducing him. Then it would be up to you.’

  ‘No, no, no! We never had this conversation.’

  ‘If you say so. But you can’t go on like this and if you continue starving yourself and spending sleepless nights, you’ll lose your looks and start to look like an old woman. And then what hope would you have of awakening him?’

  Phaedra made no answer and turned away. But when she still refused food and became still more hollow-eyed and pale, Evadne decided that her answer had really been ‘yes’. She intercepted Hippolytos on his way to the gymnasium and told him that her mistress was unwell and that he should call on her and discover what her trouble was. Hippolytos entered the little house, saw at once that his stepmother was not herself and sat down opposite her, with the window between them. The afternoon sun streamed through the window and cast a golden glow over Hippolytos as if he were indeed Apollo. Phaedra withdrew into shadow and stared at him in silence, as though she were in a trance.

  ‘You are ill?’ he asked.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Something is upsetting you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re missing my father?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘Too hot?’

  ‘I like heat.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  She shook her head so slowly and sadly that even Hippolytos, with no experience of women’s moods and signals, was touched. He leaned across and took her hand.

  ‘Let me help you!’ he said. ‘You know that since I lost my mother, you’ve been my mother.’

  Phaedra cried out:

  ‘No! No! I was never your mother. Antiope was your mother and then Aithra.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But she was my grandmother. Since I grew up I’ve always seen you as …’

  ‘Not your mother!’

  ‘No, I suppose not exactly.’ Understanding that this word ‘mother’ distressed her, he tried to find an alternative. ‘As – what can I say? As a beautiful, sophisticated woman. As the sort of wife I might one day hope for myself, if I was so lucky.’

  He smiled and looked at her steadily, still holding her hand.

  ‘That’s how you see me?’

  ‘Absolutely!’ he said, pleased that she seemed pleased.

  ‘I love you, Hippolytos,’ she said, very quietly as if to herself.

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘You know?’

  ‘Because I love you. People, in my experience, don’t love people who don’t love them.’

  Did she really mistake his meaning? The Greek verbs for friendly affection and sexual attraction are not, as in English, the same. More likely, in her desperation, driven mad by his close presence and the vengeful influence of Aphrodite, she chose to attempt the leap from one love to the other. Seizing with both hands the hand that still rested on hers, she kissed it passionately.

  ‘I am in love,’ she said, ‘devoured by love, netted and speared by Aphrodite.’

  Still he failed to understand her – how could he, from his complete innocence of the emotion?

  ‘In love? What do you mean? With my father?’

  ‘With you, Hippolytos, with you. The gods help me!’

  Now he did understand. The shock stripped him of all the respect he had for her, of all his usual gentleness, of every idea he had ever had of how things should be. He pulled his hand away and stood up, knocking over the stool he had been sitting on.

  ‘Revolting!’ he said, ‘horrible! filthy! You disgust me!’

  He fled from the room, ran past the gymnasium, up the hill past the Temple of the Muses and beyond the town to his new temple of Artemis, nearly completed. There he flung himself down in front of the altar and prayed to Artemis for comfort and guidance.

  Back in the little house beside the gymnasium, Evadne tried to console Phaedra. Phaedra would have none of it, none of Evadne herself, whom she blamed for precipitating this catastrophe. Raging, weeping, striking the walls with her fists and arms so that they bled, she drove her two attendants out of the house, telling them that she no longer needed them, they could go back to Athens or down to Hades.

  ‘What do I need attendants for? I am no longer a queen, no longer the wife of a king, no longer even a woman. Something filthy, horrible, revolting! I disgust him! Yes, quite right, Hippolytos! I disgust myself.’

  Evadne and her companion left the house and walked about disconsolately, not knowing what they ought to do. They needed help, perhaps even male help, to restrain Phaedra, but how could they get help without revealing the cause and spreading their mistress’s shame all over Troezen? And even if they managed to conceal the cause, Phaedra herself in her unconstrained self-hatred would reveal it. An hour or two later, as the sun began to go over the mountain and parts of the valley fell into shadow, they returned to the gymnasium, where Hippolytos’ friends, but not he, were exercising as usual, and came again to the house. There was no sound, not even of weeping. They went cautiously through the door. Phaedra was not in the room where she usually sat at the window. The door to her bedroom was shut. Evadne knocked but got no answer. She called Phaedra’s name. Still no answer. She tried to open the door and found it locked, bolted on the inside. She called again, louder and louder, with no answer. They waited until the sun had disappeared behind the mountain and the whole valley was in shadow and tried again without result. The two women looked at each other and agreed without speaking that they should not wait any longer.

  Evadne ran to the gymnasium and called out that the queen needed help. Several young men hastily put on their clothes and followed her into the house, then, at Evadne’s urging, broke down the door of the bedroom. Phaedra had hanged herself from a beam by one of her own girdles.

  10. THE LIES

  Theseus returned from the funeral of his friend Peirithoös’ wife to be greeted by the news of his own wife’s death only a few days earlier. He would not at first believe that she had killed herself. Why should she do such a thing when she had been so happy in Troezen that she had asked to remain there? Hippolytos was absent. After leaving Artemis’ temple he had gone into the mountains with a few servants, hunting deer, sleeping in the open, trying to cleanse himself in the realm of the virgin goddess from his encounter with what he saw as the terrible effect of Aphrodite’s arts. He did not know yet that Phaedra was dead.

  Her body had been placed in a cellar in the palace to try to preserve it from the summer heat, but it was already in a bad state. Theseus, however, insisted on viewing it and could no longer doubt, when he saw the mark round her neck, that it was suicide. But he was puzzled by her raw and bruised arms and hands. Evadne and Phaedra’s other attendant were brought before him to give a full account of what they knew. They had already conferre
d endlessly about what they should tell Theseus and decided not to say anything about Phaedra’s shameful love for Hippolytos, but to put her sleeplessness and failure to eat down to some unknown malady which she had refused to share with them. But when Theseus asked them sternly why her arms and hands were so damaged, they were taken by surprise. They had forgotten that and not prepared an explanation. They fell silent and looked at one another guiltily. Theseus, wrought up by what he had seen and by the inexplicable suddenness of his loss, became angry.

  ‘You’re hiding something,’ he said. ‘What was this malady? Tell me plainly and at once, or I shall have the truth out of you with torture!’

  Evadne in her terror, still not wanting to shame her mistress, grasped at the first explanation she could think of.

  ‘She was assaulted,’ she said.

  ‘What!’

  ‘Someone attacked her.’

  ‘Who attacked her?’

  ‘A man.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘You must ask your son.’

  ‘I will ask him, but first I am asking you.’

  ‘Her door was broken down – he seized her by the arms – she fought – he overpowered her – we two fled to get help – we returned and found her dead. Poor lady, she couldn’t bear the shame.’

  Driven by fear and the need to convince her more and more horrified and intimidating interrogator that she was telling the truth, she swam into a sea of lies that grew deeper and more treacherous the further she swam.

  ‘Is this true?’ demanded Theseus of her companion.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, equally terrified and out of her depth.

  ‘Then who was this man?’

  ‘You must ask your son,’ said Evadne.

  Why did she repeat this when she must have known that Hippolytos would either say nothing or tell the truth? Probably, in the confusion of the moment, she hoped that he would tell the truth and that she herself would be spared doing so. Between Theseus and Hippolytos surely Phaedra’s shameful secret could be buried with her?

  ‘If my son knows the man who did this, why has he not arrested him? Why is Hippolytos not here? Why was he not here to tell me this dreadful news when I landed? I’m told he’s gone hunting in the mountains. How could he do that in these circumstances?’

  The women were silent, but at least Theseus was no longer glaring at them. His thoughts were on his son’s strange behaviour, and he ordered men to go out in search of Hippolytos and bring him back immediately to Troezen. The women were sent to their quarters, while Theseus rode down to the house by the gymnasium to look at the scene of violation and suicide for himself. When he saw the broken door and the rumpled bed – its sheets bloodied by her abrasions – where Phaedra had tossed and turned in torment before deciding to end her life, he fully believed that the women had told him the truth.

  Hippolytos was already on his way back to Troezen when he met one of the messengers sent to find him.

  ‘Your father has returned,’ said this man, ‘and the queen –’

  ‘Don’t speak of her!’ said Hippolytos, already regretting that he had not ridden much further afield, perhaps as far as the Arcadian mountains, so that by the time he returned she might have gone back to Athens with his father and he would not have to look at her again. Thus he did not learn of Phaedra’s death until he entered the presence of his father.

  ‘Why were you not here to tell me of Phaedra’s death?’

  ‘Her death?’

  ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘How did she die?’

  ‘She hanged herself.’

  Hippolytos knew immediately why she had done so. But still remembering only too clearly the way she had grasped his hand, the way she had thrust her face towards him, her exact words – ‘with you, Hippolytos, with you. The gods help me!’ – and his own feelings of shock and disgust, he could not find anything to say. Theseus was astonished.

  ‘Doesn’t that touch you at all?’

  ‘I am very sorry to hear it.’

  ‘She hanged herself in shame for what was done to her.’

  ‘Done to her?’

  ‘She was assaulted, forced, raped.’

  ‘That cannot be.’

  ‘What do you mean? Her door was broken down, her arms were wounded, her bed was rucked up and the sheets bloody. Do you suppose she did those things herself?’

  ‘I put guards on the house at night to protect her.’

  ‘This happened during the day.’

  ‘Where were her women?’

  ‘They ran away. But this is all beside the point. The women told me to ask you who did it. Who was the man who assaulted her?’

  Hippolytos shook his head. He thought the women must be lying. He was sure that Phaedra’s suicidal shame was not from being assaulted, but from declaring her love for him.

  ‘Who was the man?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Then why did the women say you knew?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  Hippolytos was only half attending to Theseus’ questions. His mind was wrestling with the problem of how he should deal with this news and with his father’s ignorance of what lay behind it. He did not notice that his unsatisfactory answers and the neutral tone in which they were uttered were having an increasingly bad effect on his father.

  ‘You sound as if you don’t care, as if her death means nothing to you. What’s the matter with you? Are you made of stone? Your stepmother, who loved you and asked to stay here in Troezen because she was so happy here, has hanged herself in shame. Who was the man who did this to her?’

  ‘I know of no such man.’

  ‘What do you mean? The evidence is plain. Are you saying it was a god?’

  Hippolytos shook his head.

  ‘Speak up!’

  Theseus was shouting now with fury and Hippolytos thought that he must either tell his father the truth or remain silent. He shook his head again. Theseus seized his son by the shoulders and bellowed into his face:

  ‘You don’t want to tell me, do you? Why not? Because it was some friend of yours and rather than punish him, you rode off into the mountains and pretended you knew nothing about it. Are you fit to be a ruler? Are you fit for anything but killing deer? What sort of man are you? A miserable coward. At least your brave mother, Antiope, did not live to see this day!’

  And now, too late, when his father was already so angry with him that he had lost all reason and judgment, Hippolytos decided that he had to tell the truth. Haltingly, clumsily, shamefacedly, he tried to do so, tried to express the horror he had felt when he understood what his stepmother’s real sickness had been. Theseus stared at him with equal horror as Hippolytos stumbled to a conclusion:

  ‘So I just pulled myself away and ran out and I suppose …’

  ‘Suppose what?’

  ‘Suppose she just went into her room and …’

  ‘And broke the door down and tore at her own arms and left blood all over the sheets?’

  ‘I saw none of that.’

  ‘You saw none of that! Lies! Pitiful, shameful lies! Now I understand your cold demeanour, your reluctance to speak, your disappearance into the mountains. You did it! You assaulted her, you broke down her door, you forced her down on her bed and raped her! And now, barefaced, when I press you and you can see no other way out, you dare to put the blame on her.’

  Theseus, bright red in the face, spitting and foaming at the mouth, lashed out at his son and when Hippolytos dodged and retreated, followed him across the room and again tried to hit him. But Hippolytos, stronger even than his strong father, caught his arms and held him off.

  ‘You are wrong,’ he said. ‘I ran out of the house, as I said. I know nothing of the broken door or the blood. I could not bear to be near her after what she said to me.’

  ‘And I can no longer bear to be near you,’ said Theseus. ‘Animal! Monster without shame! Liar! I would rather have had the Minotaur as my son, a man with a bull’s head soo
ner than one with a bull’s lust and a mouth full of such monstrous perversion. Go! Leave this city, leave this land, take yourself anywhere but where I can ever hear of you again! And may the gods punish you! Poseidon, I call on you. If ever you upheld the moral laws of the universe, if ever you favoured me and my ancestor Pelops, destroy this foul spawn of mine who destroyed my dearest Phaedra!’

  Poseidon, god of earthquakes, answered with a rumbling shock that shook the ground and knocked them both to the floor. Hippolytos picked himself up and ran out of the room, then, going straight to the stables, he harnessed a pair of horses to his chariot, rode out of the city and galloped away northwards along the seashore.

  Much of this violent interview, conducted in the main hall of Troezen’s palace, which was only, after all, a large house, had been heard by others, and among those who rushed into the hall after the quake to help Theseus to his feet were two of the young men from the gymnasium who had broken down Phaedra’s door and found her hanging. They had heard Theseus’ shouts of rage and his false accusations – the whole house had heard them – and immediately asked Theseus, now seated and a little calmer, for permission to say what they knew. When they told him that it was they who had broken down the door at the request of Phaedra’s two women attendants and that the women had never said anything at the time about her being assaulted, but only that she was not herself and they feared she might have done herself harm, Theseus began to suspect that he had made a mistake. The two women were summoned, questioned more closely and soon broke down and confessed that there had been no assault.

  ‘And now tell me this,’ said Theseus, ‘and be careful how you answer, for if you utter any more lies or even equivocate you will be put to death: did my son Hippolytos visit his stepmother that day?’

  ‘He did, yes,’ said Evadne.

  ‘Why? Be careful what you say! I want the exact truth or you die.’

  ‘It was me,’ said Evadne, ‘that asked him to talk to her, because she was so ill, not eating, not sleeping …’