*Troezen (TREE-zun). Greek town in the Peloponnesus, on the Saronic Gulf, opposite Athens, that is the birthplace of Theseus, king of Athens, as well as his son Hippolytus’s childhood home. Troezen is a “gentle province” removed from “the blaze of Athens’s brawling protocol.” However, Hippolytus’s return to Troezen to live under the same roof as Phaedra during Theseus’s absence makes the province seethe with forbidden desires.
*Athens. Theseus’s seat of government. Before Theseus’s reign, Athens’s subordination to Crete required an annual tribute of fourteen young people to be devoured by the Cretan Minotaur.
*Crete (kreet). Fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, located southeast of the Greek mainland. There, in a mazelike labyrinth at Knossos, lives the Minotaur, the creature born from Queen Pasiphaë’s coupling with a white bull that the sea god Poseidon gave to her husband, King Minos. Theseus killed the Minotaur with the help of Princess Ariadne, then married her sister Phaedra. Phaedra’s Cretan origins establish not only her foreignness in Athens—in contrast to Princess Aricia’s pure Athenian blood—but also her heritage of monstrous passion, embodied at play’s end in the bull-dragon from the sea that kills Hippolytus.
*Scythia (SIHTH-ee-ah). Area in southeastern Europe, around the region northeast of the Black Sea in what is now Moldava, Ukraine, and western Russia. The Greeks considered the Scythians and their Amazon neighbors, a female warrior society, barbarians. Hippolytus, as the son of Antiope, an Amazon whom Theseus carried off to Athens, is both an illegitimate heir and a despised alien.
*Naxos. Largest and most fertile of Greece’s Cyclades Islands, almost at the center of the Aegean Sea. There, Theseus abandons Ariadne before kidnapping Antiope and marrying Phaedra.