Looking at Medea

by David Stuttard

  We can do no more than point, rather generally, to the likelihood that such entanglements, and such stories, were by no means something purely unknown, or exotic, or literary, or even remote, for the Athenian men who were seated in the Theatre of Dionysus to watch a tragedy by that notoriously difficult and upsetting tragedian, who, nonetheless, was – undeniably – so strangely fascinating: Euripides.

  The majority of the men of Athens, evidently, could never quite rid themselves of the feeling that there was something about those plays that was not right. They fascinated and gripped, admittedly, but they also disconcerted and disturbed the Athenian citizens who sat in his audience, and who formed the juries that judged him and his fellow tragic poets. Better, at any rate, they evidently felt, not to give first prize, at a religious festival, to this obviously brilliant but unpredictable fellow and his strangely disturbing plays, and thus to crown him and his work with the mark of public acceptance and approval by the city of Athens! And so they very rarely did. Unlike Sophocles, of whom we are told that he was never ranked lower than second, Euripides seems to have experienced this quite often – for the trio of plays that included Medea, the scholiasts, or ancient commentators, tell us that he was ranked third. That must have been intensely galling for him; and perhaps we are not surprised that he ended his life in voluntary exile, far from his own ungrateful city and from his own natural audience of his Athenian fellow citizens.

  But it would be wrong to make too much of the fact that he died in foreign parts. Why, the irreproachably patriotic Aeschylus, so eminently acceptable, whose Oresteia is (among other things) a supreme endorsement of Athenian democracy and of the Athenian constitution, had also died far from home, while working in Sicily; and while working there for a tyrant, at that. The Attic tragedians were born into a tradition which had always been rich in travelling poets and travelling musicians, whose line extended right back to the myth and to the figure of Orpheus, itinerant poet and singer. And we must never forget that it would have been quite easy for the Athenians to silence Euripides, by simply refusing him the right to a chorus at the dramatic festivals. The Athenians did not take that simple step, which would have made it impossible for him to present a tragedy. On the contrary, they continued, year by year, to commission his plays, and they flocked to watch them.

  Conclusion: Medea in Athens and beyond

  There is an analogy to be made, perhaps, between the situation of the first Athenian audience and that of Aegeus, king of Athens in the play. We see – as they saw – how he is talked by Medea into allowing her sanctuary in his city. By the time she arrives, she will be stained with her own children’s blood. Oedipus, welcomed by Athens in Sophocles’ play, was miaros – a polluted man; a man accursed. And yet he was also a hero, a mysterious, larger-than-life figure, from whose presence blessings may come. What about Medea? Before Euripides, other stories had been told about her, and about her sinister powers. It appears that practitioners of magic would invoke her name, as they chanted or mumbled their magical spells. The Roman poet Ovid, some 400 years after the play, would give Medea magic spells which Shakespeare would adapt for his hero, Prospero. Traditionally, Medea was a magician, but she was not (it appears) a child-murderess. That Medea, the Medea who would fascinate and eventually monopolize the minds of posterity, was the creation of Euripides, in this play. He does not make her a witch, in the conventional sense: she is described, more disquietingly, as sophē, clever – a good quality, usually; at least, in a man.

  She gave form to a universal male anxiety: what is going on, back home, in my house, while I am away, out at work, or on business, or in the army, or on my travels? I must trust my wife, the mother of my precious children: I have, in fact, no alternative to trusting her with them. But just suppose—! The story of Medea, as developed by Euripides, gave to that horrid fear a definite shape and form: in the Shakespearean phrase, a local habitation and a set of names. Here, at last, and in blatant fact, was that ultimate horror: the mother who murders her own children.

  Literature has only very rarely had the courage, or the prurience, to peer into that dark realm, and to report what is to be seen there. With Clytemnestra and her man-slaying axe, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon made his Athenian audience face the grisly horror of a wife who kills her husband, and who does it – to make it, if possible, even worse – with the defining weapon of a man: with a weapon of steel. Medea enacted another appalling horror: the mother who turns against her own dependent children and, instead of nurturing them, kills them with the sword. His creation was one of the most famous plays of the tragic theatre of Athens. Although ranked last out of three by the squeamish original audience, it would still be one of those that survived, when most of the plays of the Athenian theatre were lost. It still commands our attention, horrified but fascinated. An archetypal and universal fear was raised, powerfully and lastingly, to the status, and to the enduring power, of a great work of art.

  2

  Medea Before and (a little) After Euripides

  Carmel McCallum-Barry

  In Euripides’ Medea the action opens with Medea’s nurse and trusted companion setting the scene for us, explaining how they have come to be in Corinth, the current situation and the psychological nuances of Medea’s mood. Jason has made a new marriage with the daughter of Creon, ruler of Corinth, betraying Medea and their children. She is alerting the audience to the points that Euripides is going to emphasize, and the way that the characters are likely to react to the situation. This is very necessary, as the many stories that are woven into what we can call the myth of Medea cover action over many parts of the Greek and non-Greek world, and she appears in the early myths of Athens, Corinth and Iolcus. The myths involve several families, and are linked with hero stories, folk tales and divine mythology. Most famous of these stories is that about the voyage of the Argonauts and their quest for the Golden Fleece, and the most commonly told version of Medea’s story begins with her part in that.

  The hero Jason was sent on a dangerous expedition by his uncle Pelias, king of Iolcus in Thessaly, to fetch the Golden Fleece from Colchis, a territory at the furthest end of the Black Sea. (In some versions Pelias had usurped the throne of Iolcus from Aison, Jason’s father.) Jason gathered a group of heroes to sail with him on this expedition; the ship that was built for them was named Argo; and they were the Argonauts. After a journey full of danger and adventure, they arrived in Colchis where the king, Aeëtes, received them with suspicion. However, he promised to hand over the Fleece on condition that Jason accomplished some dangerous, seemingly impossible, tasks, the chief one being to yoke the fire-breathing bulls belonging to Aeëtes and plough with them. Jason was successful, but only with the aid of the king’s daughter, Medea, who gave him powerful ointments to prevent his being harmed by the bulls. She also helped him to seize the Fleece from the sacred grove, where it was guarded by a dragon, and, with the quest accomplished, she escaped with Jason to sail back to Greece; on the way, she killed her brother Apsyrtus, and threw his body into the sea to delay pursuit by the Colchians. The Argonauts returned to Thessaly where Pelias was still king and, in versions given by Pindar and Euripides, Medea was responsible for Pelias’ death by persuading his daughters to attempt to rejuvenate him. Some time after this, Medea and Jason came to Corinth, and there are several accounts of events there besides the story we have in Euripides’ play.

  This is the commonest version of the myth of Medea; it makes a sequential narrative, which is how we like to read a story, but does not include different or conflicting accounts of, for instance, her brother’s death or her connections with Corinth. The audience for the play probably knew of variants and episodes that were not all compatible with one another and did not fit into a neat time line, so they must have been prepared to see Euripides’ personal choice of episodes and still could wonder ‘will he put in the bit about …?’ We can try to piece together what the audience might have known or expected from the play by looking at the literary sources availabl
e to us prior to 431 BC, and we can often add to this information by considering pictorial representations of the myth which come mostly from Athenian and South Italian vases.

  Much of the literary source material in which Medea makes an appearance is fragmentary, but even so we can identify several strands from which poets could choose in order to make their own creative statement about her. She was known to the poets of the seventh century BC, and already then some key elements of her identity appear. In the divine genealogies at the end of the Theogony, Hesiod tells us that her father, Aeëtes, and his sister, Circe, were children of the sun god, Helios, and that Medea’s mother, Idyia, was a daughter of Oceanus (956–62). We are also told that Jason took Medea from Aeëtes after he had completed the tasks laid upon him by the arrogant king, Pelias, and brought her on a swift ship to Iolcus (992–99).

  Other later fragments mention her help for Jason in winning the Golden Fleece and her using drugs to rejuvenate Jason’s father. So from the seventh century at least, her divine ancestry, connection with Jason’s quest and expertise with herbs and rejuvenation are part of her mythological portrait.

  Another aspect of her identity that appears at an early stage is her complicated and confusing affiliation with Corinth. According to Pausanias, writing a travel guide in the second century ad, Eumelus, in a poem called Corinthiaca (c. 730 BC), related that Medea was invited by the Corinthians to be their queen and that she was unintentionally responsible for her children’s deaths. Notes by scholiasts (later commentators) on Medea line 264 cite a tradition that the Corinthians killed them, either in revolt against Medea as queen or in retaliation for her murder of Creon; they also add that that her children were honoured by a cult in Corinth. In versions from the Archaic Period there must have been at least two traditions concerning the children’s death; either that Medea killed her children unintentionally or that the Corinthians did. This seems to be one of the haziest areas in the stories about Medea and therefore one where Euripides was most free to innovate – and he did!

  Although the early evidence is scant, it still gives us a picture of Medea that we can recognise in Euripides. In the fifth century there are some further developments in her portrait. An important source of information is Pindar, who composed poems (Olympian, Isthmian, Pythian and Nemean Odes) to celebrate the wealthy men whose protégés and horse teams were victors at the great games. The poems were commissioned, and praised not just the current success but the victor’s family and their achievements in the past. By his use of mythology Pindar linked the ancestral family of the victor to the great events of the glorious past, as we see in Pythian 4, composed for the victory of Arcesilas of Cyrene in the chariot race at the games of 462 BC. Arcesilas’ ancestor, the founder of the city of Cyrene, was one of the Argonauts, so the poet deploys the famous myth to enhance the glory of the moment and associate his patron with the semi-divine heroes.

  The poem begins with the homeward journey of the Argonauts and how Medea foretold the events leading to the founding of Cyrene, before moving further back in the story to the expedition itself. In Pindar’s version, Jason was sent to get the Fleece because King Pelias had been given an oracle to the effect that he would be destroyed by a man who came to Iolcus wearing only one sandal, and Jason was that man. Pindar also mentions that Pelias had usurped the throne and possessions due to Jason, but promised to surrender them if Jason brought him the Fleece.

  After he arrived in Colchis, Jason was helped by Aphrodite to win the love of Medea, and he persuaded her to disregard the natural love and respect for her parents, so that she appears almost as a victim of Jason and Aphrodite. She prepared oils and ointments to help Jason through the trials her father set for him; with these he successfully yoked the bulls and ploughed with them, ‘the fire did not keep him back, because of the instructions from the foreign woman skilled in all kinds of drugs’ (233–5). Aeëtes then told Jason where to find the Fleece, but was still hoping to destroy him, as the Fleece was guarded by a fierce dragon. But Jason killed the dragon ‘with pale eyes and mottled back’, and stole away Medea. Pindar does not say that Medea helped in killing the dragon, but calls her ‘the death of Pelias’ (251), one of the earliest mentions of her involvement in his death. A few years later the story was current, as the summary of Euripides’ Daughters of Pelias of 455 BC tells that Medea was instrumental in the death of Pelias.

  The audience at the first performance of Medea derived some of their knowledge of the myths from plays performed in Athens at the great dramatic festivals and in repeat performances in the smaller towns around Attica. From the middle of the fifth century, myths in which Medea played a part, were used frequently by Athenian dramatists; clearly the issues addressed in the stories had some relevance for the contemporary Athenian public.

  Little survives of these plays except summaries (hypotheses) or fragments, but we do know that Sophocles produced several plays on different parts of the story. Women of Colchis (Colchides) dramatized events at the court of Aeëtes in Colchis; another called Rootcutters (Rhizotomi) dealt with Medea’s special skill with magic herbs. A fragment of his Scythian Women (Scythai) shows that its subject was the return of the Argonauts and their escape from Colchis, and that the murder of Medea’s brother en route was part of the subject matter, as the fragment mentions that Apsyrtus and Medea did not have the same mother.

  Euripides also used the stories more than once; his first play, in 455 BC was Daughters of Pelias (Peliades), in which Medea induced the daughters of Pelias to kill their father. The plot summary tells that she herself killed a ram and boiled it with herbs in a cauldron, from which it emerged rejuvenated. Her demonstration persuaded the women to try the same process with their aged father – unfortunately they were unsuccessful. Perhaps Pindar in Pythian 4 and Euripides were responsible for making this the canonical version of Medea’s rejuvenation magic, because there are earlier mentions of the treatment being given to others besides Pelias. A fragment of the Nostoi, late epic poems on the returns of the heroes from Troy, says she rejuvenated Jason’s father, Aison, with drugs, ‘stripping off his old age’ (fr. 7). The plot summary for Medea comments that according to Simonides (fr. 548) and Pherecydes (3F) she used her rejuvenation techniques for Jason. Obviously he shouldn’t have needed it, but there could be confusion over names here, as in Greek spelling the two are very similar (Aison and Iason). As we shall see, the early vase paintings allow differing interpretations. Nevertheless, the ability to make men or animals young must have been an integral part of her story from earliest times and, as in the case of the children’s deaths in Corinth, there was no fixed version.

  Both Sophocles and Euripides wrote Aegeus plays, which probably involved Medea after she left Corinth and took refuge in Athens with King Aegeus, where, in keeping with her other dramatic portrayals, she tried to poison Aegeus’ illegitimate son, Theseus, when he came to Athens to claim his birthright. The frequency of her appearances in fifth-century drama marks the significance of her deeds and characterization for the Athenian audience.

  The Argonautic expedition and Medea’s story were also a favourite subject for vase painters, and in the earliest paintings two scenes predominate. One is the actual taking of the Fleece from the grove where it is guarded by the dragon; the fantastical, fairy story aspect of the encounter with the dragon appealed to the artists’ imagination, and to that of their customers. The most famous example is a cup by Douris dated c. 480 BC which shows a magnificent dragon with Jason sliding out from its gaping jaws while Athena, patron of heroes, looks on; apparently he has been swallowed and disgorged, as Heracles was by the sea monster. This peculiar situation must have been long established in the repertoire, as it also appears on two Corinthian pots at the end of the seventh century. Another vase a little later in date shows Jason cautiously approaching the Fleece as it hangs on a tree; to one side we have Athena, an Argonaut and the prow of the Argo. These early fifth-century paintings focus on Jason. There is no Medea; only after 425 BC does sh
e become a standard element in depictions of the dragon scene, rather than Athena, so it seems that after Euripides’ play she is more interesting than the heroic Jason.

  The other very popular scene is that which illustrates Medea’s ability to rejuvenate someone or something, and this is how she most frequently appears before Euripides’ play. From around 530 BC a series of vases in Attic Black Figure show a ram in a cauldron with women standing around it. On some of them an old man sits or stands at the side of the picture; other depictions show women leading an old man towards the cauldron. Such scenes continue into the fifth century until after 450 BC (Euripides’ Daughters of Pelias was produced in 455 BC, keeping interest alive). The focus of attention is always the ram in the cauldron with women standing round it. In these scenes Medea is sometimes distinguishable from the other women by the polos headdress she wears, which is perhaps a comment on her divine ancestry, as this headdress is usually seen on goddesses. However, after the production of Medea in 431 BC, although scenes showing the seizing of the Fleece and the dragon are still frequent, the Pelias episode is no longer important, and scenes based on events in the play take over, especially on the vases from South Italy.

  The shift of attention away from the Pelias episode, and the fact that Euripides had already treated it in Daughters of Pelias, make it hard to guess what the audience would have expected to see in his Medea. They would have been familiar with Medea as a foreign princess, from a strange faraway land, a descendant of Helios, the sun god. She was known as the helper of Jason in seizing the Golden Fleece from Colchis and then escaping with him and the Argonauts. It is noticeable that the vase paintings show only Jason encountering the dragon, but Medea’s skill with magic herbs and drugs was part of her help for him in taming the bulls and perhaps also in taming the dragon. For love of Jason she worked against her father, left her family and killed her brother, and so came to Greece. There her expertise in magical herbs was highlighted in the vase paintings, which showed her attempts to rejuvenate a person or animal, and through these and Euripides’ play she was famous for causing the death of Pelias at the hands of his daughters.