Looking at Medea

by David Stuttard

  With Medea’s own endorsement of evaluations offered not only by Jason, but also by the sympathetic women of the Chorus, it appears that misogynist Athenian stereotypes regarding the nature of women are vindicated by the play’s end. There are plenty of earlier indications of the same. As we saw above, for example, Medea concludes her ‘feminist’ manifesto with a reference to the ‘murderous force’ of a woman when ‘slighted in her marriage and her sex’ (265–6). After her victory over Creon, and having restated her determination to take revenge, she once again casts her motives in the same light (407–9):

  I am a woman, and although we women are so useless when it comes to good, yet as the architects of every ill, there is none more accomplished.

  She returns to the same theme in her later manipulation of Jason (889–90):

  But we women are as women are – I shall not slander us. But just because we’re women does not mean we must inevitably act badly or strive to outdo one another in our foolishness.

  It does not seem to me that a play in which women make these generalizations about themselves is designed to upset such prejudices. Of course, these statements could be presented – and on the modern stage probably would be – as an ironic appropriation of misogynist stereotypes, enlisting them in the cause of a feminine backlash. Perhaps there were even some enlightened souls in the theatre of Dionysus in 431 BC, who took them in that sense. But there must, surely, have been a substantial element of the audience for whom such views were simply an accepted element of their conventional world-view. In conventional Athenian terms, Medea represents men’s worst fears of what women may be capable.

  If Medea has what are regarded as typical feminine traits in abundance and to an extreme degree, by end of play she is, in effect, more than just a woman, but rather some form of female daimôn (in the chariot of her grandfather, Helios, 1321; in her prophecy of future cult, like a dea ex machina, 1382–8) – or, as Jason prefers to phrase it, a monster, like Scylla, or a lioness (1342–3, 1406–7; cf. Medea at 1358). Euripides’ Medea does not subvert Athenian male stereotypes; it revels in them. Far from questioning the lot of women in Athenian society, it suggests that chaos and destruction would result should women ever act like men, demand equality, and throw off the constraints that their society places on them.

  Note on further reading

  For an excellent introduction to the play, its issues, and its interpretation, see Allan (2002). See also Scodel (2010), 120–32. For some background on constructions of the female in fifth-century Athens, see Gould (1980), 38–59; Just (1989). On the Athenian wedding, see Oakley and Sinos (1993). On tragedy’s treatment of the theme of marriage in general, see Seaford (1987). And for further discussion of the main issues raised in this chapter, see especially Knox (1977); Flory (1978); Visser (1986); McDermott (1989); the articles by March, Seaford, and Williamson in Powell (1990); Rabinowitz (1994), 125–54; and Rehm (1994), 97–109.

  11

  Divine and Human in Euripides’ Medea

  Edith Hall

  At the climax of Euripides’ Medea, the voices of the Colchian sorceress’ two young boys, inside their house with their mother, are heard screaming for help from backstage. But then they fall silent. Jason arrives at his former residence in Corinth and demands that the doors be opened. Like Jason and the chorus, we have every reason to believe Medea is inside, with the slaughtered children. We actually saw her enter the house just a few minutes previously, stating unambiguously in her last speech that she was going to kill them, with a sword, without further delay. Our experience of Greek tragedy leads us to expect that the doors will open, and on the wheeled platform called the ekkyklema, or ‘rolling-out machine’, a terrible tableau will come into view – Medea, covered in blood, bestriding the corpses of her little ones with a gore-streaked weapon in her hands. As Jason bangs at the doors, physically trying to force them open, our eyes are therefore concentrated on the level of the entrance represented by the staging. We expect the house to open and reveal the scene of carnage inside. Yet nothing happens on this level of view: instead, it is only on the upper periphery of our vision that the swinging stage crane at first comes to our attention, with Medea and the two little corpses visible within.

  In Greek tragedy, ordinary mortals do not pass from the interior of houses to the sky without using doors and without our noticing it. Nor do they travel by the supernatural means represented by the machine for the gods. We now know that Medea, for all her plausible emotional anguish and ability to talk in an astonishingly frank and accessible way to ordinary Corinthian women, is superhuman. Aristotle, who explained tragedy entirely in terms of human ethics and psychology rather than theology, sensed that this ‘ex machina’ scene was completely anomalous if Medea is understood to be an ordinary mortal woman; he therefore objected to the ‘inorganic’ and ‘improbable’ ending of the play (Poetics, 15, 1454b):

  The denouements of plots ought to arise just from the imitation of character, and not from a contrivance, a deus ex machina, as in Medea. The contrivance should be used instead for things outside the play, either all that happened beforehand that a human being could not know, or all that happens later and needs foretelling and reporting, for we attribute omniscience to the gods.

  Aristotle is quite explicit that the sort of omniscience which Medea seems to possess at the end of the play, when she can predict the moment and manner of Jason’s death, belongs not to humans but to gods.

  After the final, vitriolic quarrel between Medea in the chariot and Jason on the earth, the murderous heroine nevertheless flies off, as the vindictive Aphrodite disappears from the stage in Hippolytus and Dionysus vanishes at the end of Bacchae. Her crime, like a god’s action against a mortal, will remain unpunished, and she gloats over her possession of the precious corpses. The chorus are stunned: this is how they conclude their day outside that tragic household in Corinth (1415–19):

  Zeus on Olympus dispenses many things.

  Gods often contradict our fondest expectations.

  What we anticipate does not come to pass.

  What we don’t expect some god finds a way to make happen.

  They are trying to make sense of the horrifying events they have witnessed, from a religious point of view. They need to assume that unseen, supernatural factors or agents, such as gods, have been at work – factors beyond the material, physical world. This is the realm of the unseen and the divine which the Greeks called ‘beyond the physical’ – ‘metaphysical’. And this chorus are thoroughly metaphysically confused. They are not even sure exactly which god has brought about the events that have just taken place, and insist that they had no way of anticipating the tragedy at all. ‘Gods often contradict our fondest expectations.’ The Corinthian women’s metaphysical incomprehension is important and not atypical of tragedy, a genre in which bafflement is a characteristic philosophical attitude of both staged sufferer and watching spectator.1 We, too, are fundamentally perplexed, even bewildered, by what happens to Medea and Jason’s sons. Can the gods really have intended the terrible deaths that have just occurred to take place? If so, why? Indeed, all the characters in the play, except for Medea, are left either dead or bemused.

  Medea is one of the most adapted and performed of all ancient dramas. It has been turned into operas, dance theatre, novels and films as well as new plays. It has proved to be one of the most readily transferable of all the Greek dramas to different religious and cultural contexts. There have been Roman Catholic Medeas, Protestant Medeas, Jewish Medeas, Australian aboriginal Medeas, Japanese Buddhist/Shinto Medeas, Hindu Medeas, Confucian and Dialectical Materialist Medeas.2 Medea is a tragedy that can speak to every community within the global village, and through performances and adaptations has already spoken to more of them, probably, than any other ancient Greek play, except Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone. There are several reasons why it has proved so endlessly enduring. They include its focus on conflict between the sexes, its staging of dialogues between individuals of
different ethnicity, and its psychological exploration of the ambivalent feelings that children can arouse in a mother. It is also, importantly, an extraordinary exploration of the mind of a murderer, in the process of working herself up to kill another human, which raises timeless legal questions about premeditation, provocation and diminished responsibility.3 But a neglected reason why Medea is still so powerful is that it asks more metaphysical questions than it answers, even though its theology throughout is basically that of Olympian polytheism. The play leaves problematically open the question of the true religious or cosmic purpose of the events it has portrayed.

  This inherent metaphysical openness has, in turn, allowed the play to be rewritten and performed in infinite different cultural and religious contexts without ever losing its basic intellectual power. Medea’s children continue to scream for help as they die backstage, with the community powerless to help them. Jason’s irresponsibility and selfishness continue to be repaid by the disproportionate punishment of multiple bereavements. A completely innocent teenage girl, Creon’s daughter, continues to die in agony because she is marrying the man her father has approved. Medea herself, however mysterious she turns out to be, continues to lose her beloved children because her anger is too great to contain. Two entire families – Medea’s and the Corinthian royal family – continue to be destroyed, by a terrifying female figure who claims to be implementing the will of the gods, and seems to be unaccountable. Human helplessness in the face of arbitrary and dreadful suffering never received a more compelling dramatization.

  An enquiry into the metaphysics of the tragedy and their instrumentality in its cultural stamina needs to look, first, at how the characters in the play themselves explain in religious terms what they are doing and suffering. The most prominent god in the play by far is the supreme ruler of gods and men, Olympian Zeus himself. Zeus supervised the implementation of the rules which constituted Greek popular ethics, and in this capacity was worshipped in a similar way all over the Greek world, by both men and women. His primary assistants in this awesome task were his one-time consort or daughter, Themis (whose name means ‘The Right [way of doing things]’ or ‘Natural Law’), and his daughter, Dikē (‘Justice’). The ‘rules’, which Zeus oversaw, regulated human relationships at every level. They forbade incest, kin-killing, harming suppliants, hosts or guests, failure to bury the dead and perjury. Sometimes they were called ‘the unwritten laws’ or the ‘laws of all the Greeks’. Traditionally-minded Greeks believed that, if they committed any of these crimes, then Zeus might blast them with a thunderbolt or exact retribution another way, often with the assistance of Themis or Dikē. In Medea the theology of the play as understood by the nurse, the chorus, and Medea, is on one level, and at the opening of the play, remarkably simple: Jason has broken his marriage vows, the promises he swore to Medea, and has therefore made himself vulnerable as a perjurer to the ‘Justice of Zeus’. There was even a special title for Zeus in his capacity as superintendent of oaths, and that was Zeus Horkios. The theology of the play is very traditional, and the key divinity is Zeus in his capacity as Horkios, along with his designated partner in oath-protection, Themis, and the elemental gods Earth and Sun, by whom oaths were conventionally sworn and who were named as witnesses to them.

  The nurse says that Medea is calling on ‘Themis, who hears our prayers, and Zeus, who guards the promises men swear’ (168–70). The chorus intuitively feel that a woman whose husband has broken his oaths will be protected by Zeus (158–9), and state that Medea calls on Themis (208–10):

  Daughter of Zeus, goddess of the oaths,

  Which carried her across the ocean

  To Hellas, through the dark briny sea.

  Indeed, when Medea gloats at the stricken father of her children from the safety of her chariot, she reaffirms that ‘Father Zeus’ knows what has really passed between them (1352–3), and asks what god would listen to ‘a man who doesn’t keep his promises, a man who deceives and lies to strangers?’ (1391–2).4

  The play, then, in one sense, is a simple parable of perjury punished. Yet its theology also involves cults that were specifically associated with Corinth and its surrounding areas. Jason owes his safety, he claims, solely to the patronage of the goddess Aphrodite (527). Aphrodite and her son, Eros, are of course thematically relevant to the play, because Medea originally abandoned her homeland and took to crime in order to follow the man with whom she had fallen hopelessly in love. But it will have been just as relevant to Euripides’ audience that Aphrodite was also the most important god at Corinth, and the chorus of Corinthian women sing an ode to her (627–41). The temple of Aphrodite at Corinth stood high on the rocky ‘Acrocorinth’, the hill which towered over the city. By the time of Pindar (that is, before Euripides), there were many maidens serving the goddess in the temple, and the city was famous for its prostitutes, who may have plied their trade in direct connection with Aphrodite’s cult. Corinth, which had a steamy reputation, was the perfect setting for a tragedy about sexual jealousy.

  Even more significantly, at the end of the play Medea says she is flying off to Athens via the cult centre of Hera Akraia, across the Corinthian gulf at Perachora (one of the wealthiest sanctuaries ever to have been excavated in Greece). She will bury the boys and thereby found a Corinthian ritual (1378–83), which will atone in perpetuity for their deaths. The Doric temple of Hera Akraia, which can still be visited, was ancient and spectacularly adorned with marble tiles; everyone in Euripides’ audience will have known of it. Moreover, the large number of votive objects that have been found there by archaeologists (amulets worn by pregnant women, and figurines) show that it was visited by individuals anxious about the health of babies and young children.5 The killing of Medea’s children was therefore presented by the tragedy as the ‘charter’ or ‘foundation’ myth for a specific set of cult practices in the Corinthian area. Greek myth and religion often exhibit this ‘dialectical’ tendency, where opposites are united in the same figures: seers like Teiresias are blind, and children, who have been destroyed, are here somehow to protect other children from destruction.

  All over the Greek world, Hera was the deity who represented women’s social status as respected wives. Hera was worshipped as Hera Nympheuomene (Hera the Bride), Hera Chera (Hera the Widow), but also as Hera Teleia, Hera the Fulfilled or Fulfiller, the goddess who helped women finalize their marriages satisfactorily with the production of a healthy son. She is, in addition, the angry wife of Zeus, permanently disgruntled at his infidelities. In both capacities – Hera Teleia and Hera humiliated by her husband’s straying – she is a figure who offers a parallel to Medea in a less specifically Corinthian way. But a discussion of the religion in this play is not complete without Medea’s special relationships with two other gods, on the first of whom she calls when no men are in earshot (395–8):

  By Hecate, the goddess

  I worship more than all the others,

  The one I choose to help me in this work,

  Who lives with me deep inside my home,

  These people won’t bring pain into my heart

  And laugh about it …

  It was as a result of this passage that Hecate came to dominate ancient literature’s scenes of female witchcraft. Greek lyric poets had already presented her as the dark daughter of Night, the bearer of flaming torches, with some special association with sexual desire implied by making her an attendant of Aphrodite. In art, she is often associated with the huntress Artemis, but in an underworld form, followed by the triple-headed hound of Hell, Cerberus, rather than the hunting dogs who attend Artemis in sunlit glades. But Medea’s statement, that Hecate is her favourite goddess, fed the ancient literary imagination. By the time of the third book of Argonautica, Apollonius’ epic on the Argonauts two centuries later, Medea is imagined to have been a full-time priestess serving in the temple of Hecate in Colchis by the Black Sea; Hecate has taught her how to use magical herbs, which can put out fire, stop rivers in full flow and change the m
ovements of the stars and moon. But Euripides’ portrayal of Medea in 431 BC was exploiting the real anxieties of Athenian men, who feared women with expertise in lotions, potions and incantations. This is shown by the evidence relating to the real-life fourth-century trial of a woman named Theoris, who was executed, along with her whole family, for the use of ‘drugs and incantations’.6 A speech by the sophist Antiphon survives from the fifth century, in which a young man accuses his stepmother of murdering his father with poison, and the speaker is clearly able to exploit a strong social stereotype associating female guile with pharmaceutical expertise.

  After invoking Hecate, the goddess ‘deep inside her home’, Medea continues her crucial self-address like this (401–6):

  So come, Medea,

  call on all those things you know so well,

  as you plan this and set it up. Let the work,

  this deadly business, start. It’s a test of wills.

  You see what you have to put up with.

  You must not let Jason’s marriage make you

  a laughing stock among Corinthians,

  compatriots of Sisyphus, for you

  trace your family from a noble father

  and from Helios, the Sun. So get to work.

  Medea’s other special relationship is with her grandfather Helios, who, indeed, lends her the chariot in which she can escape at the end of the play. The Sun is also invoked by Aegeus, when he swears his oath to Medea, as it is by many other oath-takers in Greek tragedy, and this reflects standard practice; the regular divinities invoked in oaths, as we have noted, were Zeus, the Earth and the Sun.

  Helios is actually a rather difficult god to grasp, at least as early in antiquity as this, when in most places in Greece he does not seem to have been particularly important, and it is not yet clear that he has been firmly identified with Apollo. It is from much later antiquity that his connection with Corinth is implied by the eleven slabs with mask-like heads of Helios which have been excavated in the Corinthian Odeum; these may actually have decorated the scaenae frons (facing of the stage building). Helios had a major cult in rather few Greek communities, the most important, of course, being on Rhodes, where a spectacular sacrifice took place: a team of four horses and a chariot were made to crash into the sea. The myth of Phaethon – which Euripides himself staged in a famous tragedy – may be related to this ritual.7 An Athenian audience in 431 BC will have been reminded of the Helios on the newly completed east Parthenon pediments (now in the British Museum), riding with his team of horses from the waves. But Helios was not very significant in Athenian religion in Euripides’ day, and the epigraphic evidence for Helios being honoured in cult there, even in a minor role, does not occur until the early fourth century (IG II, 2 4962). Helios seems to have been associated with the growth of crops, and was connected with the festival of Thargelia, held in May, when the first cereals and fruits were ripe. Passages in Plato imply that those Athenians who paid the Sun/Helios special respect, in the fifth century at least, were regarded as rather avant-garde and odd, if not actually outlandish and barbarian. After all, in Aristophanes’ Peace (421 BC) we are told that Helios and Selene (the Moon) are betraying Hellas to the barbarians (406ff.) and the reason the hero Trygaeus gives is that ‘we sacrifice to the Olympians, but barbarians sacrifice to them’.