Written in the early phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Hippolytus (428 b.c.) serves as a powerful introduction to the theme of the longing for the “just voice,” a theme whose political, philosophical, and dramatic implications resonate throughout the playwright's corpus. Euripides uses a mythic story of passion, betrayal, and deception to dramatize the dangers of placing too much confidence in the tools of critical inquiry so prevalent in the young Athenian democracy. The drama demonstrates that such tools as forensic speeches, cross-examination, and the evaluation of evidence by inference and probability are highly subject to cynical manipulation. The plot of the Hippolytus seems to confirm the Thucydidean warning that passion, prejudice, and self-interest can all too easily prevail over justice and truth. Though all of the play's leading characters express longing for a single, plain form of truth and justice, the play casts doubt on whether a democracy that relies so heavily on “two-sided verbal strife” can ever recover such simplicity – a question with great relevance for our own historical moment, characterized as it is by a yearning for clear distinctions between friend and foe, truth and lies, good and evil.

It is Theseus, “a powerful yet gullible man who is the embodiment of Athenian democracy,” who most clearly articulates this yearning in Euripides' play. Theseus is wrongly convinced that his wife, Phaedra, has been raped by his son, Hippolytus.