Her husband has been gone for years after journeying to capture Persephone from the underworld. His step-mother Phaedra, wife of Theseus and daughter of King Minos of Crete, soon appears in front of the palace lamenting her fate. He prays to the virgin goddess Diana for success in the hunt. Hippolytus, son of King Theseus of Athens, leaves his palace at dawn to go boar-hunting.
Major themes in Phaedra include the laws of nature as interpreted according to stoic philosophy, animal imagery and hunting and the damaging effects of the sexual transgressions of mothers and stepmothers. Seneca's play continues to be performed today. Other notable dramatic versions of the Phaedra story that were influenced by Seneca's version include Phèdre by Jean Racine and Phaedra's Love by Sarah Kane. The play has influenced drama over the succeeding two millennia, particularly the works of Shakespeare and dramas of 16th- and 17th-century France. It was presented in Latin in Rome in 1486. When Seneca's plays were first revived during the Renaissance, the work that soon came to be known as Phaedra was titled Hippolytus. This Phaedra takes on the scheming nature and the cynicism often assigned to the nurse character. Seneca portrays Phaedra as self-aware and direct in the pursuit of her stepson, while in other treatments of the myth, she is more of a passive victim of fate. Based on Greek mythology and the tragedy Hippolytus by Euripides, Seneca's Phaedra is one of several artistic explorations of this tragic story. Its 1,280 lines of verse tell the story of Phaedra, wife of King Theseus of Athens and her consuming lust for her stepson Hippolytus. Phaedra is a Roman tragedy written by philosopher and dramatist Lucius Annaeus Seneca before 54 A.D.
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