Watch VoirFilms. The goddess of love, Aphrodite, opens the tragedy and the goddess of hunting, Artemis, concludes it, but at the center of Euripides' “Hippolytus, Bearer of the Crown” (428 BC) are not the gods, but rather Phaedra's absolute, consuming human passion for her stepson, Hippolytus. Phaedra hides her love and wastes away.