Anne Carson · Euripides to the Audience*: Euripides
I don’t understand your faces, I don’t understand them. At night I stand at the back of the theatre. I watch you suck in sex, death, devastation, hour after hour in a weird kind of unresisting infant heat, then for no reason you cool, flicker out. I guess for no reason is an arrogant thing to say. For no reason I can name is what I mean. It was a few years ago now I gave you a woman, a real mouthful of salt and you like salt. Her story, Phaidra’s story, that old story, came in as a free wave and crashed on your beach. I don’t understand, I could never have predicted, your hatred of this woman. It’s true she fell in love with someone wrong for her but half the heroines of your literature do that: Helen, Echo, Io, Agave, all of them. Phaidra’s love was for her stepson, and it excited you badly, maybe not the incest so much as a question of property rights – ditch the old man, marry the son, keep the estate. Truth is often, in some degree, economic. Which isn’t to say her passion for Hipp