rhetoricians of the decadence of the sophistic movement to
make the better seem the worse case and evil seem good. Her
transvaluation of all values is the crux of the play. Without her,
there would have been no tragedy; Phaedra would simply have
committed suicide. Or is the play a tragedy? It has noble char-
acters destroyed by tragic flaws, at least that is what it says. Yet
they are all lacking in heroic dignity and self-respect. The char-
acters of Aeschylus and Sophocles are always at home in their
own doom. Hippolytus, Phaedra, and Theseus are lost in their
myth, without self-possession. Only the representative of mass
man, the nurse, "knows her way around."

Greek philosophy and literature, like American, was pecu-
liarly medical in its outlook. Unlike Americans, Sophocles,
Aeschylus, Aristotle, Plato, in ethics, psychology, politics, were
health oriented. Human conduct was described and judged ulti-
mately in terms of man at his physical and mental best.
Euripides, like American medicine or psychology or literature,
was morbidity oriented. He is the most psychological of classic
writers, at least in our sense, but only because we define psy-
chology in terms of pathology. "Who is well?" Euripides asks
this question again and again in every play. It was a nonsensical
question to the classic Greek thinker to whom the traditions of
Aesculapian and Hippocratic medicine still determined the
understanding of human minds and motives.

Is the play a tragedy? Certainly not if we agree with those
eccentrics who hold that King Lear is a black comedy. The lat-
ter half of the play is taken up with speeches by Hippolytus and
Theseus which reveal them as a prig and a dolt. Hippolytus is
mentally ill in a most unpleasant way, and Theseus is the
embodiment of the conventional authoritarian. Both are totally
self-righteous. It is easier to sympathize with Macbeth.
Certainly it is far easier to do so with Phaedra. But Phaedra is
gone.

Why has the play remained so popular? Why does it still
move us profoundly? First, it contains some of the finest poetry
Euripides ever wrote. Although his extraordinary mastery of
verse is not translatable, much of the emotional power survives
in the meaning alone as long as the translator is careful to con-

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