Professor Edith Hall has argued with characteristic scholarly vigour that she loathes Euripides’ Hippolytus, because it legitimizes rape myths.10 By dramatizing a story in which a woman fabricates a claim of rape, we give vastly more prominence to Phaedra’s wrongdoing than we do to, for example, Theseus’ succession of rapes, forced marriages, kidnaps and child rape, which are still largely undramatized today.
