PARTISAN REVIEW
Now that the prosperity of Athens is assured, it is time for you to rest
on your laurels and savor the happiness of married life."
He urged me to pay more attention to Phaedra, and there for once
he was right. For I must now tell of how the peace of my fireside was
disturbed, and what a hideous price was expected by the gods in return
for my successes and my self-conceit.
XII
I had unlimited confidence in Phaedra. I had watched her grow
more beautiful month by month. She was the very breath of virtue. I
had withdrawn her at so early an age from the pernicious influence of
her family that I never conceived she might carry within her a full dose
of inherited poison. She obviously took after her mother, and when she
later tried to excuse herself by saying that she was not responsible, or
that she was foredoomed, I had to own that there was something in
it. But that was not all: I also believe that she had too great a disdain
for Aphrodite. The gods avenge themselves: and it was in vain that
Phaedra later strove to appease the goddess with an added abundance
of offerings and supplications. For Phaedra was pious, in spite of every–
thing. In my wife's family everyone was pious. But is was no doubt
regrettable that not everyone addressed his devotions to the same God.
With Pasiphae, it was Zeus; with Ariadne, Dionysus. For my own part
I reverenced above all Pallas Athene, and next Poseidon, to whom I
was bound by a secret tie, and who, unfortunately for me, had similarly
bound himself always to hear, and always to answer my prayers. My
most beloved son, whose mother had been Antiope, and whom I set
above all the others, devoted himself to Artemis the huntress. He was
as chaste as she-as chaste as I, at his age, had been dissolute. He
used to run naked through moonlit woods and thickets; detested the
court, and formal parties, and, above all, the society of women; was only
happy when, with his bear-hounds, he could go hunting for wild beasts
and follow them to the topmost mountain or the last recesses of a valley.
Often, too, he broke in wild horses, tamed them upon the seashore, or
rode them at a full gallop into the sea. How I loved him then! Proud,
handsome, and unruly: not to me whom he held in veneration, nor to my
laws: but he despised the conventions which prevent a man from assert–
ing himself and wear out his merits in futility. He it was whom I wanted
for my heir. I could have slept quietly, once the reins of State were in
his unsullied hands; for I knew that he would be as inaccessible to
threats as to flatteries.
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