The Athenian Plague and <i>Eros</i> as a Deadly Disease in Euripides’ <i>Hippolytus</i>
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that Euripides’ Hippolytus of 428 bc may be read as a metaphorical response to the first outbreak of the plague at Athens in 430–429 bc. Some Athenians attributed the plague to a divine cause, others to natural causes. Similarly, Hippolytus allows the audience to view Aphrodite either as an interfering deity or as a natural force in human lives. Thucydides describes the plague as a nosos, which is the main thematic term found in Hippolytus. Eros, a form of madness, is the disease Aphrodite inflicts on Phaedra to punish Hippolytus. This nosos primarily affects the mind; it is passed on to the other main characters by a kind of chain reaction and manifests itself in different forms of deranged speech. In this process the nurse provides a vital link through Aphrodite instilling, in her mind insidious notions of magic. In Hippolytus, sophrosyne, which etymologically means “safe-mindedness,” serves as an antonym to nosos. On stage, in two long episodes, the disease motif is presented visually, first through Phaedra’s sickbed and then through her deathbed. As Aphrodite is the source of the disease, the arrival of her enemy Artemis, appearing as a deus ex machina and representing, as she does, the pure air of the countryside, signifies that the plague is over, though its harmful after effects will long be remembered.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it