In the “Hippolytus” of Euripides we find Theseus, self-exiled from Athens for a year, again in Troezen, the realm of Pittheus, his maternal grandfather, who has had the rearing of his son, Hippolytus. The handsome youth has been seen at Eleusis by Phædra, his young stepmother, who then and there falls in love with him. He is, however, a somewhat intractable compound of a Jehu and a Joseph, wholly absorbed in colourless devotion to Artemis and inaccessible to the blandishments of Aphrodite, who uses the unlucky Phædra as a cat’s-paw to punish the intrusion of the divine huntress into the sphere of influence rightfully belonging to the goddess of love. Phædra, despairing and mortified at her rejection by Hippolytus, very properly hangs herself, but by way of securing her posthumous justification leaves a note for her husband, accusing the innocent Hippolytus. Theseus, in his rage, banishes his son and invokes a curse by Poseidon. Faring forth in his chariot Hippolytus, though an excellent whip, is unable to cope with the great bull sent up from the sea. This so terrifies the horses that their driver is thrown upon the rocks and dies, after Artemis, a somewhat tardy _dea ex machina_, has appeared to the now remorseful Theseus and has exonerated his son. This favourite drama, in addition to the admirable drawing of Phædra’s character, combines the grandeur of the sea as it roars up in a tidal wave, envisaging the terrible sea-bull, and the loveliness of the Troezenian meadows where Hippolytus, a replica of the young Ion in Apollo’s temple, presented the vision of human beauty, so dear to Greek eyes, in its appropriate setting of nature’s lonely charm.[37] Footnote 37: See chapter i, p. 26, for hymn to Artemis from the _Hippolytus_. In addition to these more superficial attractions there was at Troezen one of the most popular entrances to the lower world. Here Heracles fetched up Cerberus, and by this route Dionysus brought back his mother Semele. It is also reasonable to suppose that Theseus, from a sense of local pride, must have passed down this way when he assisted his friend Pirithöus in carrying off Persephone.