Looking at Medea

by David Stuttard

  Figure 2 The rejuvenation of a white-haired male: a ram springs from a cauldron towards Medea who is sprinkling the ram with a magic potion. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

  At each stage of Medea’s journey in myth from Colchis to Iolcus, a recurring motif is the betrayal of traditional family loyalties, as she harms those close to her (betraying her parents, killing her brother) or leads others to cause the death of loved ones in their own family, like the daughters of Pelias. In the next stages of her journey, in Corinth and later in Athens, the pattern continues.

  There was a wide choice of story elements here for the plot-maker, so the Athenians might have wondered: would Euripides put it all in and could he do something new? In fact he did both. The standard elements of the myth are acknowledged but not emphasized as part of the action. Medea herself deals with them almost dismissively in her first speech to Jason, where she lists what she has done for him:

  I saved you then, when you were sent to yoke the bulls, whose breath was fire, and sow the field of death. And I killed the dragon, which was coiled around the Golden Fleece, tight in a stranglehold, its guardian, unsleeping … And I betrayed my father and my very home and came with you back to Iolcus and Pelias’ land, so eager, so naïve, uncalculating, killed Pelias – such a painful death at his own daughters’ hands – and devastated utterly his house. You let me do all this for you and then, you worst of men, betrayed me for another woman’s bed, though we had children. Oh yes, if you’d been childless still, I might have pardoned you for lusting after this new bedding …

  476–91

  Medea mentions only the killing of Pelias, not fantastic rejuvenation, and she refers to the dragon only to claim that she killed it, not Jason. As he plays down the magical and bizarre parts of her story, Euripides concentrates on the issues that can disturb or destroy a family – betrayal, childlessness, murder. All his major innovations in the play proceed from this focus, so that Medea’s past as a woman who betrayed her father and killed her brother, and induced other women to kill their father, is not part of the plotting but forms an atmospheric background for the drama. Euripides builds on her past rather than retells it, and in the present it is Medea herself who is the victim of betrayal, ‘you betrayed me for another woman’s bed, though we had children’. Unlike her victims in the mythological past, she will take her revenge

  All this is clearly signalled in the Prologue by the nurse, whose description of Medea’s mood warns the audience to be prepared for something strange. She is afraid Medea may kill her children or even Jason and his new wife (36–43); to make sure that the audience take notice, she repeats a little later that Medea may harm her children: ‘I saw her just a little while ago, staring at them full of hate’ (92–3). The nurse’s final song emphasizes that her mistress in her inconsolable rage is ready to attack all those close to her in the household (187–9). Medea herself threatens that she may kill the king and his daughter and Jason too, wondering whether to set fire to the house or to stab them, but concludes, ‘The strongest way’s the most direct, the way in which I am by nature most experienced – to poison them’ (384–5). So the audience know that she is going to kill someone, but it is not clear at first exactly who or how; they must wait to see just how she will achieve her revenge.

  A series of encounters with male characters, in which Medea persuades them to grant her wishes, shows her constructing this revenge. The encounters emphasize family imperatives, in particular men’s need and love for children and the respect that should be given to a wife, especially if she has produced children.

  She persuades Creon to give her an extra day in Corinth to make arrangements for her children, by appealing to his love for his daughter, even though he knows Medea is a danger to him, ‘I love my family more than I do you’ (327). In her meeting with Aegeus, king of Athens, she wins his sympathy immediately, because Jason has not given her the honour due to a wife. Her promise to cure Aegeus’ childlessness, ‘I am familiar with certain drugs and medicines’ (718), encourages him to offer her refuge in Athens, when she leaves Corinth. Having gained time to act and a refuge afterwards, in her next scene with Jason she convinces him that she has become reconciled towards his new marriage and insists on showing her goodwill by sending the two children to his new wife with gifts of a valuable robe and golden garland. The poisoned gifts kill the bride and, in a sinister echo of the daughters of Pelias, the bride is the cause of her own father, Creon’s, death as he tries to take the deadly robe from her body. Once the deaths of Creon and his daughter have been reported, Medea knows that the die is cast and that she is going to kill her sons; despite the nurse’s earlier warnings, this must have been a shock in the theatre. We know that there were several traditions about the circumstances of the children’s deaths; before he knows that they are dead, Jason even refers to another possibility, that Creon’s relatives might kill them in retaliation for their mother’s deeds (304–5). A reminder of other versions serves to underline Euripides’ innovation in this crucial area, and it is generally agreed by scholars that he was the first to make Medea the intentional killer of her children. In doing this, her revenge on Jason is perfect, as she leaves him without children or hope of others, as his new wife is dead too.

  Medea hits at everyone she encounters in the play where they are most sensitive, in their concern over household and family, oikos. Despite this, she gets our modern sympathies and, to a large extent, those of the women of the chorus. The role of drama as a forum where all sorts of problems could be examined, can help explain this. Drama is still a place to air difficult issues; in soaps we constantly get personal and family problems up for inspection – child-bearing and rearing, parent-child tensions, husband-wife tensions, adultery, incest, relationships between members of families and outsiders. These were the topics of Greek tragedy too. In presenting family problems it also examined wider issues and values important to the city of Athens, and these were often sensitive issues, such as a hero who commits suicide, or women who kill their husband or children. Such subjects were not easy to deal with in front of a large and emotionally charged audience, but, by setting drama in the mythical past, a distance could be created between the disturbing events on stage and those watching them. Another way of confronting terrifying possibilities or extreme cases was by viewing them through female characters. Women in tragedy were not meant to be realistic portrayals, but the transgressive character and actions of Medea and others, women who fight back or act for themselves, allowed the dramatists to comment on their own society and its concerns.

  One of these concerns was that of identity. After 450 BC, Athenian citizenship and its privileges were jealously guarded. Only those with both parents Athenian born could be citizens. This meant that non-Athenian Greeks as well as non-Greeks were foreign outsiders, and we see the problematic relationship between these groups addressed frequently in tragedy. Medea is the ultimate foreigner, a barbarian from the edge of the civilized (i.e. Greek) world. Her nurse makes this clear in the Prologue, but says her mistress is accepted and popular in Corinth; however Medea herself frequently emphasizes how she has rejected her home and family and is a foreigner everywhere.

  The Athenian audience were familiar with the serious disadvantages of this situation, and no doubt many shared the prejudice against foreigners, but the chorus of local women in Corinth are puzzlingly sympathetic towards the foreign barbarian. They can feel for her because all (married) women are foreigners, strangers in their husbands’ household, frequently regarded with suspicion as outsiders; Medea’s situation is an exaggerated example of the common female experience. Sophocles, too, draws attention to the problem in his Tereus, where, in one of the remaining fragments, Procne says she has seen that grown women count for nothing; as children they have a happy life in their father’s house but once mature ‘we are pushed away and sold away from our ancestral gods and those who gave us birth, married to foreigners, some to barbarians, some to happy homes and others not’ (fr. 584
). Procne was not a foreigner like Medea, but an Athenian woman, who killed her child to punish her husband’s rape and mutilation of her sister; her chilling appraisal of the only life choice for Athenian women explains why the chorus can spend much of this play expressing sympathy towards a barbarian murderess.

  Besides her foreignness, the other disturbing aspect of Medea’s traditional character is her ability to concoct magic potions, with which in her past she helped Jason survive the fire-breathing bulls and engineered the death of Pelias. In this play she uses her skills as herbalist to offer Aegeus a fertility medicine and to make the deadly ointment that kills Creon and his daughter, but the appearance of these motifs in other plays shows that strange potions were not unknown to Greek women. In Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, the gentle Deianeira tries to win back her husband Heracles’ love for her by making what she thinks is a love potion. She smears it on a robe, which she sends to him as a gift, but the mixture is deadly and kills him. Phaedra’s nurse suggests special medicines and magic spells for her mistress’s lovesickness in Euripides’ Hippolytus (478, 509, 517). Clearly it was not unusual for wives to seek out love potions to win back straying husbands, and Greek tragedy shows that one of the most common areas of danger for Athenian men was the home. Medea as ever is the extreme case; she does not seek to bring Jason back to her with her drugs, but to destroy his future.

  We have noted that the city of Athens was extremely protective of its citizenship and special identity, which included the city’s achievements and material resources; the male members of the oikos were similarly protective of its integrity, reflecting the exclusive state approach. Threats to this entity form much of the subject matter of tragedy, and the myths about Medea highlight concerns that appear frequently in fifth-century drama, such as the need for children, sexual problems, and a wife’s need for respect and honour in the household. So how does Euripides make a new and memorable version of the well known story?

  The main part of the story, where there seems to be least certainty for myth-tellers, concerns events in Corinth, and Euripides focuses his innovations around the stay of Jason and Medea in the city. Already at the beginning we have the new theme of Jason’s marriage to the king’s daughter, and later the horrible death of Creon and the new bride provides a graphic and poignant messenger speech. We can also see the unheroic portrayal of Jason and the embarrassing (for Athenians?) discussion of Aegeus’ infertility as a new way of presenting the myth.

  But Euripides’ major innovation is that Medea actually kills her own children, after long and anguished hesitation, and in addition is able to escape from Corinth without punishment. The shocking deed makes dramatic sense in the context of her portrayal as a woman who has betrayed and killed within her own family and led others to do the same; her character has been taken to the limit and gone beyond humanity. But her escape is also shocking as it seems to indicate her deeds have divine approval, since she appears in the chariot of the god Helios, her grandfather. Medea’s divine ancestry has not been emphasized during the play, except for her own significant remarks that the robe and garland she sends to Jason’s bride were bequeathed by Helios to his descendants (954–5). The final scenes must have been doubly disturbing for the audience; not only does a woman get away with killing a king and her own sons, but a god helps her!

  We cannot know how Euripides’ innovations in Medea’s story were received in Athens, but it is interesting to note that these new episodes do not appear on any Attic vase paintings, as if the events were too disturbing for public taste. However, they became favourites with the painters of South Italy, who produced scenes not previously seen on vases, which reflect Euripides’ play. The murder of the children appears frequently: sometimes they are shown lying on the ground, but several vases show Medea killing them at an altar. There are representations of the death of Creon and his daughter and more of Medea in the chariot of the Sun; sometimes all three elements are put together on the same vase like a comic strip. On a vase in Cleveland, Medea in oriental dress rides in a chariot drawn by dragons, the chariot is enclosed in a circular frame with the rays of the sun around it, the boys’ bodies lie below on an altar, and a helpless Jason looks up at her (see illustration, p. 9).

  What next? Medea announces that she intends to bury her children at the shrine of Hera outside Corinth, and institute a festival in their honour to atone for what she admits is a sacrilegious murder (dussebēs phonou, 1378–83). Then she will go to live with Aegeus in Athens. As for Jason, he will die dishonourably, struck on the head by a piece of wood from the Argo. It would be obvious to all that, in giving these prophetic words to Medea, on high in her chariot, Euripides puts her in the role usually given at the end of his plays to a god who foretells the future and it reinforces the impression of Medea as a divine being.

  So, in the next phase of the myth after the events of this play, this female threat to Athenian peace of mind is in Athens with Aegeus; when his son Theseus comes to make himself known to his father, Medea persuades Aegeus that he is an enemy, and with Aegeus’ agreement tries to poison him. Scenes which show the dangerous female barbarian as the would-be killer of the national hero do appear on Attic vases in several forms. But Aegeus recognizes Theseus before it is too late and all is well – or is it? The audience, familiar with the myths or their own city’s past, knew very well that Theseus, the great Athenian hero, would eventually be the (unwitting) cause of his own father’s death.

  Euripides has made some startling innovations in his treatment of Medea, which could have been unwelcome to his audience, and he ends his play leaving them with even more unsettling thoughts about what is to come.

  3

  Otherness and Exile: Euripides’ Production of 431 BC

  Ioanna Karamanou

  To the memory of Professor Eric Handley

  Medea was produced in 431 BC as part of a tetralogy which also contained Philoctetes, Dictys and the satyr-play Theristae (‘Reapers’). Euripides won the third prize, which is suggestive of his lesser popularity during his own lifetime. Nonetheless, ever since antiquity, Medea has remained a highly influential play, while there is concrete evidence for the reception of Philoctetes in later literary criticism and of Dictys in fourth-century iconography.1

  As with most Euripidean tetralogies, the three tragedies belong to different myths (unlike Aeschylean tetralogies, whose tragedies derive from successive phases of the same legend). This chapter sets out to explore certain common underlying themes, which, despite the plot differences, pervade the plays of this tetralogy. I shall argue that the tragedies are conceptually interrelated by means of the key notions of exile and otherness and shall investigate the manner in which these ideas are embedded within their contemporary sociopolitical and cultural context.

  While exploring the treatment of these ideas in the tetralogy of 431 BC, it should be borne in mind that the typical Greek way of defining the Athenian ‘self’ was by negative polar opposition to a whole series of ‘others’. The ‘other’ was mainly represented in drama by disempowered individuals marginalized by gender, ethnicity, social class and physical factors, such as deformity or advanced age.2

  Medea’s multifaceted otherness emerges from a combination of features. The first element, which is shared by all three tragedies, is the notion of exile. The theme of Medea’s exiled status is displayed right from the outset in the Nurse’s prologue (12) and permeates the first part of the play until the implementation of her revenge-plan (255, 273, 280–81, 359–61, 502–3, 512–15, 604, 704, 706, 711–13). In the second stasimon the Chorus refers to the anguish and isolation which exile incurs, and goes as far as asserting that death itself is preferable to the calamities of exile:

  O my fatherland, my home!

  I would that I might never lose my city

  and so know that yawning life of helplessness that cannot be endured –

  of all the sorrows in the world, most pitiable.

  No! I would sooner die

  an
d put an end to all the long days of my life,

  for there is no grief greater

  than to lose your native land.

  645–53

  Medea’s utter isolation emerges from her own description of herself as deserted (255; see also 604) and bereft of her homeland, and is underscored through a powerful juxtaposition of words:

  If I am to be driven out in exile,

  cut off from all friends, from all family, and all alone with my poor lonely sons.

  512–13

  Medea is a foreigner and as such she should make herself agreeable to the city (222–24) by acting with the caution expected of foreigners, who are in need of protective refuge (386–90). At the same time, Medea’s social inferiority arises from her abandonment by Jason, for whom marriage to a barbarian woman does not provide sufficient status (591–92).

  Medea’s otherness is further enhanced by her gender. The famous passage from her monologue, in which she asserts that of all living creatures women are the most abject (230–51), highlights the superlative state of their wretchedness and alludes to the unfair social structure and the social imperatives which underlie the female predicament. In this speech Medea starts from the immediate situation of her own plight and moves on to identify herself both with the sympathetic female Chorus, and on a larger scale with the whole female sex.3

  Hence, Medea’s vulnerability in the first part of the play arises from her status as the ‘other’. Subject to injustice and humiliation (20, 26, 692, 696), she is forced to succumb to the power of her enemies: