strophe
CHORUS: Do you hear? hear the cry of children?*85
iō, wretched, doomed woman!
FIRST CHILD: oimoi, what should I do? Where can I flee mother’s hand?
SECOND CHILD: I don’t know, dear brother. We are lost.
CHORUS: Should I go inside? I should stop their murder, I think.
FIRST CHILD: Please, by the gods, help! We need you now!
SECOND CHILD: The snare of swords—it’s coming very near.
1280
CHORUS: Wretched woman, then you are made from iron or rock,
since the children you bore you’ll kill, their fate in your hands.
antistrophe
One woman I know of, one of all before,
who struck her beloved children with her own hand:
Ino, maddened by gods, when the wife of Zeus
sent her wandering from her home.*86
Wretched, she falls in the sea at their impious death.
Her foot stepping beyond the edge, into the sea,
she dies as she destroys her own two children.
1290
What horrible thing now couldn’t yet come to be?
O women’s bed of sorrows, how great the harm you’ve done mankind.
(Jason rushes in from the direction of the royal palace.)
JASON: You, women who’ve been standing by the house,
is Medea—a woman who’s done dreadful things!—
inside? Or has she fled? Is she gone?
Either she must be hidden deep in the earth,
or rise into the lofty air on wings,
if she’s not to pay what’s due to the king’s house.
Does she imagine she’ll flee from here
1300
unpunished, when, on her own, she’s killed the king?
But it’s not her I care about. It’s the children.
The ones that woman harmed will try to harm her,
but I’m here to save my children’s lives: I fear
Creon’s kinsmen will do something to them,
exact from them the price of their mother’s crime.
CHORUS: You’ve no idea the ruin you’ve come to, Jason;
if you had, you wouldn’t have said these words.
JASON: What is it? I suppose she wants to kill me, too?
CHORUS: Your children are dead—by their mother’s hand.
1310
JASON: oimoi, what can you mean? You have destroyed me.
CHORUS: You must believe your children live no longer.
JASON: Where did she kill them? Inside the house? Outside?
CHORUS: Open the doors. Look on your murdered children.
(Banging on the doors, Jason shouts to slaves inside the house.)*87
JASON: Undo the locks, you there! Quick as you can,
open the doors, show me the double horror:
the bodies of my boys, and her…she’ll pay.
(Medea appears on the roof of the skēnē, in a chariot with the bodies of her two sons.)*88
MEDEA: Why rattle and force these doors in search
of these corpses and me, the one who made them?
Stop this labor: If you have need of me,
1320
say what you want; but you will never touch me.
The Sun-god, my father’s father, gave me this,
a chariot to ward off my enemies’ hands.
JASON: Hateful thing! Woman! The greatest enemy
to gods and me and the whole human race!
You dared, you who bore them, to thrust a sword
into the children; made me childless; ruined me!
You’ve done this, and still you look upon the sun,
upon the earth? After daring this unholy crime?
I want you dead! I’m sane now—I wasn’t then
1330
when I brought you from your home, your savage land,
to a Greek household: an utter disaster,
betrayer of your father and your homeland.
The gods have sent to me the avenging spirit
that lurked for you. You killed your brother at the hearth
and boarded Argo with its beautiful prow.
That’s how you started. But then you were married
to me, and you bore me children. And for the sake
of the marriage bed we shared you destroyed them.
There isn’t a woman in Greece, no Greek woman,
1340
who would have dared this. Yet I thought you
worthy of marriage instead of one of them—
a marriage of ruin and hate—not to a woman,
no: to a lion, more savage than Tyrrhenian Scylla.*89
But no amount of insults I might speak
could make their mark on you: you are that bold.
Away with you and your foul acts,*90 stained with your
children’s blood! There’s little left for me except to weep.
I’ll get no profit from my new marriage;
I’ll never speak to the sons I sowed and raised,
1350
or see them living; they are lost to me.
MEDEA: I would have made long answer to this speech
if father Zeus did not already know
what you have gained from me, and what you’ve done.
Once you’d dishonored my marriage bed,
you weren’t going to mock me and enjoy your life,
nor was the princess. Nor was Creon going
to give you a bride and throw me out, scot-free.
Go on, call me lioness if you want, call me
a Scylla who makes the Tyrrhenian rock her home.
1360
I’ve done what I had to do to wring your heart.
JASON: And hurt yourself; you have your share of ruin.
MEDEA: No doubt. But it’s worth the pain if you’re not laughing.
JASON: Oh, children, what a wicked mother you had!
MEDEA: Oh, sons, you were ruined by your father’s disease!
JASON: It wasn’t my right hand that murdered them.
MEDEA: No, it was your insolence, your new-forged marriage.
JASON: You judged it right to kill them for your bed?
MEDEA: You think that pain’s a small thing for a woman?
JASON: For one who’s balanced, yes. But you’re all bad.
1370
MEDEA: They are no more. These words will tear your flesh.
JASON: They live in the spirit of vengeance on your head.
MEDEA: The gods know who began their suffering.
JASON: What they know is your noxious mind.
MEDEA: Loathe me. I hate the sound of your piercing voice.
JASON: And I yours. Easy to put an end to this.
MEDEA: Tell me how. I want that. What shall I do?
JASON: Hand me those bodies to bury and to mourn.
MEDEA: No, indeed. With this hand I’ll bury them.
I’ll carry them to the temple of Hera Akraia
1380
so that my enemies may not violate them
by smashing their tomb. In this land of Sisyphus*91
we will install a sacred feast and rites
to expiate for all time their unholy murder.*92
I will go to the land of Erechtheus*93 to live
in the house of Aegeus, son of Pandion. You,
a bad man, will die a bad death, as suits you:
struck on the head by a piece of Argo, after
you’ve seen the bitter end of marriage to me.
(Jason and Medea chant in anapests.)
JASON: May the children’s Fury destroy you,
1390
and bloody Justice.
MEDEA: What god, what spirit hears you—
breaker of oaths, deceiver of a stranger’s trust?
JASON: pheu, pheu, foul child-killer.*94
MEDEA: Go to the palace, bury your wife.
JASON: I go, without my two sons.
MEDEA: Don’t mourn yet; wait for old age.
JASON: Oh, children dearest—
MEDEA: —to their mother, yes. Not to you.
JASON: And so you killed them?
MEDEA: To cause you pain.
JASON: oimoi, I need in my despair
1400
to kiss their dear mouths.
MEDEA: You talk to them now, now embrace them;
then you pushed them away.
JASON: By the gods, let me touch
the children’s soft skin.
MEDEA: It cannot be. You speak to no purpose.
(As Jason speaks, Medea departs with the boys’ bodies in the chariot sent by the Sun-god, raised by the mēchanē.)
JASON: Zeus, do you hear? how I’m driven away,
what suffering comes from this
foul, child-murdering lioness?
As best I can, as much as I am able,
I mourn, I summon the gods
1410
to bear witness that you
killed the children, and now you stop me
touching them, burying their bodies.
Would that I had never given them life
to see them destroyed by you.
(Jason remains alone onstage as the Chorus chant the coda to the drama.)
CHORUS: Zeus on Olympus keeps many things in store;*95
the gods accomplish many startling things.
What we expect does not take place,
and the god makes way for what we don’t expect.
And so it came about in this affair.
* * *
*1 The nurse refers to the story of Jason’s voyage on the ship, the Argo, to retrieve the Golden Fleece from Medea’s father, King Aeetes, in Colchis on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. In myth the entrance to the Black Sea is guarded by the Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks, which required skill and luck to sail through.
*2 Pelion, a wooded mountain in Thessaly, provided the wood to build the Argo, in mythology the first ship to venture to the east, beyond the Mediterranean.
*3 Pelias, Jason’s uncle, had usurped Jason’s father’s throne in Iolcus in Thessaly, in northern Greece. It was Pelias who sent Jason in quest of the Golden Fleece, promising to return the throne to him if he fetched it.
*4 Jason’s success in gaining the fleece was largely the result of Medea’s help; she aided him with her knowledge of potions (a characteristic of granddaughters of the Sun). Jason and Medea fled Colchis together in the Argo, pursued by Medea’s father, Aeetes.
*5 When Jason and Medea returned to Iolcus with the fleece, Pelias reneged on his promise to return the throne. Medea persuaded Pelias’ daughters to rejuvenate their father by cutting him up and cooking the pieces of his body in a cauldron, assuring them that at the end of the process, her magic spell would restore him to newly vigorous life. They did so, but Medea did not honor her pledge. Jason and Medea were forced to flee from Iolcus to Corinth.
*6 Kovacs inserts two lines here. I do not think they are necessary and have not translated them.
*7 Jason took Medea from Colchis as his wife, although their marriage is not governed by the rituals of Greek wedlock. The “bond of the right hand” (or handshake) implies an arrangement between equals rather than the subordination of the woman (as would be the case in a true Greek marriage contract).
*8 Editors have edited lines 37–45 in various ways, including deletion of the whole passage. I follow Kovacs in deleting only one line (41).
*9 Remains of the fountain house in the center of Corinth, where the water of the stream Pirene collected, can still be seen. The water from the spring was used for ritual purposes, and the area around the fountain house functioned as a social space.
*10 Exile is the most extreme punishment in the Greek world short of death, although it is often considered worse than death, especially for women. The exclusion from community and family denies any settled existence or social status to the person in exile, who must often live as a nomad and beggar if no one is willing to take her in.
*11 A line here, “some with reason, others out of greed,” appears to be a later addition to the text.
*12 The anapestic rhythm (in its pure form, two short syllables followed by one long syllable) can be chanted or sung. Chanted anapests are often used for the entrance of a Chorus, as they are associated with marching. Sung anapests can be associated with laments.
*13 Line divisions in sung and chanted sections of the play vary considerably from one edition to another. In the songs, editors differ in their sense of the metrical phrasing marked by line division; in the chanted sections, under some circumstances there can be disagreement about the number of anapests in a line. Therefore line numbers, which are retained from a very early edition of the play, do not always correspond to the actual number of lines in the songs in this translation.
*14 The image here is of a thundercloud that will soon be accompanied by lightning.
*15 Initially the rhythm of the Chorus’s song is anapestic, the meter (in its chanted form) traditionally used for the choral entrance. Other rhythms then mingle with the anapests. Medea and the nurse continue in anapestic rhythms, singing and chanting respectively.
*16 This translation reflects an emendation of the text by Kovacs.
*17 Themis is the goddess who is understood to enforce human law and custom, here specifically the keeping of oaths. Medea calls on Artemis perhaps because she is closely associated with women’s lives, particularly moments of transition such as marriage or childbirth.
*18 To delay her father’s pursuit, Medea, when fleeing Colchis with Jason in the Argo, cut up her brother and threw pieces of his body overboard. Aeetes stopped to pick up each piece, allowing Medea and Jason to escape.
*19 The oaths that Jason swore to Medea persuaded her to go with him to Greece.
*20 The gateway referred to is the Bosporus.
*21 Medea refers here to the necessity of the bride’s family to provide a dowry (in the Hippolytus, lines 625ff., Hippolytus makes the same point, but in that case he’s illustrating how much of a drain women are on a household’s wealth); she also points out that most Greek women do not know their husbands when they marry because the marriage was arranged by their parents.
*22 Kovacs’s text deletes line 234: “This disaster is worse than disaster.”
*23 When a girl married, she left her father’s house and went to live with her husband and his family. Medea is describing Greek customs that she herself has not been subject to, in part to win the Chorus’s trust.
*24 A line here, “in the company of a mate or someone close to him,” is considered corrupt by many editors for metrical reasons.
*25 It is quite common for a character to ask the Chorus to keep quiet in order to “naturalize” the fact that although it is onstage for most of the play, the Chorus very rarely intervenes in the action. A line has been deleted here, in which Medea also mentions vengeance against Creon and his daughter.
*26 Kovacs deletes two lines here to keep the sharp contrast between “some men” and “you.” The deleted lines read “others find me retiring; others the opposite; and others find me an obstacle; but I am not overly wise.”
*27 The full act of supplication (see line 336 below) involves the suppliant’s taking hold of the knees of the person he or she is supplicating and gesturing to the person’s chin or grasping his or her hand. Medea’s symbolic act here involves simply a gesture toward the knees and chin or hand.
*28 The Chorus usually responds to what has happened in a scene with a pair of spoken lines. The chanting of anapests is unusual and occurs again in this play at line 759, perhaps to contrast the Chorus’s agitation with Medea’s control. The opening lines have been transposed to have the Chorus begin with pheu, pheu. Kovacs deletes the line “wretched woman.”
*29 Kovacs has deleted this line, which is identical to line 40. I retain both lines, making the nurse at line 40 refer to Medea’s possible suicide, while he
re Medea refers to the killing of Jason and his bride.
*30 Hecate is a goddess closely associated with magic, witchcraft, and the moon; it would be unusual to have a sanctuary of Hecate within the house, and the fact that Medea has one suggests her special connection to the practice of magic and the use of potions.
*31 Medea refers to Jason’s new marriage as Sisyphean because Sisyphus was king of Corinth and therefore an ancestor of Creon’s. Because Sisyphus was associated with terrible crime and punishment, the reference has a negative tone.
*32 The Chorus refer to the prevalence of negative judgments about women in men’s talk and in literary works.
*33 Phoebus is the god Apollo.
*34 The Chorus imagine that women’s voices might be heard in response to men’s in public celebrations involving songs that portray women in a negative light or that view a story from only a male perspective. Women do not sing in public.
*35 The Pontus is the Black Sea, and the two rocks are the Symplegades, or Clashing Rocks (see note to line 2).
*36 A line, identical to line 1324, “bitter to the gods and to me and the whole human race,” is deleted here.
*37 These are two of the tasks that Medea’s father, Aeetes, demanded of Jason before he would relinquish the Golden Fleece. The second task was to sow a field with dragon’s teeth from which armed men sprang up whom Jason had to conquer.
*38 See note to lines 9–10.
*39 Cypris is another name for Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love; Eros (line 529) is her son, who carries a bow and arrows that cause whomever they strike to fall in love. Jason’s point is that these gods made Medea fall in love with him, so it is they, not she, who deserve credit for his success in winning the Golden Fleece.
*40 Jason makes a claim to piety here by not boastfully recounting in detail the extent of Medea’s love and by acknowledging the minor help that he can attribute to her skill rather than to Cypris.
*41 Jason evokes Orpheus, the great musician who was said to have been able to bewitch even the god of the dead with his song, because he is comparing different sources of power: money, fame, and, in Orpheus’ case, artistic talent.
*42 Jason’s wish that children could be born without women is similar to that of Hippolytus’, at lines 616–22 of the Hippolytus.
*43 Jason refers here to the practice of guest-friendship by which a person could establish a network of supportive connections with different families in different parts of Greece. Without such a network, a woman in exile would have been particularly vulnerable.
The Greek Plays Page 63
