Liminal Landscapes and Civic Alienation in Euripides’ Hippolytus

Abstract: In this article, I re-evaluate the Troezenian setting of Euripides’ Hippolytus in dialogue with the concept of “liminal landscapes,” culturally constructed spaces imagined as occupying the margins of political geography, whose symbolically laden topographies mark them as zones of transgression and transformation. I argue that Euripides’ “liminal” rendering of his fictive Troezen—as a wild borderland on Athens’ frontier, representing freedom and purity, but also alienation and contested identity—underscores the fraught civic status of the tragedy’s three main characters as well as recent tension between the historical communities of Athens and Troezen.