The Greek Plays

by The Greek Plays- Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles

  *15 The oracles in Lycia (an area on the southern coast of what is now Turkey) and northern Africa are the most remote the Chorus can think of. Ammon is the hellenized god Zeus Ammon, who corresponds to the Egyptian god Amon-Ra; his oracle was located in ancient Libya, at a site that is now on the Egyptian side of the border between Egypt and Libya.

  *16 Asclepius. See note to line 4.

  *17 In normal circumstances, women of the household would prepare a body for burial. Here Alcestis prepares her body herself, since she knows she is about to die.

  *18 Hestia is the goddess of the hearth; she is worshipped as protector of the household.

  *19 A child was considered orphaned if he or she lost one parent.

  *20 Myrtle was used in a variety of ritual contexts, though it is particularly associated with Aphrodite.

  *21 Line 208 has been omitted as an interpolation.

  *22 The text of this song is problematic in several places. Some editors divide the Chorus into two groups because of the address to “friends” at line 218, which implies that one part of the Chorus is singing to the other. I prefer to think of the Chorus members addressing each other as a whole as “friends” and singing in unison.

  *23 See note to line 91.

  *24 Some words have been lost from the text here.

  *25 Iolcus is a town in Thessaly near Pherae, at the head of the Gulf of Pagasae. It is Alcestis’ birthplace.

  *26 Alcestis sees the boat that carries the dead across the rivers of the Underworld. The ferryman is Charon, whose name is mentioned here for the first time in extant Greek literature.

  *27 Before this moment, Admetus has been speaking, while Alcestis sings. Now he chants in an anapestic rhythm, something between speech and song, and Alcestis then speaks.

  *28 Line 312 has been omitted. It is identical to line 195.

  *29 The description of a pipe as Libyan is unique to Euripides; it may be connected to the use of lotus wood to make pipes, since lotus grew abundantly in Libya and the word for pipe here is “lotus,” also an unusual usage.

  *30 Admetus refers here to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was able to retrieve Eurydice from the Underworld through the power of his music, which bewitched even Persephone and Hades, the deities who ruled the dead.

  *31 The dog Cerberus. Pluto is another name for the god Hades.

  *32 The text of this line is corrupt.

  *33 The text is slightly emended here. Admetus’ request to the Chorus to sing a paean and not make a libation is unusual. Normally a paean is performed with a libation as a request for help in times of danger or in thanksgiving, when danger is averted. Parker (p. 140) suggests that Admetus asks for a paean in defiance of death. Perhaps the absence of a libation marks the unusual use of the paean here, or it may reflect the fact that the god of the dead never receives libations.

  *34 The instrument translated here as “pipe” is an aulos. It was a double-reed wind instrument; there is no modern musical instrument exactly like it, but we speculate that the oboe is the closest in sound to it. The aulos is the instrument that accompanied the choral songs in tragedy.

  *35 Charon. The river Acheron is one of the rivers of the Underworld.

  *36 The month of Carnea was the time of a great musical festival in Sparta.

  *37 The Cocytus is another river in the Underworld. Its name is derived from the word for “lament.”

  *38 A line is missing here; we know this because the antistrophe must correspond in meter to the strophe, where there is an additional line.

  *39 Eurystheus was Heracles’ cousin and rival. Hera championed him in opposition to Zeus’ championing Heracles. The imposition of the labors, whose immediate cause is Heracles’ murder of his own family, is also part of this divine and human rivalry.

  *40 Diomedes, king of Thrace, was the son of Ares and Cyrene. Both he and his horses were known for their viciousness.

  *41 Bistonia, a city in Thrace, was founded by another son of Ares, Biston.

  *42 “Lord of the golden shield” is a poetic way of saying “lord of the Thracians,” since the shield mentioned here is a small round shield frequently carried by Thracians, and Thrace was known for its gold mining.

  *43 Lycaon is an obscure figure whom a late source identifies as a son of Ares, killed by Heracles on his trip to bring back the golden apples of the Hesperides. Cycnus, another Thessalian son of Ares, brutally murdered all travelers who passed by him until Heracles killed him.

  *44 Perseus was, in most mythical accounts, the great-grandfather of Heracles and grandfather of Heracles’ human father, Amphitryon. Heracles does not become a divine figure until Zeus, his other father, takes him up to Olympus as he is about to die.

  *45 Since a wife is viewed as a kind of outsider, unrelated by blood to her husband’s family, Admetus’ answers here could apply equally to Alcestis or to a woman with far looser ties to his house.

  *46 A mountain of the Pindus range in Thessaly.

  *47 A lake in Thessaly near Mount Ossa, south of Pherae.

  *48 The text here is corrupt but clearly refers to the land of the Molossians in Epirus, far to the west of Pherae.

  *49 Mount Pelion borders the Aegean to the east of Pherae. The Chorus mention the lack of a harbor along the range of Mount Pelion presumably because it makes Admetus’ kingdom invulnerable to attack by sea.

  *50 Lines 651–52 have been omitted because they closely resemble lines 296–97 and fit better there.

  *51 People from Lydia and Phrygia, areas of Asia Minor, would have been brought to Greece through the slave trade, by which populations defeated in war were sold into slavery and traded among nations.

  *52 The Chorus chant in anapests here, a meter appropriate for the funeral procession.

  *53 Hermes escorted the dead to the Underworld.

  *54 Persephone.

  *55 Wine was usually mixed with water in the Greek world, the potency of the wine being regulated by the amount of water added. Only a man of enormous strength, like Heracles, would risk drinking unmixed wine.

  *56 The Greek word translated “stranger” here means, literally, someone from outside the house. As at line 532, Euripides is playing ironically with the fact that wives were considered “outsiders.”

  *57 Cypris is another name for Aphrodite, goddess of erotic passion.

  *58 Two half-lines have been deleted. A scribe copying the manuscript accidentally inserted parts of other lines here.

  *59 Two lines, 818 and 819, have been omitted here as interpolations.

  *60 Hades and Persephone.

  *61 The Chorus start to sing and dance in a rhythm that includes some dochmiacs, the meter of intense emotion. Admetus’ cries are a kind of accompaniment to this part of their song. After each stanza, Admetus chants in anapests. The second two stanzas are not accompanied by Admetus’ cries, and their rhythm is less excited.

  *62 Part of the wedding ritual involved the groom’s grasping the bride by her wrist and leading her into his house.

  *63 The Chorus personify the force of necessity as a goddess the consequences of whose power cannot be averted or cured.

  *64 Songs of Orpheus were supposed to have curative power; the Chorus also refer to herbal cures passed down to Asclepius and his sons by the god Apollo, Asclepius’ father.

  *65 The Chalybi were a people who lived on the coast of the Black Sea and were famous for their mining and treatment of iron to make a steel-like metal.

  *66 The Chorus are suggesting that Alcestis’ tomb will become the site of a hero cult. As a hero, she will have a godlike presence with the power to protect those who live in the area of her tomb.

  *67 Lines 1094–95 are omitted because they are repetitious and break the flow of the dialogue.

  *68 This translation results from a slight emendation of the line, which would otherwise read “She must—as long as it won’t make you angry with me.” The line read in this way seems to make Admetus give in to Heracles out of fear of angering him, which
would be consistent with his wish to spare Heracles any inconvenience as his guest but is also a very weak ending to this long debate.

  *69 When Perseus beheaded the Gorgon he looked away from her, since looking directly at her would have turned him to stone. So here Admetus takes the hand of the veiled woman but faces away from her. The tableau of his holding the hand of a veiled woman evokes a wedding (see line 916 and note).

  *70 The beginning of this line, here translated “certainly not,” has been translated and emended in various ways. No translation, including this one, can claim with absolute confidence to capture the nature of Heracles’ response.

  *71 Eurystheus.

  *72 The best evidence for what Admetus refers to here with the word tetrarchia comes from Homer, who tells us that Eumelus, Admetus’ son, ruled over four cities. Tetrarchia may also refer to the fact that Thessaly was divided in the sixth century into four regions, or tetrades; that reference would of course be anachronistic.

  INTRODUCTION TO EURIPIDES’ MEDEA

  Medea was already a sorceress and a murderess by the time this play begins. Many years before, when Jason arrived in her native Colchis (part of modern Armenia) on his voyage to capture the Golden Fleece, a love-struck Medea—daughter of the reigning King Aeetes and granddaughter of the god Helios, from whom she inherited magical powers—used her potions to help the Greek stranger accomplish the task. Then she escaped with Jason in his ship the Argo, but first she killed her brother Apsyrtus to prevent him from pursuing. Her union with Jason, contracted by way of a pledge “of the right hand”—some ritual that Medea regards as binding, but Jason may not—thus came to birth amid betrayal and kindred bloodshed. Its death, as we will witness in Medea, will be similarly solemnized with blood.

  The theft of the Golden Fleece was meant to establish Jason as ruler of Iolcus, a city in northeastern Greece. Jason’s uncle Pelias, who had usurped the Iolcan throne, promised to restore it if Jason retrieved the fleece, never dreaming the boy could succeed. When Jason and Medea returned triumphant, Pelias plotted to destroy them, but Medea again sought safety in magic and treachery. She showed to Pelias’ daughters how to use a witches’ brew that could rejuvenate a dismembered sheep, turning it into a frisky young lamb. These daughters eagerly chopped up their father in an effort to rejuvenate him, but Medea this time prevented the charm from working. (Euripides dramatized the episode in his now-lost Peliades, staged as part of his very first tragic trilogy in 455 B.C.)

  The killing of Pelias explains why Jason and Medea are now in Corinth, though Euripides remains vague about just how they got there. The bloodstained couple are exiles, cut off from the high rank and power to which their births would have entitled them. But Jason has glimpsed a route to regaining that high stature, this time in the Corinthian royal house. He has wedded a princess of Corinth, daughter of the reigning Creon (a different figure from Creon of Thebes, the ruler encountered in Sophocles’ Oedipus, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus). He has cast off Medea, evidently regarding their pledges to each other, contracted in haste and in a foreign country, as falling short of a legitimate Greek marriage. Now, as we learn from the tutor to Medea’s children, Creon has decreed that Medea must leave Corinth forever, with her sons, to remove any threat she might pose to the newly married princess.

  Given Medea’s history of witchcraft and crime, it would have been easy for Euripides to paint her in lurid colors (as did Seneca in a later, Roman version of this play), but he takes a different path. He domesticates Medea, allowing us to see her through the eyes of servants who pity more than fear her (a passage that tends otherwise, lines 37–45, is contested by some editors and may not be genuine). When Medea herself enters, she speaks in measured tones of how women, in the Greek world, suffer the burdens of marriage and pains of childbirth while men do as they please. She invokes the goddess Themis, guardian of oaths and social sanctions, rather than Hecate, the Erinyes, or other forces of darkness. We can hardly imagine this long-suffering housewife a murderess, yet she has killed, as she reminds us in lines 166–67. This disjuncture, between the very human woman Euripides creates and the monstrous deeds she will do, makes this play complex and compelling, an object of fascination to both the ancient and modern worlds.

  Unlike Clytemnestra, who also takes revenge on a faithless husband, Medea has no well-laid ambushes and no allies. She has no plan in mind when we first meet her, and even when she wins a day’s reprieve from Creon’s exile decree, she is unsure how to use it. We watch her schemes take shape as circumstances change, becoming her confederates in that, like the Chorus, we are privy to her inmost thoughts. Perhaps we even rejoice with her as she gains from Aegeus, an Athenian king who passes through Corinth as he seeks a remedy for his childlessness, a promise of sanctuary in Athens. It’s not clear when she forms the intention to murder her children—perhaps it was Aegeus’ distress at his childlessness that suggested a terrible way to make Jason suffer—and Euripides’ original audience may not have thought she would do so: an ancient commentator notes that in previous versions of the myth, the children died at the hands of vengeful Corinthians after Medea had fled. The filicide for which Medea has become notorious, the act depicted so stunningly in a superb Attic vase painting, may well have been invented by Euripides as this play’s most wrenching plot twist. Medea herself may not have formed this intent before line 1007, where she cries out in pain as she receives her children; perhaps her murderous plan has spontaneously occurred to her at that moment (earlier hints and double meanings may reflect the playwright’s foreknowledge, not her own).

  Just as Euripides downplays Medea’s ties to kindred bloodshed and black magic, so he also avoids typecasting her as a wild-eyed barbarian. She thinks and speaks like a Greek, and other characters treat her as one, at least until after her murders. The Medea, in other words, denies us the comfort we might have taken in the “otherness” of its title character. Her eastern extraction might have made her easy to hate—especially for Athenians whose city had been destroyed, only fifty years before this play was put on, by invaders from the East—but Euripides instead stresses the ways she is like us. Jason’s cry in his final speech, “There isn’t a woman in Greece, no Greek woman / who would have dared this,” cannot be taken to represent Euripides’ own view, given that Jason has in an earlier scene shown himself completely unable to “get it,” for example when he attributes Medea’s rage to mere frustration of female sexual desire (lines 568–72).

  The play’s final sequence builds toward a masterful coup de théâtre, a scene depicted on a number of memorable Greek vases. Medea, who has planned her crimes so cunningly, seems in the end to be trapped without means of escape; the forces of law and order, spearheaded by the hyperrational Jason, are fast closing in. But just when we expect that justice will be done, Medea appears in the sky above the house, riding in a chariot supplied by her grandfather Helios. She bears with her the slain children, denying Jason even the hope of mourning them and burying their bodies. The spectators of 431 B.C. had no hint of this, either from previous Medea tales or from Medea’s confidences throughout the play. Or, indeed, from previous tragic productions, in which (as far as is known) the mēchanē used to lift actors into the air had carried only gods, not mortals, aloft.

  Medea displays her superhuman powers with her final aerial ascent; she delivers the prophetic epilogue that in other Greek dramas issues only from a divine source. Where, then, are the traditional deities who might have appeared in this final scene, to comfort Jason or foretell that Medea, in the end, would pay the price? Their absence from this play is keenly felt, given the suffering Medea has inflicted and the outrage she provokes with her escape. “May the children’s Fury destroy you,” Jason prays, invoking the Erinys who punishes the spilling of kindred blood; but Euripides does not imply (as does Aeschylus at the end of the Libation Bearers, following Orestes’ matricide) that such an avenging deity will in fact appear. Medea’s reply—“What god, what spirit hears you, / breaker of oaths, d
eceiver of a stranger’s trust?”—seems to be the play’s last word on divine intervention, as well as its clearest, though still barely adequate, attempt to situate Jason’s suffering in some scheme of cosmic justice.

  Medea took only third place in the competition of 431 B.C. but loomed very large in the Greek mind, to judge by caustic jokes in the comedies of Aristophanes and by the above-mentioned vase paintings of the final scene (the artists were no doubt inspired by the original play or by a later revival; from their images we can infer that dragons or serpents were depicted drawing Medea’s chariot in those productions). It deeply impressed the Romans as well: Ovid and Seneca both composed Medeas of their own for readers of the first century A.D. (only Seneca’s survives). In recent times, the Medea myth has perhaps attracted more comment, interpretation, and adaptation than any other Greek story, including film versions by the celebrated directors Pier Paolo Pasolini and Lars von Trier and a novelistic “retelling” by the German writer Christa Wolff. Euripides’ play is lurking in the background of all such treatments, despite their modern twists.

  MEDEA

  Translated by Rachel Kitzinger

  This translation is based on the text edited by David Kovacs for the Loeb Classical Library, Euripides: “Cyclops,” “Alcestis,” “Medea” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). I have also consulted Donald J. Mastronarde’s text and commentary in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series, Euripides: “Medea” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  CAST OF CHARACTERS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)

  NURSE, Medea’s personal attendant

  TUTOR, teacher and minder of Medea and Jason’s two sons

  MEDEA, member of the royal family of Colchis, on the Black Sea; granddaughter of the Sun-god; wife of Jason

  CHORUS of Corinthian women

  CREON, king of Corinth

  JASON, heir to the throne of Iolcus, living in exile in Corinth