According to the older explanations, Hippolytus represented the sun, which sets in the sea (cf. the scene of his death and the story of Phaethon), and Phaedra the moon, which travels behind the sun, but is unable to overtake it. It is more probable, however, that he was a local hero famous for his chastity, perhaps originally a priest of Artemis, worshipped as a god at Troezen, where he was closely connected and sometimes confounded with Asclepius. It is noteworthy that, in a speech put into the mouth of Theseus by Euripides, the father, who of course believes his wife's story and regards Hippolytus as a hypocrite, throws his son's pretended misogyny and asceticism (Orphism) in his teeth. This seems to point to a struggle between a new ritual and that of Poseidon, the chief deity of Troezen, in which the representative of the intruding religion meets his death through the agency of the offended god, as Orpheus (q.v.) was torn to pieces by the votaries of the jealous Dionysus. According to S. Reinach (_Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft_, x., 1907, p. 47), the Troezenian Hippolytus was a horse, the hypostasis of an equestrian divinity periodically torn to pieces by the faithful, who called themselves, and believed themselves to be, horses. Death was followed by resuscitation, as in the similar myths of Adonis (the sacred boar), Orpheus (the fox), Pentheus (the fawn), Phaethon (the white sun-horse). See Wilamowitz-Mollendorff's Introduction to his German translation of Euripides' _Hippolytus_ (1891); A. Kalkmann, _De Hippolytis Euripideis_ (Bonn, 1882); and (for representations in art) "Uber Darstellung der Hippolytussage" in _Archaologische Zeitung_ (xli. 1883); J. E. Harrison, _Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens_ (1890), cl.