Medea

views updated May 23 2018

Medea

EURIPIDES 431, B.C.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Although historians can only piece together the biography of a man who lived before detailed biographical information was reliably recorded, certain “facts” about Euripides’s life are generally accepted. Euripides was born around 480 B.C. to parents who were presumably affluent, considering that the playwright obtained a good education and owned a library of philosophical works. Euripides knew the philosopher Anaxagoras, entertained the Sophist Protagoras in his home, and could count on the philosopher Socrates attending his plays. Although no evidence exists that Euripides conversed with Socrates, the latter’s influence is apparent in the playwright’s skepticism. Euripides’s life was deeply affected by the Peloponnesian Wars, which ultimately ended the Golden Age of Athens; the scars of a life plagued by war are evident in the mood of pessimism and uncertainty that permeates his works of tragedy. Euripides’s characters have more psychological depth than those found in the works of his dramatic predecessors, Aeschylus and Sophocles. Euripides broke with traditional theater and chose to examine the motivations of realistic humans instead of the acts of gods, heroes, and stock characters. He championed the underdog and challenged traditions through his radical ideas regarding the gods and society. Some called him an atheist, but he did not reject religion-he merely identified and denounced its shortcomings.

In all, there are references to ninety-two plays by Euripides; of these, only nineteen are known to have survived the centuries. Most of these plays were more than likely altered as a result of the common practice of oral storytelling, in which tales were verbally passed from town to town, generation to generation. It was not until a century after their author created them that most of these works were actually written down. After his death, Euripides’s plays enjoyed more popularity than they had during his lifetime. One measure of his renown is that Aristophanes wrote three plays that lampoon Euripides. In the Frogs, Euripides is portrayed as a radical who taught the Athenians to “think, see, understand, suspect, question, everything,” according to Edith Hamilton in her book The Greek Way. In his later years Euripides withdrew from public society and spent most of his time in a cave, working on his plays. The Peloponnesian Wars, in their final throes, were destroying the city and society which he so loved; Athens was collapsing. Finally, at age seventy Euripides left Athens for

Macedonia, to help that city’s king establish a cultural center to rival Athens. He died there in 406 B.C.

PLOT SUMMARY

Euripides’s play takes place in Corinth, where Jason had settled with his Colchian wife Medea after his adventure in pursuit of the Golden Fleece (in Greek mythology, a rare garment made from the wool of a magical flying ram). The scene opens with a prologue spoken by Medea’s nurse. She summarizes what has led to her lady’s current state of grief and rage: her husband Jason has married the daughter of the local king, Creon. The nurse recounts how Medea aided Jason in his exploits, even killing her own brother to help Jason escape. The nurse knows the many moods that Medea is capable of and fears that her rage may settle on her two children by Jason. When the attendant appears with the boys, the nurse warns him to keep them away from their angry mother.

Next is heard Medea herself chanting a savage curse at her husband, the children, and the whole family. The chorus of Corinthian women interpose

comments of sympathy for the “sad wife” with Medea’s anguished cries and the nurse’s fearful warnings. Finally, Medea herself appears to plead for empathy from the chorus in a long monologue. At its end, Creon enters with more bad news for Medea: because he fears Medea may harm his daughter, the new wife of Jason, he banishes her from the land of Corinth. Medea hypocritically assures him she would not do such a thing and in an extended duet of dialogue (or duologue), begs for just one day to find living arrangements for her sons. Won over, Creon grants her wish, but threatens to kill her if she does not depart the next day.

Now Medea considers how to obtain revenge upon Jason, for she abhors the thought of being a laughing-stock in her loss. The chorus encourages her. Next Jason encounters Medea, with words seemingly calculated to offend her. She reminds him that she saved his life, slew a dragon, left her father’s home and killed her brother Pelias, all for the love of him. Jason plays the sophist (“as for me, it seems I must be no bad speaker”), arguing petty points against her valid complaint. His suggestion that he is marrying the princess so that Medea and her children may live in comfort incenses the chorus so much that they defy discretion and accuse Jason of sinning. To appease Medea, Jason merely offers her money; he refuses to help Medea convince Creon to let her stay. Medea scornfully dismisses Jason. The chorus judiciously comments upon the need to moderate passion, thus for the first time indirectly finding fault with both parties. The chorus ends, however, on a note of sympathy for Medea.

The next scene offers another perspective on Medea and underscores the importance of children to a royal family. The ruler of a neighboring city, Aegeus, confides to Medea that he has just visited the oracle to learn how he might reverse his childless life. In a marked shift of mood, Medea calmly and professionally offers advice and promises to cast a potent spell to help him, asking only for asylum in return. Upon learning of her distress, Aegeus offers her sanctuary in his city with the caveat that she must find her own passage there as he does not want to incur the anger of his allies, Creon and Jason.

With a means of escape well in hand, Medea unveils her evil plan for revenge. Not only will she kill princess Creusa and her father Creon, but she will slay her own children, in order to destroy Jason’s life completely—because she cannot abide the thought of being mocked for her downfall, and because she knows that the Corinthians will kill the children anyway, in retaliation for her murder of Creusa and Creon. The chorus tries to dissuade her from including the children in her murderous rampage, for her own safety and for the sake of respecting the law. When Medea remains unmoved, the chorus warns her that no city would pollute itself with her presence. Thus is introduced the theme of pollution, a concern that underlies the whole play. Jason returns at Medea’s bidding. She shrewdly begs his pardon for her angry words and shares with him her “plan” to ply Creusa with gifts and then request that they be allowed to remain in Corinth. Jason blesses his two children with the wish for long life, bringing unexpected tears to Medea who masks her real reason for sadness with the explanation that she will miss them when she goes.

Thoroughly appeased, Jason departs with the sons and their attendant to deliver Medea’s gifts, a robe of gold and a diadem (crown) of gold. The chorus laments the forthcoming death of the young bride and realizes that the two children are doomed as well.

The attendant returns with the simple news that the gifts have been delivered. He is surprised by Medea’s tears at this announcement. The appearance of the children causes Medea to dispute her resolve, but she is overcome by her desire for revenge and bids the children leave her. The chorus acclaims that it would be better never to have children at all than suffer the grief of losing them. A messenger rushes in, warning Medea to flee. He recounts in gruesome detail how the princess, at first irritated by the presence of Medea’s children, gleefully dons the robe and crown which almost instantly begin to eat her flesh. Embracing her, Creon becomes entangled in the trap and they die together. The chorus, still in league with Medea against Jason, laments that Medea has “gone away to the house of Hades” as the price of her marriage to Jason.

The children’s screams are now heard, as they fruitlessly seek to escape their murderous mother. The chorus now accuses Medea of having a heart of stone. Jason rushes in to save his children from Medea, but the chorus informs him that he is too late. In the final scene Jason and Medea hurl stinging reproaches at each other. Jason reminds her that she too suffers from her crime, but Medea still claims that vengeance was worth the pain. In a final act of insult, she carries the children’s dead bodies away on her chariot drawn by dragons, refusing Jason even one last touch of their skin. The chorus quickly closes the play with the warning that one never knows how things will turn out.

CHARACTERS

Aegeus, King of Athens

Aegeus, with his dilemma of childlessness, reinforces the importance of children (heirs) to royal leaders, making doubly hurtful Jason’s loss. Aegeus follows the conventional means of solving his problem—consulting an oracle for advice. Aegeus is obviously a kind man. He recognizes that Medea is downcast and asks tactful questions; then gives her his complete sympathy. His accepting attitude toward Medea and his offer to give her shelter in his city elevate her in the eyes of the audience. His refusal to help her travel to Athens because it would offend his allies shows that he is a careful leader—it also reinforces the danger of Medea’s situation.

Children’s Attendant

The attendant discourses with the nurse in the opening scene to further reveal the nature of Jason’s break with his wife. The attendant also displays the cynical attitude for which Euripides was known—rebuking the nurse that every man cares for himself first and for others when it profits himself, only rarely from honest motives.

Chorus of Corinthian Women

The chorus of Corinthian women at first shows a great deal of sympathy for Medea, who is rejected by her heroic husband for the young princess of Corinth. But at the same time, the chorus honors the laws of its city and therefore tries to persuade Medea to control her anger. Occasionally the leader of the chorus interacts with the players, as when the leader criticizes Jason, telling him that he has in fact sinned against his wife. When Medea seems at last determined to kill her children, the chorus pleads with her, suggesting that she will not be able to look upon their faces and do the deed. Thus the chorus represents a more moderate kind of woman than Medea—these women of Corinth show anger at Jason’s betrayal but advise control in the retaliation; they even express pity for Jason’s downfall. The chorus insists that all women are capable of wisdom. They serve as an antidote to the devastating events of the play, reminding the audience of the broader concepts being enacted. The final lines of the chorus fall short of the intensity of its other songs, however, saying something to the effect of, “what will be, will be.” Their explanations ultimately leave the audience unable to transcend the horror of the final scene.

Creon

Creon is King of Corinth and father to Creusa, whose marriage to Jason so infuriates Medea. Creon is well aware of Medea’s bloody reputation; fearing that Medea might, in her rage, harm Creusa, he bans the rejected woman. A soft heart causes the King to allow Medea into the city for one day. His love for his daughter brings about his own death. Creon is portrayed as a weak, indecisive man whom Medea easily persuades to allow her another day in Corinth—a day that proves fatal to Creon. He is also ambivalent at his daughter’s corpse, first saying he wants to die with her, yet when her poisoned garment ensnares him, he struggles to escape.

Jason

Jason, the Argonaut who retrieved the golden fleece, was a well-known character to Athenian audiences and a significant hero in Greek mythology. However, Euripides’s portrayal casts him in a

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Medea’s anguished story has been transformed into film, music, opera, art, poetry, prose, and drama. In the early years of the first century A.D., the Spanish Roman, Seneca, wrote a melodramatic version of Medea that portrays Medea as a witch and Jason as being relatively innocent of causing her anger. Ianni Xenakis, a Greek born in Rumania, wrote music for Seneca’s version of Medea in 1967.
In 1946, French playwright Jean Anouilh adapted the play to serve as an analogy for modern life. American poet Robinson Jeffers produced a singular Broadway stage production of Medea, a work that Jeffers loosely adapted from Euripides’s play and that bears Jeffers’s trademark stamp of nihilism and destructive passion. A sound recording is available on Decca Records. Maxwell Anderson, an American contemporary of Jeffers, placed the story in the contemporary United States and named his piece The Wingless Victory.
A 1959 film version was directed by Jose Quintero and starred Colleen Dewhurst and Zoe Caldwell.
A 1971 Italian film version of the play stars opera diva Maria Callas in her only screen appearance. The adaptation by late eighteenth-century composer Luigi Cherubini follows the basic structure of the Euripidean plot line.
A one-act musical interpretation called Medea in Corinth was written by Benjamin Lees in 1985 and is available through Boosey and Hawkes.
A Kabuki Japanese version was produced in 1984 by Shoca Sato, with traditional Kabuki music and costume and called Kabuki Medea (available on Illinois Video).
An African version of Medea was created in 1968 by J. Magnuson.
Samuel Barber wrote ballet music for Medea in 1949. A different ballet version of the play was produced in the Soviet Union in 1979 and videotaped; it is available from Kultur Video Distributors.
John Gardner, whose other classical adaptation, Grendel, is better known, also adapted the story of Jason and Medea into a long (354 pages) epic poem, Jason and Medeia; his version contains a modernistic twist on Euripides’s theme. Countee Cullen’s translation of “The Medea” can be found in his collection, The Medea and Some Poems.

rather negative light. Medea catches him lying when he tells her he is marrying Creusa simply to increase their fortune, and he never accepts responsibility for his new love alliance. Medea has a valid complaint, yet Jason attributes her anger to a “stubborn temper” and blames her banishment on her inability to submit to Creon’s will. Jason is made even less sympathetic when he minimizes Medea’s role in helping him obtain the golden fleece (a feat that involved killing her own brother so that Jason could escape) and suggesting that Medea is merely jealous and not legitimately hurt. Jason almost deserves the punishment Medea serves him.

Medea

Courageous, powerful, and reckless, Medea left her father’s home without his blessing to accompany Jason to the land of Corinth, after using her magic powers to slay the dragon that guarded the golden fleece. She also killed her own brother to slow Jason’s pursuers. A foreigner to Corinth, Medea nevertheless found favor with the Corinthians and all of Hellas because of her cleverness. For a while she and Jason were in harmony and her life with him and their two sons was blissful. However, when Jason takes as wife the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth, Medea is both grief-stricken at her loss and rage-filled at Jason’s betrayal. As her nurse explains during the prologue, “she’ll not stop raging until she has struck at someone” and the fact that Medea now says she hates the sight of her own children by Jason leads the nurse to fear for them.

Alone in a foreign land, rejected by her beloved husband, and unable to return to her homeland, Medea goes mad, going to great extremes in exacting her revenge for Jason’s infidelity. When faced with their presence, Medea spends a few moments debating the wisdom of murdering those she loves, yet her desire for revenge fully outweighs her mother’s heart. Even after she has accomplished the deed her rage outstrips her better nature, for she will not allow Jason to bury or even kiss the children farewell. She claims that the price she has paid is worth the harm she has caused Jason.

In his book The Poetry of Greek Tragedy, Richard Lattimore speculated on Medea’s motives for murdering her own children:“We are given, not one compelling motive but a whole assortment of motives. She kills them because she hates them, because she loves them, to spite and hurt Jason, to leave him without posterity, to vindicate the rights and prestige of herself and her country, to save them from the Corintihians who, she supposes, would kill them if she did not. In the end she does not know why she kills them and neither do we.”

Messenger

The messenger has only one scene to act—he delivers to Medea the news that her gifts smeared with poison have had their desired effect on Creusa and Creon. His is a storytelling role and he is given gruesome details to spin out to Medea’s delight.

Nurse

The Nurse opens the play with her prologue, reciting Medea’s reasons for rage and grief and generally providing a sympathetic first appraisal of her mistress. She also warns of Medea’s “wildness and bitter nature,” saying that she fears some harm will come to the children Medea now claims to hate. The nurse herself demonstrates more resolve; she catches herself cursing Jason and stops herself because he is still her master. The implication is that Medea cannot so successfully contain her anger, both because the harm is hers and because of her savage nature.

Sons of Medea and Jason

Medea and Jason’s two sons participate in only four scenes, but the entire action of the play revolves around their victimhood. They appear initially with their attendant, immediately drawing audience sympathy, and are sent inside by the nurse to protect them from their raging mother. When they innocently bear Medea’s gifts to Creusa, they garner even more audience sympathy because she at first becomes irritated at the sight of them. Later their sweet smiles cause Medea to pause in her resolve to kill them. Their pitiful screams as she pursues and then slays them are finally heard offstage.

THEMES

Revenge

In Euripides’s Medea, revenge—its necessity, its causes, and its price—is the central to the drama. Euripides makes Medea’s desire for revenge plausible. Not only has her husband Jason wronged her by marrying the king of Corinth’s beautiful young daughter, but the king of Corinth has banished her from the city to prevent her from avenging herself on his daughter. Medea can no longer return to her father’s home because she left without his blessing upon her marriage to Jason. Thus she is unlawfully abandoned, emotionally wounded, and legitimately outraged. She bridles at the idea that she might be the laughing-stock of Corinth. Even when Aegeus offers her a secure future in Athens, Medea remains unsolaced—she now only seeks revenge.

The chorus of Corinthian women legitimize her outrage, sympathizing with her grief as well as her desire for revenge. But Medea takes revenge that goes far beyond the conventionally accepted forms of retribution. Euripides altered the traditional myth to include Medea murdering her own children to avenge her errant husband. Her act represents a form of revenge that is shocking to today’s audiences. The excess of her revenge can be measured by the reaction of the Chorus: the women of Corinth exhibit no surprise that Medea might want to kill Jason’s new bride, nor do they try to dissuade Medea from murdering the king of their city simply because it was his daughter whom Jason loved; but the idea of killing her own children alarms these women. They ask Medea how she will be able to look upon her own children and murder them simply to hurt Jason. When Medea commits her horrendous crime the chorus withdraws its alliance. The

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

What kind of revenge would the Chorus of Corinthian woman have approved? Why do they object to Medea’s revenge?
It has been said that the first song of the chorus could well be a feminist’s theme song. How so?
What effect might the Peloponnesian War have had on Euripides’s writing, and why?
How does Medea’s reaction to being rejected by her husband for another woman compare with similar contemporary situations? What are some of the ways spouses exact revenge upon each other for marital indiscretions? What is the impact of these actions and how do they compare to the impact of Medea’s revenge?

women of Corinth also recognize that this act will hurt not just her erring husband Jason but, in a much deeper way, hurt Medea herself. Jason too recognizes her self-inflicted pain and demands that she acknowledge her error. In a final, shocking outburst of hatred, Medea retorts that her pain is worth the price of avenging herself upon him. Medea’s revenge is excessive, perverse, and nihilistically potent.

Passion

In a way, the theme of passion that overcomes one’s better sense lies behind the theme of revenge in Euripides’s provocative play. The ancient Greeks considered passion dangerous, and the chorus expresses this in the song mat follows Medea scornful rejection of Jason’s offer of money. The chorus sings that love in excess brings neither glory nor repute, though love in moderation is blissful. Medea’s problem is that she loved Jason so much that she left behind her homeland and family—and even killed her brother to slow their pursuers. Medea loved not in moderation but in excess.

Then, when Jason removed himself from her love, her passion turned to anger and since hate is the nearest thing to passionate love, she also hated in excess. It is as though Medea goes mad with the urgent need to punish her husband for his betrayal. The nurse suggests that Medea enrages herself, goading herself to greater heights of fury. In a state of self-aggravated wrath, Medea is immune to the warnings of the chorus of Corinthian women who, almough sympathizing with her, warn her not to break the law. But the law is meaningless to Medea; she tells the chorus that its words are wasted. For it is Medea’s tragic flaw to succumb to her own fury, a passion that imprisons her better self, and to goad herself into a heedless frenzy of anger that brings her to the point of murdering her own children.

From the very beginning, the nurse warns that Medea is not to be trifled with, that “she’ll not stop raging until she has struck at someone.” It had been Medea’s reckless heart that drove her to leave her father’s home to take up with Jason. And yet, in the exchange with Aegeus Medea behaves perfectly rationally. Smoldering with rage wimin, she is capable of convincing Creon to allow her to stay another day and of charming Jason into taking her gifts to Creusa. These moments complicate the question whether Medea could have controlled her passion enough to spare her children. Typically of Euripides, he leaves the question unanswered.

Euripides fabricated the murder of the two children—in variations of the myth they are either killed by accident or not involved at all. Euripides’s invention pushes Medea’s need for vengeance beyond the bounds of normalcy, thus underscoring that destructive passion reigns in her heart.

STYLE

Chorus

Taking his cue from Sophocles, who demoted the chorus from primary character status to that of a speaking spectator, Euripides reduced this dramatic device even further. In Medea the chorus appears less often than it would have in Sophocles or Aeschylus’s plays; its time on stage is limited to mere moments between scenes. At the same time, the acting characters now have chanting parts (a move that eventually led to the development of opera)—further eroding the unique contribution of the chorus. Euripides also reduced the interaction between chorus and characters. Euripides’s reduced use of the chorus ultimately led it is eventual disappearance from ancient Greek theater.

In its modified role, Euripides’s chorus of Corinthian women is a kind of precursor to the modern theater’s narrator (such as the one employed in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town). The chours in Medea goads the consciences of the audience while it sympathizes with, pleads to, and chides Medea. The chorus follows a clear progression of observations that influence and validate the reactions of the audience. At first the women completely sympathize with Medea as an honest woman wounded by an errant husband, and they concur with her desire for revenge (“You are right, Medea, in paying your husband back.”). In fact, D. J. Conacher, in his Euripidean Drama: Myth, Theme, and Structure, has called the first choral stanza (lines 410-445) a virtual theme “song for feminists.” The chorus even goes so far as to accuse Jason of sinning in his betrayal of Medea. The women shift their attitude, however, as soon as they learn that Medea intends to murder her own children. As the play progresses, the chorus moves from sympathy to horror, interacting less with the characters and turning to address the gods of nature and, late in the play, the audience. The chorus does not simply condemn Medea, however. It complicates a too-easy judgement of Medea by showing pity for her throughout the play. When Medea puts her plan into action, the chorus expresses pity for the children, Creusa, Jason, and Medea in turn—in order, apparently, from innocence to guilt. In this crime, all parties deserve pity, even the perpetrator, because the perpetrator had a reasonable cause for anger. The chorus’ list blurs Medea’s liability by including her as one deserving compassion.

The Euripidean chorus also reminds the audience of the larger issues involved in the action of the play. It evokes the concept of pollution, warning Medea that no city will want to be polluted by her presence if she should commit the deed she threatens. Here the purpose of the chours is to place Medea’s deed into the larger context of society, to suggest the greater implications of her personal crime. The Euripidean chorus frequently reminds the audience of ideal values, such as in the second choral stanza when it expounds on the virtues of moderate love and fidelity and proclaims the misery of the loss of fatherland to elicit sympathy for Medea. In Medea, as in most of Euripides’s work, the chorus chants poetic asides on the themes raised by the action. This was the typical role of the chorus—to express the ultimate emotion or beauty of even the most painful event, “to translate the particular act into something universal,” as Gilbert Murray noted in Euripides and His Age. The action of the play consists of the here and now, while the choral odes consists of the eternal. However, some Euripidiean choral odes, including those in Medea, seem only slightly connected with the events of the play, and it was this innovation that led to the elimination of the chorus altogether. The final lines of the chorus, something on the order of “whatever happens, happens,” are so far removed from the actions that have just unfolded that they do nothing to dispel the uneasiness the final scene elicits. The same stock ending appears in three other Euripidean plays that have survived. The effect is a rather abrupt return to reality.

Deus ex Machina

In the final scene, Medea rides off with the corpses of her murdered sons in a chariot pulled by dragons. On the ancient Greek stage, this stage effect would have been accomplished by means of a large crane that would permit the contraption to “fly.” The “deus ex machina,” literally “god from a machine,” was a common closing device in ancient Greek theater. Normally, a god would descend from the heavens to bring the action to a close and ordain the ritual the play celebrates. In Medea, no god appears, although the chariot has been supplied by Medea’s grandfather, the sun god, thus weakening considerably the invocation of the gods. Perhaps this slight derives from Euripides’s skepticism about religious rituals. In any event, the scene is glaringly inconsistent with the realism of the rest of the play. But considering that Medea is now guilty of multiple murders, it seems one of a very few possible means of escape available to her.

Prologue and Duologue

The prologue precedes the action of the play. Before Euripides’s time, the prologue was spoken, chanted, or sung by a chorus, but it had evolved into a presentation by the actors by the time he began writing dramas. Euripides’s plays often begins with a single actor who addresses the audience directly, explaining the background of the story to be told (even though his Athenian audience would already be quite familiar with the myth upon which the play would, by convention, be based). Medea opens with a monologue by the nurse, who recounts the cause of Medea’s grief. The nurse is joined by the attendant, and together, in duologue (a dialogue among two actors) they discuss the implications and extent of Medea’s rage, forshadowing the murder and mayhem that will come. The duologue between Jason and Medea is called the agon, an intense argument between powerful antagonists.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The End of the Golden Age of Athens

The year Euripides produced Medea, the devastating Peloponnesian War (431-404 B. C.) began. The tensions which precipitated this conflict between Athens and its neighbors on the Peloponnesian peninsula, primarily the cities of Sparta and Corinth certainly existed before the first recorded battle and possibly led Euripides to set his play in Corinth. Thucydides (c.460-400 B.C.) claims that the true cause of the war was Athen’s rise to greatness, which made Spartans fearful. However, trade rivalry with Corinth may also have fueled the conflict. At any rate the Peloponnesian War was to last the next thirty years, with great losses suffered by both winners and losers. Ultimately, after a victory at Aegospotami, Sparta forced Athens—decimated in money and ships, emotionally enervated, and without allies—to submit to its terms. The Golden Age of Athens had come to an end. Herodotus (480-425 B.C.), writing during the early years of the war, hints that Athens had become a tyrant city, and Thucydides records its further corruption as the war progressed. Euripides’s life spanned the peaceful years before the Peloponnesian War through the imminent end, although he died before Athens’s final defeat. By the time of his death, Euripides had fled his beloved city to take refuge in calmer Macedonia. The sense of uncertainty and adversity that pervade Euripidean tragedy stem at least partially from the anguished, extended demise of the greatness that was Athens.

Women and Marriage in Ancient Greek Culture

Medea’s complaint that Jason married another might have carried less weight had Jason followed the conventional method of divorce in Athens. Although women could only under exceptional conditions obtain a divorce, any Athenian man could rid himself of a wife simply by publicly renouncing his marriage. Marriages were arranged by the parents with no input from the daughter; thus Medea’s flight with Jason was scandalous impertinence. The daughter came with a dowry, a substantial one if the family was wealthy. Once married, the woman served her husband by caring for the children and slaves, who legally belonged to her husband. Medea accurately describes the conditions of married life for women in lines 231-251. Athenian women never experienced independence during their lives. They received no education, lived in separate quarters from their husbands, and seldom went out. The ideal woman was “spoken of as little as possible among men, whether for good or for ill” according to the historian Thucydides (c. 460-400 B.C.). Athenian law forbade Athenian men to marry any but Athenian women, but it was not uncommon for Athenian men to keep foreign concubines, who often had more education than their Athenian rivals. However, the children of these unions were not official citizens of Athens, just as the children of Jason and Medea would not be official citizens of Corinth, while Creusa’s offspring by Jason would enjoy the full benefits of Corinthian citizenship.

Greek Theater

Greek theater evolved from rituals in honor of Dionysus. Three playwrights would each present three tragedies and one satyr play that burlesqued one of the tragedies. To be invited to produce a tetralogy was a significant honor; to win the coveted prize of the festival was a cherished one. Although the dramas belonged to a religious festival, the audience was by no means solemn. In Euripides’s time, Dionysus was still carried into the theater in procession and was revered as the god of wine, who inspires music and poetry. It was his festival, conducted in March over a three-day period, that hosted the competition in which Medea was performed, the first play of the conventional tetralogy.

Euripides’s other two tragedies and satyr play have been lost. His tetralogy containing Medea placed last in the competition.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

5th century B.C.: In Greece, humans are considered part of the vast web of life; what was important about any individual is the way in which he or she is like all others and connected to them through society. Thus art, philosophy, and religion sought to explain and represent the whole order of things and not the individual within that order, with fate ultimately in control of human events.
Today: Humans are seen as unique individuals and contemporary art, philosophy, and religion conform to a world view in which the individual is central—and responsible.
5th century B.C.: Women in Ancient Greece essentially lived in a separate society from their husbands and fathers, and they held few rights. Women kept quarters and ate apart from men; they seldom went out and never walked in public without a male escort. They did not own property or money, did not choose their own husbands, did not receive an education, and could only terminate a marriage under extreme conditions.
Today: Women have equal rights to men and, in most fields, equal opportunities in the workplace.
5th century B.C.: Thousands of Greek city-states (polis in Greek) practiced a wide range of different governing systems during this period of fertile political experimentation. In Athens, a form of radical democracy promised equality among Athenian citizens (meaning adult males born of two Athenian parents); these citizens participated freely in the governing of the city and ardently defended the city’s political system. The philosopher Aristotle called Athenian democracy “a common life for a noble end.”
Today: the very different form of democracy that exists today in many developed nations has little in common with Athenian democracy, for the simple reason that modern democracies serve larger and more diverse populations and extend their ideals to all.
5th century B.C.: Greek tragic theater was produced in March for the ritual celebration of Dionysus, the god of wine. Everyone in the city attended the festival and the overall mood was festive—but also serious—this was a religious festival and the outcome of the competition was a matter of civic pride. It took place in the heart of the city at the altar of Dionysus and was at the center of Greek culture as well.
Today: The Modern theater no longer has ties to religion, although dramas for religious rituals are produced in some organized religions for important holidays. In the public theater, the sense of solemn ritual as experienced by the Athenians has no counterpart today. Theater is a form of entertainment and diversion that holds a rather peripheral status in today’s societies.

The center of the theater, or orchestra (literally, “dancing-place”) in which Euripides’s plays were produced consisted of a circle sixty feet in diameter, with an altar to Dionysus at its center. On the South side, a stage building served as backdrop (scene or “skene”) and as a place for players to make their entrances and exits. A crane provided the means for gods to drop in from the heavens for the deus ex machina (literally, “god from a machine”). In a horseshoe around the other sides ranged rows of stone seats fitted into a natural hill slope. Because of the bowl-shaped site, acoustics were excellent for the 14,000 or so spectators the theater would accommodate. Unlike modern theatre, Greek dramatic presentations were more like readings. Different characters were represented by masks that the actors would wear. Usually only a handful of actors would enact a play, with one actor often performing multiple roles (or wearing multiple masks). Another difference from modern dramatic performance is the manner in which the actors read their lines. Where contemporary actors emote or “act out” their parts, their Greek counterparts would most often impassively read their lines.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

When Euripides’s Medea, along with three other tragedies and a satyr play (a tetralogy), were presented at the annual March festival of Dionysus, Euripides did not win the coveted prize; in fact, his tetralogy came in last of the three tetralogies performed that day. This initial reaction, however, has not affected Medea’s reputation over the centuries. Euripides’s contemporaries did not consider him a master tragedian, and he won only four prizes during his lifetime, although his elder, Sophocles, regarded him as a master playwright and ordered that the participants in the next Dionysian festival after Euripides’s death dress in mourning out of respect for him.

A tendency to revive fifth-century plays during the fourth century led to a revised judgment of Euripides. His reputation grew significantly during this period, so much so that Aristophanes (448-380 B.C.) dedicated three plays to ridiculing his style. This is not to suggest that Aristophanes admired Euripides—far from it. But burlesque presumes an audience familiar with the original; Athenian audiences must have known enough about Euripides to make Aristophanes’s jibes recognizable. Euripides was considered a fine poet with a misguided message. As Philip Vellacott, one of his many recent translators, explained in Ironic Drama: A Study of Euripides’s Method and Meaning: “As a poet he was revered; in his function as a teacher of citizens’ he was misunderstood.”

During the century following Euripides’s death, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) called Euripides “with all his faults the most tragic of the poets” and used four of his works to illustrate various concepts of tragedy in his Poetics. When Greek culture fell into decline, Euripides’s fame went to Alexandria, and then on to Rome and the Byzantine culture. Plutarch (c.46-120 A.D.) tells three historical anecdotes of escapes made good because of an ability to recite Euripidean poetry, suggesting that Euripides’s reputation, at least as a poet, persisted in Greece as well.

Euripides was the youngest of the three Greek tragedians (along with Aeschylus and Sophocles) whose plays were required reading for the classical education valued during the Renaissance and Romantic periods, among others. Scholarly writings of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance cite Euripides more often that his contemporaries: Italian poet Dante Alighieri mentions him in his masterwork the Divine Comedy and seventeenth-century English poet Ben Jonson used one of his plays as a model. Also in the seventeenth century, Jean Racine adapted many of his plays and considered Euripides his master. Poet John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, was also an admirer.

The eighteenth century lost interest in Euripides because his work was too innovative for the classical revival then in progress. Then German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (whose work would greatly influence European literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), paid him the ultimate Romantic period compliment by calling his work “sublime.” It was of Euripides that Goethe wrote his oft-adapted expression: “Have all the nations of the world since his time produced one dramatist who was worthy to hand him his slippers?” In the nineteenth century, English poet Robert Browning make conspicuous allusions to his plays, and Euripides was once again central to a good, classical education. Gilbert Murray’s translation in the early twentieth century once again revived interest in him.

The twentieth century literary criticism holds a reserved judgment about Euripides. Modern critics appreciate his championing of the underdog—slaves, women, the elderly, and children—and his lampooning of religious and secular hypocrisy. But he remains a shadowy figure whose actual political and religious beliefs have been lost. Lacking sufficient evidence to say with certainty how his philosophy manifested itself in his life, many critics have turned to focusing on his dramatic technique and structure. In this context Euripides does not quite measure up to Sophocles or Aeschylus—the poetry of Medea does not reach the heights of beauty that Sophocles achieved in Antigone. Euripides’s forte is irony, and he finds a ready audience in the modern period, as Vellacott explains: “Our present generation responds readily to irony, revels in it; therefore we should have the better chance of understanding Euripides.” Literary criticism devoted to his play, Medea appears only occasionally nowadays. Writers and artists ranging in cultural background continue to reinterpret Euripides’s version of Medea, but they never overshadow Euripides’s.

CRITICISM

Carole L. Hamilton

In this essay Hamilton contrasts modern audience reaction to Euripides’s play with fifth-century Greek perceptions of the drama.

Euripides’s psychologically realistic portrayal of Medea, who indulges in an excessive form of revenge-the murder of her own children. This is a fascinating study of motivation, yet it is a topic safely distant to modern audiences. The people and society in Medea are part of ancient history. Today’s audiences can consider and understand Medea’s motivation while simultaneously dismissing it as both a work of fiction and as part of a past culture. However, to Euripides’s fifth-century Athenian audience, Medea’s act would, under the circumstances, make perfect sense. These Athenians, congregated in the temple of Dionysus to celebrate an annual ritual of dramatic performances, would give no more than a moment’s thought to Medea’s motivations. Instead, the significance of Medea’s act would lie in the consequences to her society and in the larger philosophical question “is revenge effective?” The fifth-century Greeks would not see Medea as an isolated fictional character but as part of a grander scheme that was part of their everyday lives. According to historian Edith Hamilton in The Greek Way,“Greeks always saw things as parts of a whole.” Medea’s story was not an isolated act of uncontrolled passion but a reminder that things are not always what they seem and that contact with someone tainted with evil represents danger to the whole society.

A fifth-century Greek citizen was only important insofar as his or her connection to society. The ancient Greeks thought of the individual not as a unique entity but as a component in the larger organism of society. The Greek view of the individual differed from the modern view, as Hamilton wrote: “To the Greeks [character] was a man’s share in qualities all men partake of; it united each one to the rest. We are interested in people’s special characteristics, the things in this or that person which are different from the general. The Greeks, on the contrary, thought what was important in a man were precisely the qualities he shared with all mankind.” Thus the Athenian audience would consider Medea’s resemblance to themselves, her place in society, and her effect upon it. Furthermore, the citizen wholly belonged to the city, sharing in the city’s well-being, beliefs, and laws. Religion especially was, according to E. R. Dodds in The Greeks and the Irrational, a “collective responsibility.” If one person committed an act of sacrilege, the gods might punish the whole city. Therefore, each citizen had a moral obligation and civic duty to obey the religious customs and honor its gods. To do otherwise was dangerous: during the final thirty years of the fifth century B.C., intellectuals whose ideas threatened tradition were successfully prosecuted on the grounds of disbelieving in the gods. At the same time, there was no separation between religion, law, and customs—rites, prayers, recipes, and legislature peacefully coexisted. All were civic obligations to which the citizens submitted willingly. “The citizen was subordinate in everything, and without any reserve, to the city; he belonged to it body and soul,” wrote Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges in The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.

Rather than feeling bound by confines of a restrictive society, the ancient Greeks valued their membership in a society; it was critical to them. That is why Jason’s comment, that Medea had found favor among her new neighbors, was not as trivial as it sounds to the modern ear, and why Medea shows so much dismay at having nowhere to go after Creon banishes her. The fact that Medea left her own city to run off with Jason was, to ancient Greek audiences, evidence of a flaw in Medea’s ability to remain connected to her society. The chorus’ reminder, “there is no sorrow above the loss of a native land,” would only confirm what the audience already knew.

Beyond the perimeter of the city or community, humans were connected in other ways. The emotions and drives that lie behind actions and feelings were not simply common sensations but palpable forces that flowed through all humankind. Fate both surrounded the individual and society and also ran through them, moving individuals to act in a prescribed manner. The impulses which tempted humans to misdeeds were considered outside of human control, and “endowed with a life and energy of their own,” according to Dodds. Epidemics and famines were “demons” just as were urges toward sinful acts. Fate was fused with the will of the gods; Dodds quoted Pindar, who put it this way: “the great purpose of Zeus directs the daemon [demon] of the men he loves.” Medea realizes, “The gods and I, I in a kind of madness, have contrived all this.” Against these forces, humans were helpless to defend themselves; they would be foolish to defy

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Euripides’s Phaedra and Jean Racine’s seventeenth-century version of it, Phedre, portray a woman who immorally falls in love with her step-son and in retaliation against his rebuff claims that he tried to dishonor her. The works examine similar moral ground to that examined in Medea.
Toni Morrison’s moving novel Beloved (1987) revolves around a historical incident of infanticide performed by a slave mother who is moved to this tragic act by the horrors of slavery—she murders her child to remove it from the life of toil, shame, and pain that she has led. Her act haunts characters through several generations of her family.
In Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c. 1605) Lady Macbeth pushes her husband to commit murder and then goes mad from the guilty thoughts that plague her. Indirectly, her ambition is responsible for a series of murders, including some innocent children, that Macbeth commissions in his vain efforts to obscure their crime.
George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) centers on the relationship between Adam Bede and Hetty Sorrel, who becomes pregnant by a local nobleman and abandons her baby to die.
The Lion in Winter, a 1968 film directed by Anthony Harvey and starring Katherine Hepburn as the powerful Eleanor of Acquitaine, concerns the tense interplay between her and Henry II as he chooses between her and his lover’s brother for a successor to the throne. Eleanor and Henry’s three sons side with her in rebelling against the unfaithful king.

the gods. The ancient Greeks had no concept of “will” in the sense of “freedom of choice” but rather felt at the mercy of sensations moving through them. Passions could overwhelm mem and obscure their ability to make rational decisions. These passions might come from the gods, from inherited guilt, or from hubris—excessive arrogance. When Medea argues with herself, she confronts her demon, the irrational force demanding the deaths of her two sons. She acknowledges the wickedness of this act but finds no power to escape the emotions that will force her to act: “Stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury, fury that brings upon mortals the greatest of evils.” The chorus acknowledges Medea’s powerlessness to free herself from the grip of such a force: “Medea, a god has thrown suffering upon you in waves of despair.” Fate possesses Medea, and it becomes Medea’s fate to murder her own children. The concept of Medea having a “motive” or “choosing” to kill her sons would not have made sense to Euripides’s audience.

The Greek rationalists Aristotle and Plato argued that humans did not have to fall prey to the demons of passion but could, with training and resolution, endeavor to maintain their rationality in the face of these demons. Euripides pits the rationalists against the fatalists in Medea in the form of the chorus who consistently represent the voice of quiet rationalism. The Corinthian women sympathize with Medea’s grief and outrage, but they counsel moderation in seeking revenge:“I both wish to help you and support the normal ways of mankind, and tell you not to do this thing.” However, their counsel proves impotent in the face of the forces driving Medea. She tells them that no compromise is possible and turns her attention to calling Jason back. Euripides’s audience would have pondered the question whether Medea had the capacity for rational behavior under the circumstances of Jason’s betrayal and Creon’s decree of banishment. Yet, the question would not have been cast in terms of the conflict between Medea and Jason, two individuals, but of the conflict within Medea, between her rational mind and the fates driving her.

To complicate matters, the Greeks considered guilt a kind of contamination that spread through contact or through inheritance. The Corinthians might indeed have killed Medea’s children to eliminate the danger they represented. Although innocent in their youth, Medea’s offspring would surely manifest her evilness when they grew up because they were polluted through inheritance. All of Medea’s descendants would carry her curse. In a way, her murdering the children and ending her lineage saves Corinth the trouble of either killing them or suffering the consequences of harboring them, for any contact with them was potentially dangerous. The city that hosted them would bring down upon itself the wrath of the gods. Medea’s killing the children while they are still innocent, then, serves as a kind of sacrificial act that purifies the city of Corinth.

The chorus recognizes that Medea, already banished from Corinth, will make herself an outcast by committing her horrendous crime. The women tell Medea that she “is not pure with the rest” and ask her what city could accept a woman who murdered of her own children. The pollution of guilt can result from contact as well as inheritance. Corinth may unwittingly have brought disaster upon itself for welcoming Medea into their society in the first place, falling prey to her charm in spite of knowing that she had abandoned her family and city and had killed her own brother to facilitate Jason’s escape. Or perhaps Jason brought on the disaster by his ambition to marry the King’s daughter and secure a place in Corinthian society; his hubris put his adopted city into danger. Either or both of these contaminating factors led to the disaster of Medea murdering the King and Princess of Corinth. Jason and Medea sinned against each other, but they also sinned against the city of Corinth—their sin was that of profane contact. Jason and Medea are foreigners who entered the city and covertly brought pollution in their wake.

The year that Euripides presented his play, the devastating Peloponnesian War was being waged. This was the first major war the Greeks had fought against people of their own ethnic background, introducing a new difficulty in identifying the enemy. Medea contains a sub-theme concerning the danger of mistaken appearances. When Medea’s sons deliver her gifts to Creon’s daughter, she at first is irritated by their presence—she mistakenly takes them for enemies. Ironically, her first reaction was the more accurate one. But seeing the bright gifts, she welcomes them and completely accepts the pretext of their visit, as Medea hoped she would. The young princess is tricked by appearances, just as were the Trojans when the Greeks presented a “gift” horse that secretly harbored Odysseus and his best warriors. That night the Greek warriors burst out of the horse’s belly and slaughtered the sleeping Trojans. Likewise, the poison in Medea’s gifts takes effect the moment Jason’s new wife innocently dons the robe and crown. Euripides plays on the anxieties of his audience over their ability to recognize enemies and to know when and when not to trust others. Effectively, the King’s daughter was polluted through unknown and dangerous contact with Medea via poisoned gifts. Nor does the cycle end with the young princess. Creon becomes enmeshed in his daughter’s poisoned embrace and dies with her, despite his efforts to disentangle himself. This gruesome detail, related by the messenger in almost lyrical prose, demonstrates how even the desire for contact with a known loved one can bring about disaster.

Creon’s fate most aptly fulfills the closing lines of the chorus: “What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not god contrives.” This is the Euripidean version of “expect the unexpected,” a stock phrase with which a number of his plays abruptly end. Euripides suggests that ironically, passion—the same force that drives humans to desire contact with others—has the capacity to destroy. Jason is guilty of misdirected passion on several counts. He initially brought his fate upon himself by marrying a foreign wife, a known sorceress, and then betraying her. He also allowed his ambitious desire for connection with Corinthian society to turn him away from a faithful, loving wife and their two sons. Medea’s culpability is thus compromised by Jason’s. Medea herself has a passionate, reckless nature, which makes her a perfect medium for the expression of the forces of passion orchestrated by the gods. Whether Medea or the gods are to blame for the infanticide she commits, her act, as far as Euripides’s Athenian audience would have been concerned, would generate a civic disaster. She became a danger for Corinth, and banishing her made her all the more dangerous. Euripides’s deeply pessimistic and fatalistic play would have been disturbing to his Athenian audience; perhaps that is why his tetralogy-which include Medea—failed to win the festival prize.

Source: Carole L. Hamilton, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale, 1997.

D. J. Conacher

In the following excerpt, Conacher provides an in-depth analysis of the Medea, outlining eachportion of the drama, explaining its structure, and exploring the characters and their motivations.

The intense centripetal focus of this tragedy begins in the prologue. Its three parts, monologue, dialogue and a frightened anapaestic series punctuated by Medea’s off-stage cries, produce their complementary effects in an ascending scale of excitement. The first speaker is the Nurse, and so our earliest impression of Medea comes through an intimate and sympathetic witness. Her news, that Jason has deserted Medea for the daughter of King Creon, is enclosed by accounts of the past services of Medea to Jason and to the city which has sheltered him, and, hideous as these services have been, they are presented in the light of Medea’s passionate devotion to her husband. The description of Medea’s mood suggests a savage, wounded animal and in the Nurse’s apprehension of some monstrous deed (perhaps against the children, whose sight Medea now abhors) we get our first warning, from the one who knows her best, of what Medea can become, when wronged.

Enter the Tutor, leading the children of Medea. As the bearer of fresh news—that Creon is about to exile Medea—and more particularly as the guardian of the children, he increases the sense of apprehension and makes it more specific. The Nurse redoubles her worried chatter:

O keep the children from her . . . for even now I saw her glaring at them like an angry bull. . . . She’ll not leave this fit, too well I know it, till she has charged at someone. May it be enemies, not friends, she chooses!

Two savage cries, off-stage, provide the final impact of this prologue: Medea screams her wrongs and curses husband, children, “all the house.” The brief intensity of these cries, contrasted with the Nurse’s long-winded moralizing, brings the prologue to a chilling climax. The series of emotions traversed—sympathy, apprehension, horror—anticipates in a few rapid strokes the responses which, in the same sequence, the coming action will evoke.

This sinister blend of effects is repeated, in choral terms, in the parodos, where the brief songs expressing sympathy and fear are harshly punctuated by Medea’s off-stage cries. The direction of this tragedy requires that the Chorus should begin by feeling sympathy for Medea. Thus, singing as women rather than as Corinthians, they remind us that it was Jason’s vows, by which Medea now curses him, which first induced her to take her ill-starred voyage to Greece.

The contrast between the fury of Medea’s initial cries and the controlled and calculated rhetoric of her opening address to the Corinthian women has already been compared with the presentation of Phaedra in the Hippolytus. The same dramatic purpose is served in both cases: that of showing in striking contrast the most elemental and the most civilized or even sophisticated aspects of the same personality. What difference there is between the two contrasts is due to the difference between the two women. Even in hysteria, Phaedra seeks to cloak her naked passion (this impulse is, indeed, the cause of her hysteria); later, in her discourse on human frailty (her own included) one feels that she expresses her own character more truthfully than does Medea in her official bid for sympathy. Freudians, no doubt, could express these same distinctions more accurately in terms of the ego, the super ego and the id.

Medea’s purpose in her opening speech is, purely and simply, to win the Chorus of female citizens to her side. As a piece of rhetoric (this time needing no apology for dramatic relevance) the speech is one of the poet’s finest passages. It begins on a note of specious but ingratiating familiarity, moves on to the briefest possible indication (“I’m finished, good women, my husband has betrayed me!”) of the speaker’s plight, and then concentrates with a wealth of poignantly familiar detail on “woman’s lot,” a trouble which the Chorus shares. “We women are a timid lot. . . but wronged in marriage, there’s none more murderous!” All Medea has asked is silent co-operation. By the end of her speech, the Chorus, to a woman regards her vengeance as its own.

The poet’s purpose in this passage is, perhaps, more complex than Medea’s, though it has much in common with it: we, too, like the Chorus, are destined to begin in pity then to move through fear to horrified revulsion. But to see the larger dramatic purpose of the speech we must consider it in relation to the whole presentation of Jason’s barbarian wife.

Prior to this speech, Medea is known to us only as the terrifying witch whom the dramatist has received from the tradition; even if we have no direct knowledge of that tradition, both deeds and character of that Medea have been emphatically made known to us in the opening portions of the play. Now, for the first time, we are introduced to another Medea: a woman and a foreigner who can move the Greeks of the Chorus, and perhaps of the audience, with that disciplined compound of passion and reason which the Greeks called rhetoric. Despite her outlandish background, this Medea manages to strike a common chord in people who (as Jason so tactfully reminds her later) regarded their own society as a privilege which a barbarian must enjoy on sufferance. Thus it is that the dramatist begins, at least, to endow his folk-tale witch with something of the stature which a tragic heroine requires: here and in subsequent encounters with Creon, with Jason and with Aegeus, the many aspects of Medea’s powerful personality—eloquent and cunning, wise and passionate by turns—are gradually revealed.

In facing Creon, Medea must play the fawning hypocrite to win at least a day’s reprieve from exile. With nice irony, the dramatist endows her with the insight and skill to twist what should most tell against her—her reputation as “a wise one” and Creon’s protective love for his own daughter—to serve her purpose. The exchange with Creon has other qualities as well. Medea’s appeal “for her children’s sake” to Creon’s paternal instincts keeps the “children theme” before our minds, while the passage in which Medea allays Creon’s fears about her special powers allows Euripides a sly, contemporary aside on the slander which clever people must suffer in society.

While something of Medea’s power appears even in the scene with Creon, the full force of her personality is necessarily muted by the situation. This briefly piano effect is more than redressed by her next and most dramatic encounter. Here Medea’s greatest advantage is achieved at the expense of, and in contrast to, the traditionally “epic” figure of Jason, for the hero of the good ship Argo cuts a very sorry figure in her presence. Generosity, absolute loyalties, action and feeling on the grand scale, are the hallmarks of the heroic character. Jason’s quibbling rationalization of his actions Medea answers with the single word . . . (“O utter shameless brazenness!”), as she launches into an impassioned account of all that she has done for him. Consistently, Jason plays the sophist to a heroic Medea: for past favours, he has really Cypris to thank, not her; besides, for a barbarian, life and fame among the Greeks is more than just requital of her service. Previously, horror may have been our main reaction to Medea’s deeds for Jason. Now, confronted by Jason’s niggling sums in settling the accounts of love, we are impressed by the wild generosity of passion which made them possible.

“TO GRASP THE NATURE OF THIS STRUGGLE, WE MUST SEE THE GOOD IN MEDEA BEFORE WE SEE HERAT HER WORST”

The effect of the Aegeus scene on the “public image” of Medea seems often to have been missed by the critics, distracted, no doubt, by arguments concerning its allegedly “episodic” nature. Surely we must be impressed by Aegeus’ respect for Medea’s advice and the readiness with which he confides in her. Nor does he speak in the tone which one reserves for one’s witch-doctor: rather, they converse on terms of mutual regard—witness the warmth of their greetings and the exchange of confidence and sympathy with one another’s plight. It should be noted, too, that Medea’s utterances acquire a sort of brisk professionalism, completely different in tone from other speeches in the play, as soon as Aegeus begins his consultation; this is our only actual view in the play of Medea as a specialist, a professional “wise woman.” And the readiness with which Aegeus accepts Medea’s offer to put an end to his childlessness in return for future sanctuary at Athens shows a confidence in her powers at least equal to that which he feels in Apollo’s oracle or in the wise and pious Pittheus of Trozen. In general, this treatment from the King of Athens does as much as anything to establish Medea in our minds as a “personage” not to be disposed of as a mere gypsy baggage from barbarian lands.

The Aegeus episode is, of course, important for other reasons as well; it heralds, as we shall see, a turning-point in Medea’s career of vengeance and in the sympathy which the Chorus has hitherto afforded her.

In her encounters with Creon and Aegeus, Medea has assumed soft-spoken roles which circumstances have forced upon her. After both these encounters, the essential single-minded Medea reappears in impassioned outbursts alone with the Chorus. (“Do you think,” she reassures the Chorus. . ., about her attitude to Creon, “that I’d have ever fawned on that one, if I’d not been weaving wiles to serve my ends?”) There is, however, a terrible difference in the content of these two speeches, and this gulf is marked by the sharp contrast in tone between the earlier and later choral lyrics of the play. In the first of these speeches, Medea shows, it is true, a sinister delight in pondering the different routes—poison or the knife—by which her enemies may be despatched, but however much her oath “by Hecate, the sharer of my hearth” may chill us, it is still her enemies she speaks of killing.

In the lyric (almost “a song for feminists”) which follows this speech, the Chorus is still full of sympathy for Medea. As often in Euripides, the first strophe and antistrophe generalize on the situation (here, “the injustice done to women”) while the second strophic pair applies the theme directly to the tragic sufferer:

Now rivers flow upstream and the established course of justice is reversed—for now ‘tis men who are unjust and laugh at oaths. . . .
Through the ages, man-made songs show women faithless, but if we women had the gift of song, we’d sing a different tune. . . . (paraphrase)
So with you, Medea. Love brought you across the seas to Greece. But now, abandoned (for no longer do Greeks reverence marriage oaths) you have no refuge, no paternal home, as a royal rival destroys your marriage bed. (paraphrase)

The chorus which follows the encounter with Jason is not, however, quite as single-minded in its championship of women and Medea. The first strophe, praising moderate love, decries that excessive passion which ruins judgment and virtue; the answering antistrophe, which praises self-control (sophrosyne), decries the adulterous love which causes strife. Thus, in the generalizing part of this lyric, the Chorus glances at the faults of both Medea and Jason in turn. In the second half, however, nothing distracts attention from sympathy for the deserted and homeless foreigner.

The decisive change in the dramatic action and in the attitude of the Chorus occurs after the scene with Aegeus, for it is then that Medea announces the awful means by which she plans to take vengeance on her husband. The excellence of the play’s structure is well illustrated by the placing of this crisis and by the kinds of effect which precede and follow it. The gradual revelation of Medea’s personality has now been completed, save for one essential feature which is to give the agon its tragic meaning. The “children theme,” so essential to this meaning, has been kept constantly before our minds: in the frightened premonitions of the Nurse and in Medea’s own off-stage curses; in Medea’s exploitation of Creon’s paternal instincts, and, ironically enough, in Jason’s own claim that he is acting for his family’s sake: “For what need have you of children?” he asks Medea. The Aegeus episode itself is, of course, vital both to this theme and to the mechanics of the plot. Aegeus’ own royal trouble, childlessness, and the lengths to which he goes to cure it, is our most forcible reminder of a king’s essential need of sons. Again, in promising the outcast sanctuary in Athens, Aegeus unwittingly removes the only barrier to Medea’s plans and her last reticence in revealing them to the Chorus.

Medea’s three addresses to the Chorus follow an ascending scale in keeping with the gradually increasing impetus in plot and theme. In the first and most rhetorical of these, Medea’s passion is rigorously subordinated to her immediate purpose of winning the Chorus to her side. The second speech with its curse by Hecate and its pondering of the various means of murder, is both more savage and more sinister, but it tells us little of Medea’s actual intentions. Only after the scene with Aegeus does she shout for all to hear the full horror of the vengeance which she plans.

One of the most shocking effects of this speech comes from the lack of horror which Medea displays herself. The plan to send her children to the princess bearing poisoned robes is told with hideous matter-of-factness, and only an occasional word or phrase suggests any hesitation at the awful plan of slaying her children for the sake of vengeance on their father. All this suggests that the hints given in the prologue told the truth, that Medea has from the start been determined on this course of action. The main emphasis of the speech is that laughter from one’s enemies is not to be endured and the cry, “grievous to my enemies and kindly to my friends” serves as a grim reminder of the accuracy of the Nurse’s description (at v. 38) of Medea’s spirit.

It is in the ode immediately following these dreadful revelations that the Chorus begins to withdraw its allegiance from Medea. The first strophe and antistrophe deal, in highly poetic terms, with the purity and beauty of Athens. Euripides may well have enjoyed pleasing his fellow citizens and himself with such idealized pictures of his city, but here he does not do so at the expense of the dramatic situation. The point of the description appears in the second strophic pair: “How,” asks the Chorus, “will such a city ever welcome you, Medea, a child-murderer polluting all you meet?” Now the respect and chivalrous treatment which Medea had won from the King of Athens has been one of the most impressive features of her earlier presentation; the immediate effect of that treatment, however, has been to confirm Medea in her secret and terrible decision. Thus to dwell as the Chorus does on the hideous uncongeniality between Medea the child-murderer and the pure and serene haven which she has chosen in an effective way of expressing the self-destruction which her plans involve. The terms in which Athens is described are admirably suited to this purpose: it is the physical serenity of the place which is stressed, for this is the aspect which is particularly vulnerable to the pollution with which Medea threatens it. Thus, Athens is “the sacred, unplundered land—where golden Harmonia produced the Muses nine”; the land whose children “ever culling illustrious wisdom, stride spendidly under skies of glorious brightness.” What sharper contrast to the black deeds of Medea could we find than all this bright serenity? Even Cypris, so dread a goddess in Medea’s case, “breathes moderate, pleasure-wafting breezes on this land.”

The actual execution of Medea’s plot against the Princess needs little comment. It provides, of course, one of the most exciting and theatrical of the playwright’s intrigues and suggests, perhaps, at least one reason why the Medea, of all Greek drama, has survived most successfully as a play which is still presented on the stage. The gulling of the pompous Jason, unaware as ever of his wife’s true nature; the contrast between the children’s innocence and the glittering fatality of the gifts they bear; the suspense, heightened by the vivid anticipations of the Chorus, as to whether the Princess will yield to the “heavenly charm” of these adornments; the gruesome account, in the messenger’s speech, of the switch from delight to anguish, then all the gory details of the deaths themselves: all this provides many opportunities (and none is missed) for melodrama and irony of the more obvious sort. Such effects are legitimate enough in themselves, particularly in view of the sort of creature which Medea is to become before the last scene is ended; nevertheless, a tendency to overplay this aspect of the drama, from the second scene with Jason to the murder of the children, has sometimes obscured certain more subtly tragic effects with which it is combined. Thus far the dramatist has presented a Medea who combines the elemental passion of the folk-tale witch with certain qualities of mind, emotion and personality which let her tower above the several royal and (conventionally) heroic characters who appear beside her on the stage. Now, in her last speech to the Chorus this human and potentially tragic Medea vanishes: instead we hear an embodiment of the alastor (the avenging spirit from Hades) coldly announcing child-murder as a necessary part of her revenge. If this is the Medea which we are to watch without relief to the play’s end, then both the Chorus and ourselves have been the dupes, both of the “heroine” and of the dramatist, for yielding our sympathy and interest. Fortunately, however, it is the air of cold inflexibility which is false: a cloak of desperate resolution hiding the maternal anguish as well as a device by which the dramatist may, in the end, present that anguish more effectively.

The agony of Medea begins quietly and unexpectedly in the scene with Jason. The “reconciliation speech,” the apology to Jason, Medea accomplishes with all her usual aplomb. The first onset of grief suddenly occurs at the entry of the children, summoned to heal the reconciliation, when Jason thus addresses them: “Only grow up! Your father and whatever gods are kindly will assure the rest! Soon may I see you glorying in the strength of youth. . . .” In each instance, the effect of Medea’s tears is so veiled by her ambiguous explanations, so muted by her resourceful ironies, that some critics have taken the tears themselves as a calculated device for securing Jason’s sympathy. But Medea’s dissimulation only shows us the measure of her will in masking, with characteristic ingenuity, the anguish which, for a moment, overcomes her. So viewed, this scene anticipates, in miniature, the major struggle to come.

The alternation of the human and the fiendish Medea in the following scenes corresponds to the curious interweaving of the tragic and the macabre elements in the double catastrophe. The chorus which follows the despatch of the children with the gifts heralds both deeds of violence: the first strophe and antistrophe anticipate, with sinister vividness, the temptation of the Princess and its fatal results, while the concluding strophic pair expresses grief for the woes of Jason and Medea, respectively, in the coming murder of the children. The report of what has happened at the palace is divided, most remarkably, into two parts. The Tutor’s announcement that the children and their gifts have been accepted is, to his surprise, greeted with sullen gloom by Medea; on the other hand, the Messenger’s announcement in the following episode, of the deaths which the gifts have caused is received with hideous joy. In between these two reports comes the most crucial passage in the play: that agonizing self-debate in which Medea twice revokes and twice confirms her decision to slay her children. After the Messenger Speech, lengthy . . . with all the harrowing details, we are brought with the speed of necessity to the final catastrophe for, Medea argues desperately, if their mother does not kill the children now, some hostile hand may do so. . . the beginning of the speech reminds us of the truth of the matter: the original decision to slay the children was a part, perhaps the major part, of the original plan, before the fatal gifts were sent. Medea utters her final determination with the grim conviction that for her a life of misery must now begin:“Steel your heart for one brief day—then mourn thereafter!”

A final brief and despairing lyric precedes the off-stage murder. It is significant that now the Chorus no longer addresses its pleas to Medea but to the “nature” deities, Earth and Sun (Medea’s grandsire) to restrain this unnatural murderess, this embodiment of a vengeance-driven Erinys, which Medea has become. For Medea herself they have only despairing questions and equally dismal prophecies.

Why are the two deeds of violence, in many ways so different, presented in this interwoven fashion? Partly, no doubt, for the practical reason that the poet does not wish to lose dramatic impetus by having to work up two separate crises. But there are, I think, reasons more significant than this.

From her folk-tale chrysalis, Medea has emerged, in this play, as a human heroine with the power to achieve her ends in a highly civilized social context (as Jason reminds her) against all odds. So far, however, save for a few hints in the second scene with Jason, her passion for vengeance has been tempered by no redeeming emotion: though human, she is not sympathetic (the Chorus sympathizes with her situation rather than with her): we cannot achieve any degree of identification with her. Again, so far there has been no essential conflict in this play. True, Medea, abandoned and alone in a hostile state, has had to bend two kings, a Chorus of Corinthian women and an ambitious husband to her will, but this achievement is only the measure of her greatness: in this play, Medea herself is really the only one capable of resisting Medea. Regarded as a tragic figure, the Medea of the earlier scenes corresponds to a hate-ridden Philoctetes as yet undisturbed by the friendship of Neoptolemus, or to a stubbornly resentful Achilles, untried by the loss of Patroclus.

Medea’s first full statement of her plans (in the last of her three addresses to the Chorus) has shocked us by its coldness. More recently, in the second scene with Jason, we have seen signs that this frozen determination does not represent the whole Medea. Now, when the child-murder suddenly becomes imminent with the success of the first phase of the plan, Medea’s resolution falters for the first time. Thus the great speech at 1019 ff. is essential to the characterization of Medea and to the meaning of the play.

If Medea’s sudden flood of emotion, her passionate regrets for lost maternal joys, should strike us as commonplace, let us remember that that is just its purpose. We are meant, simply, to realize that Medea loves her children as deeply as any woman does. So, too, the sudden effects of the children’s smiles, and of Medea’s lightning switches from “I cannot do it” to “I must,” and back again, far from being bathetic melodrama, are essential to the realistic presentation of the struggle in Medea’s soul. Without this scene, what Medea eventually becomes would indeed smack of melodrama. That monstrous figure attains tragic significance only when we see it as the result of a conflict—of a victory, as Medea herself expresses it—of her all-consuming passion for vengeance over her better counsels. To grasp the nature of this struggle, we must see the good in Medea before we see her at her worst. The plot requires that something of her lethal savagery should appear before the ultimate horror of the child-murder, but had we already seen her gloating over the details of her palace butchery the sympathetic presentation of her own agony would have been impossible. So it is that the first news from the palace, that the children and their gifts have been accepted, is greeted sadly by Medea, and that the horrible sequence to this news is postponed till after the emotional climax at vv. 1019-80. By the time that the second bulletin, showing the first results of Medea’s cruelty, arrives from the palace, Medea’s self-debate concerning her children, and with it the dramatic need for our sympathy, is over; indeed, the wholehearted gloating over the Messenger’s hideous account, contrasting so sharply with her despondent reception of the Tutor and his news, may be meant to illustrate the new Medea, now totally committed to evil, who emerges only after the completion of her interior struggle.

In the concluding passages of the play, after the murder of the children, the monstrous and inhuman aspects of Medea are played up in a variety of ways. The Chorus by its reference to Ino, intimates that no human mother could bear to live after slaying her children and Jason echoes this thought when he cries, “Can you still look upon the sun and earth, after enduring such an impious deed?” And yet Medea lives and flourishes. More significant, perhaps, is Jason’s bitter reference to the unnatural deeds of Medea—deeds from which he took the profit—against her own family in Colchis. During the very human action of this play, little has been made of these dark deeds, save as examples of Medea’s devotion to the ingrate Jason, but now that “Medea the fiend” has triumphed over the human heroine this reminder of the barbarous, magic-working Medea of the folk tale is all too apposite. Jason complains that the Alastor which should pursue Medea for these deeds is pursuing him instead, but we who have witnessed the moral destruction of Medea in the preceding episode are all too well aware that the alastor has not missed its mark. As for the murderess herself, Medea the avenger, in the final scene with Jason, has quite defeated Medea, the tortured mother: “. . . Call me lioness or Scylla, as you will . . . as long as I have reached your vitals. . . .” “My grief is solaced if you cannot mock!”

The “improbable” and inorganic ending of the play—Medea’s departure in the Sun-god’s fiery chariot—is a feature of the play which appears to have irritated Aristotle. (Poetics 1454b 1-2) However, such macabre touches, such departures from the real world of tragedy, if they serve some purpose, are surely permissible when the tragic meaning has already been expressed. That, in this instance, the supernatural intervention is not meant to intrude on the real action of the play has already been shown by the fact that, earlier, the human and the tragic Medea has been concerned with such practical matters as the arrangement for asylum at Athens and the impossibility of escaping with her children from the vengeful Corinthians. (See, for example, lines 1236-41). Thus the only point of interest in the deus-ex-machina ending lies in the symbolic purpose which this device fulfils. This has been variously expressed by critics in accordance with their different views of Euripides’ “Medea theme.” Kitto finds in the device the poet’s answer to the Chorus’s and Jason’s idea that “Sun and Earth, the most elemental things in the Universe, have been outraged by these terrible crimes,” while Lesky and M. P. Cunningham both regard the chariot scene as marking the fundamental, qualitative change which her awful deed has effected in Medea. In terms of the present study, it seems fair to suggest that by this final macabre touch of symbolism, the poet is once again expressing the transformation of a human heroine back to the folk-tale fiend of magic powers.

Source: D. J. Conacher, in his Euripidean Drama: Myth, Theme, and Structure, University of Toronto Press, 1967, pp. 187-98.

Brooks Atkinson

In the following review, which originally appeared in the New York Times on October 21, 1947, Atkinson offers praise for Robinson Jeffers’s adaptation of Euripedes’s Medea. His review illustrates how ancient Greek dramas can be altered slightly or extensively without changing the messages intended by the original authors. Such adaptations can make these dramas more accessible to modern audiences.

As drama critic for the New York Times from 1925 to 1960, Atkinson was one of the most influential reviewers in America.

If Medea does not entirely understand every aspect of her whirling character, she would do well to consult Judith Anderson. For Miss Anderson understands the character more thoroughly than Medea, Euripides or the scholars, and it would be useless now for anyone else to attempt the part. Using a new text by Robinson Jeffers, she set a landmark in the theatre at the National last evening, where she gave a burning performance in a savage part.

Mr. Jeffers’ “free adaptation,” as it is called, spares the supernatural bogeymen of the classical Greek drama and gets on briskly with the terrifying story of a woman obsessed with revenge. His verse is modern; his words are sharp and vivid, and his text does not worship gods that are dead.

Since Miss Anderson is a modern, the Jeffers text suits her perfectly and releases a torrent of acting incomparable for passion and scope. Miss Anderson’s Medea is mad with the fury of a woman of rare stature. She is barbaric by inheritance, but she has heroic strength and vibrant perceptions. Animal-like in her physical reactions, she plots the doom of her enemies with the intelligence of a priestess of black magic—at once obscene and inspired. Between those two poles she fills the evening with fire, horror, rage and character. Although Miss Anderson has left some memorable marks on great women in the theatre, Medea has summoned all her powers as an actress. Now everyone realizes that she has been destined for Medea from the start.

The general performance and the production are all of a piece. As the nurse, Florence Reed is giving an eminent performance that conveys the weariness and apprehensions of a devoted servant who does not quarrel with fate. John Gielgud’s Jason is a lucid, solemn egotist well expressed in terms of the theatre. As Creon, Albert Hecht has the commanding voice and the imperiousness of a working monarch. The chorus of women, which has been refreshingly arranged in Mr. Gielgud’s unhackneyed direction, is well acted by Grace Mills, Kathryn Grill and Leone Wilson. The parts of the two young sons are disarmingly represented in the guileless acting of Gene Lee and Peter Moss. Hugh Franklin as Aegeus and Don McHenry as the Tutor give agreeable performances, innocent of the stuffiness peculiar to most classical productions.

Ben Edwards’ setting of the doorway to a Greek house is no more than pedestrian designing, although Peggy Clark has lighted it dramatically, and Castillo has dressed the characters well. Your correspondent could do very well without the conventional theatrical effects—the lightning and the surf especially, for, unlike the acting, they derive from the old-fashioned theatre of rant and ham.

Out of respect for Miss Anderson’s magnificent acting in this incarnadined drama, they ought to be locked up in the lumber room. For she has freed Medea from all die old traditions as if the character had just been created. Perhaps that is exactly what has happened. Perhaps Medea was never fully created until Miss Anderson breathed immortal fire into it last evening.

Source: Brooks Atkinson, in a review of Medea (1947) in On Stage: Selected Theater Reviews from The New York Times, 1920-1970, edited by Bernard Beckennan and Howard Siegman, Arno Press, 1973, pp. 282-84.

Medea

views updated May 11 2018

Medea

by Euripides

THE LITERARY WORK

A tragic play set in Corinth, Greece, during an unspecified mythological time; first an performed in Athens m 431bce.

SYNOPSIS

A wronged wife exacts a terrible revenge on her husband, who has taken a younger bride.

Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place

The Play in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Play Was Written

For More Information

Euripides was born near Athens, Greece, around 480 bce. Little is known about his early life, although his works show an in-depth education that suggests his family must have been financially comfortable. Also an inscription (recorded by Theophrastus) commemorates the young Euripides’ service as a cupbearer to the guild of dancers who performed at the altar of Apollo, a post that suggests the family was not lacking in prominence. In 455 bce Euripides entered Athens’ dramatic competitions and placed third. He first earned the prize for tragedy in 441 bce, winning only five times in his career (the last occasion, posthumously, for The Bacchae), as opposed to Sophocles’ 18 and Aeschylus’ 13 victories. In 408 Euripides left Athens to visit the court of King Archelaus in Macedon, where he died a year and a half later. A prolific dramatist, Euripides is credited with 92 plays, though fewer than 20 survive in complete form. Medea is often considered one of his masterpieces. About an already legendary figure, the play focuses on a non-Greek female, in part to explore the status and power of women, an issue that would fascinate Euripides throughout his career.

Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place

Medea and Jason—the legend

Like other dramatists of the time, Euripides based his plays on classical myths and legends. His audience would have been familiar with the characters of Medea and Jason, who figured primarily in the story of the Golden Fleece. They would have also encountered Medea from other tales in which she made appearances, but all these stories were episodic. There was no single life story of Medea at the time. In the Golden Fleece legend, Jason, son of the king of Iolcus, a city in Greece, is sent away in secret as a child when his uncle, Pelias, usurps the throne from Jason’s father.

When Jason returns as a young man to claim his birthright, Pelias first insists that his nephew free lolcus from a curse. A generation before, a prince named Phrixus—related to the royal family of Iolcus—fled from his homeland to avoid being sacrificed, riding on the back of a divine ram with a golden fleece. Taking refuge in Colchis, a foreign land in Asia at the eastern end of the Black Sea, Phrixus sacrificed the ram to the supreme god Zeus in thanks. Phrixus then deeded the Golden Fleece to King Aeetes of Colchis, who hung the prize from a tree in a grove consecrated to the war god Ares. A great serpent guarded the treasure day and night. Later, when Phrixus died, he was denied a proper Greek burial; a prophecy from the oracle at Delphi (the god Apollo, who answered human questions there) proclaimed that Phrixus’ ghost would not rest, nor would the land of lolcus prosper, until the Golden Fleece was retrieved from Colchis.

Agreeing to undertake this quest, Jason assembles a crew and sails for Colchis aboard a great ship named the Argo. After a perilous voyage that claims several lives, Jason and the surviving Argonauts reach their destination, where they are welcomed by King Aeetes. Angered by Jason’s re-quest for the Golden Fleece, the king assigns the young man a series of dangerous tasks to perform in exchange for the prize. But Princess Medea, Aeetes’ daughter and granddaughter to Helios (god of the sun), has fallen in love with Jason. A powerful sorceress, she secretly helps him to accomplish all of her father’s tasks and ultimately to secure the Golden Fleece as well by lulling the guardian serpent asleep. Jason and Medea then flee Colchis, Medea slaying her own brother Apsyrtus and casting his limbs before her father to delay the Colchians’ pursuit of the Argo. During their homeward voyage, Jason and Medea marry.

On returning to lolcus, Jason learns that Pelias brought about the deaths of Jason’s parents. Jason asks Medea for help in avenging the murders. Under the pretense of restoring Pelias’ youth, the sorceress tricks Pelias’ own daughters into cutting up their sleeping father’s body and casting the pieces into a cauldron. Too late, Pelias’ daughters realize that they have been deceived.

Banished from lolcus, Jason travels with Medea to the Greek city of Corinth, where they live for many years and have children. The ambitious Jason eventually decides to cast off Medea and make a politically advantageous marriage to a princess of Corinth, who is sometimes called Glauce, some-times Creusa (she is nameless in Euripides’ play). This princess is the daughter of King Creon. Enraged at Jason’s abandonment, Medea sends a poisoned robe and crown to the bride who is consumed by unquenchable flames when she wears them. A fugitive once more, she flees Corinth in a chariot drawn by dragons. Accounts vary as to the fates of Jason and Medea’s children. In one version, King Creon kills all but one of them in retaliation for his daughter’s death, while the lone surviving child flees with Medea. In another version, Medea kills Creon as well as his daughter, and his relatives murder her children in retaliation. In yet another version, Hera, Zeus’ wife, promises immortality to Medea’s children if she will lay them on the sacrificial altar of the goddess’ temple. Medea’s murder of her own sons to wound Jason for his unfaithfulness seems to be Euripides’ unique addition. In any case, he was first to fix this plot development into literary form. Medea herself escapes to Athens, where King Aegeus gives her sanctuary.

Thereafter, Medea appears in several other legends. She is credited with curing the Greek hero Hercules of madness and romantically linked with King Aegeus of Athens, father of Theseus, another Greek hero. Driven out of Athens after trying to poison Theseus, Medea is said to have married an Asian king and eventually achieved immortality. Jason is far less fortunate. Shunned by the gods for breaking faith with Medea, he wanders as a lonely outcast from city to city then perishes ignominiously. The prow from the Argo, beached on the Isthmus of Corinth, falls and crushes his skull while he is resting in the ship’s shadow. In Euripides’ play, Medea taunts him with her foreknowledge of his inglorious demise.

The status of women in fifth-century Athens

Although Medea is ostensibly set in the mythic past, Euripides portrays the characters as if they lived within his own time. Athenians of the fifth century bce could thus identify with his characters’ concerns, such as Medea’s diatribe against the oppression of women: “Surely, of all creatures that have life and will, we women / Are the most wretched” (Euripides, Medea, lines 228-229).

Most of the information that survives on the position of women in Classical antiquity comes from male writers. Moreover, scholars disagree as to how much freedom women were truly permitted and whether their degree of freedom meant women were despised or honored. While literature and the visual arts suggest that women of good family enjoyed a prominent role in society, legal and historical data suggest that women were regarded as perpetual minors, to be protected and guided by their male relations.

Some general understandings have nevertheless been gleaned with respect to women in Classical Greece, especially those of the middle and upper classes: they were not permitted to attend, speak at, or vote in political assemblies; they could not hold office; they were considered unfit to make sensible judgments; and they required a husband, father, or guardian to be their agent in economic transactions. Also, while women might be allowed to leave the house to visit friends and relations or attend weddings and religious festivals, they were barred from attending banquets or even the theater. Women of the poorest classes actually enjoyed more freedom: they could travel to the market to sell produce or livestock. Among the higher classes, slaves probably did the shopping.

Women also had little say about whom they married. Until reaching their mid-teens, girls lived under the guardianship of their male relatives, at which point, a marriage would be arranged for them. The girls’ guardians and prospective husbands saw to all the arrangements, such as the size of a bride’s dowry and the groom’s gifts to her father. Political and economic concerns were paramount, and marriages took place whether or not the bridal couple liked or even knew each other. Overall, the bride tended to be considerably younger than the groom, so that he could make the most of her childbearing years. Just after puberty a young woman would enter into a relationship with a man probably 10 to 15 years older (between 28 and 35) than she.

The bearing of legitimate children, especially sons, was recognized as the primary purpose of marriage because it affected inheritance of property and one’s standing in the community (having sons brought honor and promised continuity of the family line). Given these concerns, women’s sexuality was closely guarded, to ensure, above all, that her children were indeed her husband’s. Women were supposedly wild. They had strong sexual desires and could easily fall victim to powerful emotions unless they were contained; their instincts needed to be suppressed by men or else they would create emotional havoc in society. Children were considered the legal property of their father and would remain with his family in the event of their parents’ marriage ending through death or divorce.

Theoretically, either spouse could seek divorce, though the process was more involved for a wife. The husband could, without providing a reason, send his wife out of his house and back to her father’s. By contrast, the wife needed the intercession of her father or some other male citizen to bring the case before the archon (chief magistrate) if she wanted permission to divorce. During the Classical period there were only three known cases of Athenian women initiating divorce proceedings (Pomeroy, p. 64).

Sexual freedom and Athenian men

While wives were expected to remain chaste and completely faithful to their husbands, men—whether married or single—endured no such restriction. Although bigamy, or marriage to two women, was prohibited, Athenian men could, according to the Greek orator Demosthenes, have three women: a wife, for the procreation of legitimate children; a concubine, for regular sexual relations; and a hetaera (companion) who attended drinking parties with aristocratic men and some-times established an ongoing relationship with them. A man’s relationships with his wife and his concubine held certain similarities. Fidelity from both women was expected and any children resulting from the man’s liaison with the concubine were granted certain rights of legal succession, though not the same as those granted to the legitimate offspring of the wife. It was also not uncommon for the concubine to be received in the conjugal home.

By contrast, the hetaera was paid to provide not only sex but also social companionship. She was often more educated than either a wife or a concubine; she also had the freedom to accompany a man to public places where his two other women were not permitted to go. A man’s relationship with his hetaera could therefore be socially and intellectually as well as sexually gratifying. While the hetaera enjoyed more

WOMEN AND REVENGE IN ANCIENT GREECE

In ancient Athens women had no political rights and required men to act for them in most economic and legal matters. Included were matters involving revenge, which in ancient Athens was expected to be exacted “through the laws rather than violently” (McHardy, p. 102). Women could not speak in court; to attain lawful justice, they had to depend on their private ability to influence men. In truth, the figure of the avenging woman appears repeatedly in Greek tragedy, whether she is inciting her male kin to violent retribution or influencing her sons against their fathers. Euripides takes the issue a step further by having a woman exact her own revenge and by making that woman a non-Greek. Modern scholars note that Athenians were anxious to stamp out the possibility of revenge attacks because they threatened civic order. The scholars also point to accounts that circulated about the vengefulness and deceit of foreign women; in one such tale, an Egyptian woman, Nitocris, avenges her late brother by constructing a death chamber and inviting a host of Egyptian nobles, whom she blames for her brother’s death, to a dinner in the chamber. The existence of such stories suggests “that the Creeks believed powerful, foreign women were not only liable to desire revenge, but were also capable of achieving it by using these methods [of persuasion and treachery]” (McHardy, p, 104). Euripides’ play features a Chorus that sympathizes with Medea’s desire for revenge against the husband who has deserted her—“To punish Jason will be just / I do not wonder that you take such wrongs to heart” (Medea, lines 262-263), Interestingly, Medea herself comes from Colchis, not Athens. To Euripides’ audience, her hideous revenge on Jason—killing his bride, father-in-law, and children—would likely have been considered all too typical of a foreign woman.

freedom than other females, she still enjoyed far less than he. In general, the relative freedom—sexual and otherwise—enjoyed by men is another injustice upon which Medea comments bitterly in the play: “If a man grows tired / Of the company at home, he can go out and find / A cure for tediousness. We wives are forced to look / To one man only” (Medea, lines 245-248).

The Play in Focus

Plot summary

The play opens in Corinth, where Jason, Medea, and their two sons have been living for several years. Medea’s Nurse enters, lamenting that Jason ever came to Medea’s home-land of Colchis. She frets that her Medea has fallen in love with him and committed so many crimes on his behalf. The Nurse reveals that Jason has abandoned her mistress to marry the daughter of King Creon of Corinth. Medea, devastated and enraged, has taken to her bed, but the Nurse fears that she is hatching some terrible plan of revenge against her faithless husband.

Just then, the ancient Tutor of Medea’s sons arrives with more bad news for Medea: fearing trouble, Creon plans to banish Medea and her children from Corinth. The Nurse and Tutor discuss Jason’s selfishness and Medea’s heartbreak; Medea herself is heard offstage, alternately bemoaning and cursing her fate.

Do I not suffer? Am I not wronged? Should I not weep?
Children your mother is hated and you are cursed:
Death take you, with your father, and perish his whole house!
(Medea, lines 112-114)

Sensing her mistress’s dangerous mood, the Nurse warns Medea’s sons to keep their distance from their mother.

A Chorus composed of Corinthian women arrives to inquire after Medea’s troubles. As Medea continues to cry offstage for justice and vengeance, the Chorus expresses sympathy and advises caution, remarking that women have been deserted by their husbands before. At the Chorus’ request, the Nurse enters the house to persuade Medea to speak with her friends.

Medea appears, grief-stricken but otherwise composed. She reveals her misfortunes to the Chorus, relating them to the woes women have endured throughout the ages, such as faithless husbands, the difficulty of gaining a divorce, and the pains of childbirth. Medea maintains that her situation as a foreign exile exacerbates her problems and swears to avenge herself upon Jason. The Leader of the Chorus agrees that Medea has a legitimate grievance against her husband, then observes that Creon is approaching.

Confirming the Tutor’s report, Creon arrives to order Medea and her sons into immediate banishment. He has heard of her threats and curses against his house and, fearing her sorcerous powers, wishes her gone for the safety of his family and his country. Medea denies that she has great powers, proclaims her innocence of, any malicious intent, and pleads to remain in Corinth. Creon is unconvinced by her protestations but agrees to give Medea one day to settle her affairs before her departure. Once Creon exits, Medea tells the Chorus that she means to use that day to carry out her revenge against Creon, Jason, and Jason’s new bride. She decides that poison will be her weapon of choice but wonders where she can find safe asylum after committing her crimes. The Chorus delivers a triumphant ode on how standards are changing. Someday the glory of women, it predicts, will become the focus of song and story. Medea’s determination makes her such a woman.

Jason, resplendent in his royal finery, now enters and informs Medea that her banishment is her own fault. He offers her money to support herself and their sons in exile, but Medea furiously rejects his offer. She upbraids him for his abandonment of her, accusing him of selfishness and ingratitude and recalling the many times she used her powers and wiles for his benefit. Jason argues that it was the goddess of love, Aphrodite—working through Medea’s infatuation—who saved him on his legendary voyage for the Golden Fleece. He furthermore contends that Medea has benefited from throwing in her lot with him, going so far as to insist that he married the princess of Corinth to improve the fortunes of his and Medea’s sons. Now they are connected by marriage to the royal family. Jason considers his actions wholly unselfish and even rebukes Medea for her jealousy and possessiveness. When Medea derides him as a hypocrite and again refuses his financial assistance, Jason departs in anger. The watching Chorus recites an ode on the dangers of unrestrained love and the sorrows of exile.

A solution to one of Medea’s problems arrives in the form of Aegeus, King of Athens, who is passing through Corinth on a journey. Medea reveals her woes to Aegeus and begs for asylum in Athens, offering to use her skills to help him and his childless queen have sons. Unaware of Medea’s vengeful schemes, Aegeus swears to grant her sanctuary in his land, as long as she

MEDEA THE BARBARIAN

Medea’s status as a foreign exile is a recurring theme in Euripides’ play. From the beginning, she is set apart from the other characters, a non-Greek woman in an alien land, who is at times considered a barbarian. Her loneliness and isolation make her a sympathetic figure, more sympathetic in many respects than Jason; nevertheless, her vengeful actions, especially the murder of her own children, only widen the gap between her and her Greek neighbors, who in real life often blamed “barbaric” behavior on a person’s foreignness.

The very concept of the barbarian stemmed from a reaction to the rise of Persia, which caused the Greek city-states to identify with one another against a common threat. The concept harks back to the word barbaros, meaning “not speaking Greek.” largely became of the tragedy writers, a number of virtues came to be seen as distinctly Greek—intelligence, courage, order and restraint, and justice. Certain vices, on the other hand, were associated with the barbarian—stupidity, lawlessness, cowardice, and Medea’s flaw, unrestrained passion. Not only the tragedies but also other works of art in ancient Athens championed a familiar set of attributes: order over dis-order, selfdiscipline over irrational behavior, democracy over tyranny, and the Greek over the barbarian, to whom Euripides’ Medea is linked.

gets herself to Athens without his help. Once Aegeus has left, Medea gleefully unfolds the whole of her plan to the Chorus. She will feign acceptance of Jason’s new marriage, ask for their sons’ sentence of banishment to be revoked, and then send the boys with poisoned gifts for the princess of Corinth that will cause her death and that of anyone who touches her. Medea also means to kill her own children to prevent them from falling into enemies’ hands and to hurt their father, Jason. While still sympathetic to Medea, the Chorus pleads with her not to carry out such a cruel plan. Medea remains adamant and commands the Nurse to summon Jason to the house but reveal nothing of her secrets. The Chorus recites an ode in praise of Athens and wonders how this glorious city will receive a woman who has murdered her own children. Again it exhorts Medea to refrain from this most horrible of crimes.

When Jason arrives, Medea feigns remorse, begging his forgiveness and offering to resign their sons to his care if they are allowed to remain in Corinth. Pleased by her change of heart, Jason promises to intercede for the boys. Medea sends her sons and their Tutor back to the royal palace with Jason, bearing gifts of a gossamer robe and a gold diadem for the princess. The Chorus expresses pity for Medea’s children, unwitting accomplices to murder, and even for Medea herself, because her great crimes result from Jason’s betrayal.

Returning from the palace with the boys, the Tutor excitedly tells Medea that her sons will not be banished, after all. Medea is now torn between her love for her children and her hatred of Jason, but the latter ultimately prevails. Firmly resolved to kill her sons, Medea embraces them one last time, then sends them into the house. The Chorus discourses on the blessings and curses of having children, especially when the children perish young without fulfilling their promise.

A Messenger from the palace arrives in haste to tell of the terrible deaths of the king and princess. No sooner had the princess donned the robe and diadem than their poisons began to consume her flesh, the diadem bursting into flame. Embracing his dead daughter, Creon was likewise consumed. A vengeful Medea rejoices to hear this news, then enters the house to kill her sons. The Chorus prays for someone to stop this final murder and tries in vain to beat down the doors while Medea’s sons cry for help on the other side.

Hoping to protect his sons from the Corinthians’ rage, Jason rushes to their rescue but arrives too late. The Chorus reveals that Medea has slain the boys. In a frenzy of grief and anger, Jason orders the doors broken down and vows to kill Medea. Just then, Medea herself appears on the roof in a chariot drawn by dragons, her sons’ bodies at her side. (The chariot belongs to her grandfather, Helios, the Sun, and she sits elevated in it, as if to stress her victory and superiority.) The estranged husband and wife again exchange bitter curses and accusations, each blaming the other for the tragedy. Jason asks for the boys’ bodies to bury but Medea refuses him, saying she will bury them where no one can violate their tomb. She announces that she is fleeing to Athens and mocks Jason with her knowledge of his future death, when his skull will be crushed by the hull of the Argo, the ship on which he first sailed to Colchis. (Such a death would have been far from ideal—young heroes hoped to die nobly to earn a public burial with all due honors.) The play ends as a broken, embittered Jason calls upon the gods to witness his wife’s horrible crimes, while Medea flies away triumphantly in her chariot.

Motherhood

While Euripides follows the established legend of Jason and Medea closely, he invents or introduces into the fixed form of a play at least one striking innovation—namely, Medea’s murder of her own children. In the original myth Medea either lost most of her children to vengeance by the Corinthians or gave them up to Hera (queen of gods), who promised to make them immortal. In Euripides’ play, however, Medea’s killing of her sons becomes the one crime no one can justify. On hearing Medea’s plans, the Chorus pleads with her to refrain from this last act of vengeance:

Contemplate the blow struck at a child.
Weigh the blood you take upon you.
Medea, by your knees,
By every pledge or appeal we beseech you,
Do not slaughter your children!
(Medea, lines 851-855)

Medea herself has a difficult time resolving to go through with the deed: “Why should I hurt them, to make / Their father suffer, when I shall suffer twice as much / Myself? I won’t do it. I won’t think of it again” (Medea, lines 1047-1049). She wavers, but then rallies: “What is the matter with me? Are my enemies / To laugh at me? Am I to let them off scot-free? / I must steel myself to it (Medea, lines 1050-1052). Her final decision to carry out the murders sets Medea forever apart from her adopted country, marking her as an outsider in every sense of the word.

The nuclear family—husband, wife, and children—formed the heart of Classical Greek society. The begetting of legitimate offspring was, in fact, the main purpose of marriage; the birth of the first child consolidated the wife’s position in her husband’s household and family. Sons were more highly prized than daughters, who at birth could be exposed to the elements and left for rescue or death if their fathers were unwilling to raise girls.

Although children were the legal property of their fathers, mothers were responsible for their children’s day-to-day rearing. Young children stayed with their mothers in “women’s quarters,” the most remote and protected part of the house. A close bond often formed between mothers and sons, partly because the birth of sons enhanced a woman’s prestige within her husband’s family, partly because women had to part with their daughters much sooner. Once a girl reached her early teens, she was groomed for marriage, then given to another household to ensure its continuance. Custom was not conducive to emotional warmth for daughters: “At birth [women] were viewed as temporary and costly members of the household, for they were destined to leave it to become mothers in a rival oikos (household), carrying away with them a portion of the household wealth in dowry” (Demand, p. 3).

By contrast, sons remained their mothers’ concerns until they reached the age of 18 in Classical Athens. Moreover, sons were responsible for the care and well-being of their aging parents.

As women grew older, sons became ever more important to them. Adult sons of widows acted as their mother’s kyrios (guardian) and managed their dowries, which they [the sons] would eventually inherit. A son thus provided his mother with a public voice for the protection of her property and rights. The law also required him to support his mother, which was crucial in a society in which there was no public system of old-age pensions. A view to the future undoubtedly figured in the family-planning strategies of both parents and contributed to a woman’s joy at the birth of sons.
(Brand in Demand, p. 29)

Thus, by killing her sons, Medea destroys her own future as well as Jason’s, a thought that haunts her as she contemplates their murder: “Oh, yes, I once built many hopes / On you; imagined, pitifully, that you would care / For my old age, and would yourselves wrap my dead body / For burial. How people would envy me my sons!” (Medea, lines 1031-1034).

Sources and literary context

Euripides’ primary source for his tragedy was the extensive body of myths relating to Medea and Jason. Several written versions would have been available to the dramatist, including those in Hesiod’s Theogony and Pindar’s Pythian 4. Euripides chose to concentrate not upon the legend of the Golden Fleece, but rather on the domestic tragedy that takes place many years later, when Jason abandons Medea for the princess of Corinth. While retaining the basic elements of the story, Euripides, as noted, became the first to make Medea’s murder of her children part of a fixed version of the legend, an addition that has since become integrated with the original tale.

Euripides dramatized other Greek figures, including

Alcestis (438 bce)
Medea (431 bce)
Children of Heracles (c. 430 bce)
Hippolytus (428 bce)
Electra (c. 420 bce)
Heracles (c. 416 bce)
Trojan Women (415 bce)
Iphigenia among the Taurians (c. 414 bce)
Orestes (408 bce)
The Bacchae (after 406 bce)
Iphigenia in Aulis (after 406 bce)

He, like other major dramatists in Classical Greece, drew on the mythology of his age. Euripides is most often considered in relation to the tragic playwrights Aeschylus (c. 525-456 bce) and Sophocles (496-406 bce), who also used myth as the foundation for much of their work. Euripides, however, employed a plainer style, one closer to everyday speech. Moreover, while Aeschylus chose to focus on dramatic events and Sophocles on situational irony, Euripides concentrated on the suffering individual in a way that was uniquely his own. His protagonists tend to be flawed and human, struggling with passions that frequently overpower them, which leads to a tragic outcome. Euripides’ emphasis on character and realism has led some to contend that his plays anticipate the modern psychological drama.

Events in History at the Time the Play Was Written

The Golden Age of Athens

Euripides’ life (c. 485-406 bce) spanned what historians have sometimes called the Golden Age of Athens, the era when the city’s power and prominence were at their height. Although sacked and burned by invading Persians in 480 bce, Athens literally arose from the ashes in the years following the Persians’ defeat at Salamis in 480 bce. In 477 bce Athens formed the Delian League, an alliance of Ionian cities on the west coast of Asia Minor, the strait of Hellespont, and the Propontis Sea, to repel further Persian threats. The member states began to meet on the centrally located island of Delos—hence the league’s name. Athens refortified its defenses and ultimately transformed the league into an empire that extended over the Aegean area. At its height in the 430s, the empire included 150 subject states. Corinth, the city-state that is featured in Medea, was not one of them. Rather this city-state and Athens were bitter enemies.

COMPETING AT THE DIONYSIA

From at least the end of the sixth century BCE onwards, tragedies were performed during the Athenian spring festival of Dionysus Eleuthereus, the City Dionysia. The festival was a celebration of Dionysus, god of fertility. Poets competed with one another in the festivals for prizes, producing lyric poems, tragedies, and comedies for the occasion. Besides the dramatic competitions, the festival included such activities as processions, sacrifices in the theatre, libations, and parades of war orphans. The archon—state official—in charge of the festival chose three poets to compete, each of whom produced three tragedies about connected subjects, followed by a satyr-play—a semi-comic play with a Chorus made up of satyrs, mostly human though partly bestial creatures of the woods. Originally, the tragedian would perform in his own play, but later he employed actors to play all the characters. A panel of ten judges assessed the merits of each play, and the results were set down permanently in the public record. Once the victor had been announced, he was crowned with ivy in the theater.

Athens maintained a preeminent role in the empire. Between 479 and 431 bce, the year Medea was first performed, Athens was a leading power in the Greek world politically, intellectually, and artistically. The Athenian statesman Pericles dominated the political scene from about 461 to 429 bce, presiding over one of history’s most democratic governments. While women, slaves, and foreigners were excluded from Athenian democracy, male citizens were granted equal opportunity to participate in their city’s political process, whether that involved speaking at public assemblies or serving as a magistrate or juror.

While Pericles supported foreign policies that would enlarge the Athenian empire and domestic policies that clarified Athenian citizen-ship, his accomplishments were not only political. He also promoted festivals and financed the construction of public buildings and religious monuments during the 440s and 430s bce. Athens grew in wealth and beauty under Pericles’ administration, arousing the admiration and envy of its neighbors. In Medea Euripides includes a choral ode on the glories of Athens, acknowledging the city’s exalted place in the Greek world: “The people of Athens, sons of Erechtheus, have enjoyed their prosperity / Since ancient times. Children of blessed gods, / They grew from holy soil unscorched by invasion, / Among the glories of knowledge their souls are pastured” (Euripides, Medea, lines 825-829). Ironically, tensions between Athens and the cities of the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta and Corinth, erupted into war in 431 bce, the same year that Medea was performed. The conflict, known as the Peloponnesian War, was to last nearly 30 years and cost Athens most of its wealth and prestige.

Reception and impact

During his lifetime Euripides’ work tended to be underappreciated. When performed at the Dionysia in the spring of 431, Medea placed only third out of three tragedies, arguably because of its handling of un-orthodox themes (infanticide, female vengeance). Euripides himself served as the butt of jokes: the comic dramatist Aristophanes (c. 455-385 bce) poked fun at him in The Frogs, presenting Euripides as a ranting bore whose plays about bad women had corrupted the morals of Athenian wives. However, Euripides was not without his admirers. Discussing the merits of tragedy in his Poetics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle described Euripides as “the most tragic of the poets” and praised his handling of the infanticide in Medea as an effective way to arouse pity and fear in the audience (Aristotle, pp. 58-59).

Euripides, of course, influenced later classical writers, including Apollonius of Rhodes (c. 295-215 bce), whose own epic Argonautica features Jason and the winning of the Golden Fleece. Other works that featured Medea were written by Ovid (43 BCE-17 ce) and Seneca (c. 4 BCE-65 ce). Ovid’s Medea, his only tragic play, has been lost to posterity. But his Heroides (“Heroines”), a work of imagined letters from mythological women to their lovers or husbands, includes a letter from Medea to Jason that survives:

Ovid’s Medea
Ah me!… Why did I too greatly delight in those golden locks of yours, in your comely ways and in the false graces of your tongue?… At your bidding I have withdrawn from your palace.… When, all suddenly, there came to my ears the chant of… a wedding-strain… I was filled with fear.… Perhaps… when you wish to make boast to your stupid mate… you will fashion strange slanders against my face and against my ways. Let her make merry.… While sword and fire are at my hand, and the juice of poison, no foe of Medea shall go unpunished!… By the two children who are our mutual pledge—restore me to the bed for which I madly left so much behind; be faithful to your promises, and come to my aid as I came to yours!
(Medea in Ovid, pp. 143, 155, 157)

Seneca’s Medea is portrayed as the vengeful sorceress, in contrast to Euripdes’ image of the wronged wife. Even her final exit is more savage in this later play: before fleeing in her flying chariot, Seneca’s Medea tosses down the slain bodies of their children to Jason, leaving him to rail at her as the play ends. Seneca’s version was better known than Euripides’ version among playwrights of the English Renaissance. But Euripides’ portrayal became and remained preeminent thereafter.

Modern critics have long recognized the power of Euripides’ Medea. In an introduction to his translation of the play, Gilbert Murray wrote, “For concentrated dramatic quality and sheer intensity of passion few plays ever written can vie with the Medea” (Murray in Bloom, p. 71). Much attention has been focused on the title character, who has been viewed by turns as a champion of oppressed women, an eternal outsider, a masculinized avenger, and a being at once more and less than human. Examining Medea in the light of the expectations of Euripides’ original audience, Edith Hall contends that the “vengeful, competitive, sexually honest Medea,” who goes unpunished for her crimes, “was any Athenian husband’s worst nightmare recognized” (Hall in Bloom, p. 86).

—Pamela S. Loy

For More Information

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. James Hutton. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982.

Bloom, Harold. Euripides. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003.

Cantarella, Eva. Pandora’s Daughters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Demand, Nancy. Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Ancient Greece. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Euripides. Medea. In Medea and Other Plays. Trans. Philip Vellacott. London: Penguin, 1963.

Garland, Robert. Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks .Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Hall, Edith. Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Hall, Edith, Fiona Macintosh, and Oliver Taplin, eds. Medea in Performance 1500-2000. Oxford: Legenda, 2000.

Hornblower, Simon, and Antony Spawforth, eds. The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

McHardy, Fiona. “Women’s Influence on Revenge in Ancient Greece.” In Women’s Influence on Classical Civilization. Ed. Fiona McHardy and Eireann Marshall. London: Routledge, 2004.

Ovid. Ovid 1: Heroides. Amores. The Loeb Classical Library. Ed. Jeffrey Henderson. Trans. Grant Showerman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977.

Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves. New York: Schocken, 1995.

Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin. Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

World Literature and Its Times: Profiles of Notable Literary Works and the Historic Events That Influenced Them

Medea

views updated Jun 08 2018

Medea

by Euripides

THE LITERARY WORK

A play set in ancient Corinth, performed in Athens in 431 b.c.

SYNOPSIS

Medea, a foreign princess and sorceress,, is abandoned try her Greek husband Jason. who has married the princess Creusa, Medea lakes terrible vengeance upon her former husband. She murders Creusa and Creusa’s father, then kills her own two sons—lason’s only children—in retribution.

Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place

The Play in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Play Was Written

For More Information

Euripides (485-406 b.c.) is regarded as one of the greatest of classical tragedians. Creafor of more than ninety plays (although less than twenty are available in complete form), Euripides is cited by scholars as a dramatist who cultivated a more realistic tone than most of his contemporaries. His works often featured flawed, unheroic characters.

Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place

Medea as an Athenian play

An Athenian citizen, Euripides revolutionized Greek tragedy by treating his mythic characters as if they were people of his own time, subject to the political and social pressures faced by everyday citizens in fifth-century b.c. Athens; although the play is set in Corinth, Euripides has his characters live according to Athenian customs. Medea’s characters are drawn from Greek myth, a body of stories and legends that were passed on orally and regarded as historical accounts by the Greeks who eventually wrote them down. Roughly a thousand years separate Euripides from the mythic past in which Medea and Jason were imagined to have lived; however, the dramatist compresses this time so that the earlier characters seem to inhabit the same historical moment as the audience.

The Play in Focus

The plot

Medea and Jason were best known to Athenians of the fifth century b.c. as the main characters in the legend of the Golden Fleece. This tale concerned Jason’s search for the magic fleece of a ram that was sacrificed by Phrixus and transformed into the constellation of Aries. The character of the nurse in Medea recounts part of this legend in the opening scene of the play, and other characters mention the legend liberally throughout.

In the legend, Jason and his troop of young Greek heroes arrive in Medea’s home of Colchis, located on the farthest shores of the Black Sea. Jason is continuing his search for the magnificent golden fleece that is in her father’s possession. Medea falls in love with Jason and betrays her father by helping the adventurer win the treasure. Jason, Medea, and her brother flee Colchis with the fleece. In some versions of the story she kills her brother and throws pieces of his body overboard to delay her father, who is in pursuit. When the fugitives arrive in Jason’s homeland, Medea commits another murder by dispatching Jason’s uncle, who has usurped the throne. Forced to flee once again, the pair settle in Corinth, where Euripides’s play takes up the story.

Jason becomes involved with Creusa, the daughter of King Creon of Corinth, entering into a relationship he believes is politically advantageous. Creusa and Jason decide to marry despite the presence of Medea. When Medea learns of this, she curses the wedding and the king. Because King Creon fears Medea, he exiles her from his city. She obtains a reprieve for one day to put her affairs in order and to make provisions for her two sons, who are to accompany her. But she has fooled the old king. Instead Medea intends to exact revenge. Although she at first considers killing Jason, his new bride, and Creon, upon second thought she realizes that it would be a greater punishment to let Jason live once she has killed his new family—and the children she had with him.

To further her scheme, she begs King Creon to let her sons remain in Corinth with their father Jason. Medea involves the unwitting boys in her evil scheme, sending them to Jason’s new bride with poisoned gifts—a golden robe and diadem (crown). The horrible poison melts the princess’s skin from her bones. Creon embraces his afflicted daughter and is killed as well. Medea later turns on her own two sons with a sword, confident that the impact of those murders will crush the spirit of her faithless husband. The play concludes as Medea flies off in a dragon-drawn chariof laden with the bodies of her two dead sons, leaving behind a devastated and childless Jason.

Sources

Medea appears in many different guises in the mythological stories on which Euripides based his play. She is sometimes portrayed as the rightful queen of Corinth, or as the granddaughter of the sun, Helios (in whose chariof she departs at the end of Euripides’s play). In some traditions, she is the niece of Circe, a wicked enchantress. The extent to which she is an evil figure varies from story to story; Euripides’s own contribution to the tradition is the grim variation in which Medea purposely kills her own children. Previous versions of the story explained that the Corinthians killed the boys in retaliation for the death of their king and his daughter, or that Medea killed them accidentally while trying to make them immortal.

Women and marriage in fifth-century Athens

Women in fifth-century b.c. Athens were kept cloistered within the home and could not act on their own behalf. In political, economic, social, and legal terms they were largely powerless. The powerful Medea flouts this state of affairs, however. At one point she announces, “Women of Corinth, I have come outside to you” (Euripides, Medea, line 214). Some speculate that this announcement may have signaled to the audience in Athens her rejection of the traditional social role of wife and mother. She protests against the unfairness of such a system, which extends to all Greek women: “Great Themis, lady Artemis, (goddess of oaths), behold the things I suffer, though I made him promise, my hateful husband” (Medea, lines 160-62).

A NASTY RUMOR

Slander ... accrued to Euripides at some point after production of the Medea: that Euripides had accepted a bribe from (he Corinthians to saddle Medea instead of them with the murder of her children.

(McDermott, p. 98)

When Medea rages at being put aside by Jason in favor of Creusa, she assumes sympathetic overtones. Tradition, however, is clearly on Jason’s side. One of her sharpest accusations against Jason is that he has broken his marriage oath to her. But as a Greek man, Jason was not obligated to honor such an oath—a woman could not legally promise herself in marriage, and Medea’s father did not sanction the union. Medea herself had no authority to marry Jason. In fact, the ceremonies surrounding the betrothal were traditionally negofiated by a woman’s prospective husband and the man responsible for her, usually her father. The transaction was finalized by the father’s pronouncement, “I give my daughter to you to plow for legitimate children” (Rabinowitz, p. 4). Marriage was seen as the means of producing offspring who would be citizens and not as a romantic attachment. Jason says as much when he complains: “It would have been far better for men to have gof their children in some of her way, and women not to have existed” (Medea, lines 573-75).

Like marriage, divorce was initiated exclusively by men and was easily accomplished. All a man had to do was publicly renounce his marriage, which is what Jason does, and send his ex-wife home with the dowry with which she had entered the union. The woman had no say in the matter. Athenian men were also allowed to keep a foreign concubine (mistress) with whom they could have children in addition to their “real” Athenian wives. Such was the domestic arrangement that Jason hoped to achieve when the play began. The only reason that Jason’s action might have been considered improper to Euripides’s audience was that Medea had nowhere to go, no father or male profecfor to turn to. The dramatization of these commonplace aspects of Athenian domestic life served as an important element in Euripides’s tragedy.

ARISTOPHANES ON EURIPIDES AND WOMEN

Another Athenian writer, the playwright Aristophanes (448?-388? b.c.), poked fun at Euripides in his work. The following is a comic exchange between Euripides and another character that is featured in one of the plays uf Aristophanes:

Euripides; “I fear that this day will be my last. The women have been plotting against me. And today, at the Thesmophoria, they’re going to discuss my liquidation (death),”
“But why on earth,...?”
They say I slander them in my tragedies,”
Well, so you do. Serve you right if they did get you!”
(Powell, p. 32)

Events in History at the Time the Play Was Written

The Age of Pericles

Pericles dominated Athenian politics from 447 b.c. until around 431 b.c., the year that Medea was performed. An empire builder, he was always searching for ways by which he might increase the number of Athenian colonies and bolster the city’s power throughout all of Greece. His ambitions led Athens to war, but the city also grew in beauty and wealth under his leadership. Huge amounts of money were directed toward buildings, festivals (including dramatic productions), and religious monuments.

THE COLOR OF THE CHARACTER’S SKIN

Herodotus [a Greek historian] mentions that Colchis [Medea’s homeland] was first an Egyptian settlement. According to this evidence, then, Medea was not only a foreigner but also a woman of color and, more important, a member of a well-established civilization, not at all barbaric.

(Rabinowitz, p. 137)

The most famous building in Athens, the Parthenon, was finished in 431 b.c.; this temple was dedicated to Athena, not as the goddess of wisdom but as the patroness of Athens. A cult of city-worship rose during this era; the famous ode to Athens sung by the chorus in Medea might have been a reflection of this trend. Also during this time, the new philosophical school known as Sophism became popular, with Socrates emerging as its most famous teacher. Socrates challenged commonly held beliefs about religion and ethics. The psychology of the average man was studied for the first time, and important questions about truth and virtue were considered through the use of philosophical dialogue. In fact, Socrates is thought to have been an influence on Euripides’s dramatic technique, which mimicked cultural trends of the time, such as the study of psychological motivations behind individual actions.

Drama and Athenian politics

The theater was squarely at the heart of fifth-century b.c. social and political life in Athens; Pericles actually dipped into the civic treasury so that people could go to the great festivals at which drama was presented (Ehrenberg, p. 248). Ten to fifteen thousand people would sit on the grassy slopes in the middle of the city to watch the highly ritualized performances. These began with a parade of representatives from the Athenian colonies who presented tributary money to the city, along with a dance performed by youths dressed in military gear. The festival was very competitive: each play was judged by a panel drawn from the audience, and the results were set down permanently in the public record. How well a playwright did in these competitions would naturally influence whether, and how often, he would be allowed to have his work performed publicly. Although it later became one of Euripides’s most famous plays, Medea was not his most successful effort in the dramatic competitions, possibly because it challenged rather than affirmed traditional values regarding the role of women in Greek society.

Reviews

Medea placed third out of three tragedies that were performed in the spring of 431 b.c. Yet Aristotle, who thought that Euripides produced particularly tragic poetry, held up Medea as an example of a drama that successfully inspires pity or terror in the audience: “The action may be done consciously and with knowledge of the persons, in the manner of the older poets. It is thus too that Euripides makes Medea slay her children” (Aristotle, Poetics, 14.6). Euripides, though, was occasionally the target of later comedies, particularly those written by Aristophanes.

The citizenship law of 450-451

In the play, Jason protests to Medea that his new Corinthian wife is necessary in order to protect the position of his first family: “I wished to preserve you and breed a royal progeny (set of children) to be brothers to the children I have now, a sure defense to us” (Medea, lines 595-97). Medea scoffs at this justification, but it is possible that Euripides is referring in these lines to a law that had been recently enacted in Athens. Under this new law, which was passed by Pericles, only those people whose parents were both Athenian could be citizens of the city. Therefore, the children Jason had with Medea were barred from obtaining citizenship. Even the son of Pericles, who was born to the general’s Milesian lover, could not be a citizen. Some historians feel that the law was drawn up in order to limit the power of certain aristocrats who opposed Pericles’s policies. Others suggest that it was the increasingly large number of resident aliens that necessitated the concentration of power among a relative few. Whatever the case, the citizenship law was probably not far from the minds of Euripides’s Athenian audience as they considered the plight of the foreign princess Medea and her children.

Preparing for war

At the time Euripides was completing Medea, the treatment and status of foreigners became important for other reasons. The play was staged in Athens in 431 b.c., on the eve of the first major war in which Greeks fought among themselves. The Peloponnesian War was named after the Peloponnesus peninsula, which forms the southern part of Greece. The war was the result of tensions between Athens and the cities of the Peloponnesian League—Sparta and Corinth, primarily. A preliminary skirmish broke out between Corinth and one of the allies of Athens, Corcyra. Previous battles had pitted the Greeks against foreign forces such as the Persians, a people with different customs and appearances. Because the warring Greek cities of Corinth and Corcyra shared the same culture and traditions, a different definition of foreign or alien had to be formed. The struggle to arrive at this definition would continue for almost thirty years, until the end of the Peloponnesian War.

For More Information

Aristotle. “Poetics.” In Criticism: The Major Texts. Edited by W. J. Bates. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.

Bulfinch, Thomas. Bulfinch’s Mythology. New York: Crown, 1978.

DuBois, Page. Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1991.

Ehrenberg, Victor. From Solon to Socrates: Greek History and Civilization during the 6th and 5th Centuries. 2nd ed. London: Methuen, 1973.

Euripides. “Medea.” In Euripides 1, The Complete Greek Tragedies. Translated by David Greene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1974.

Hammond, N. G. L., ed. A History of Greece to 322 b.c. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.

McDermott, Emily A. Euripides’ Medea: The Incarnation of Disorder. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1989.

Powell, Anton, ed. Euripides, Women, and Sexuality. London: Routledge, 1990.

Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin. Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Translated by Rex Warner. New York: Penguin, 1972.

Literature and Its Times

Medea

views updated Jun 11 2018

Medea

Nationality/Culture

Greek

Pronunciation

me-DEE-uh

Alternate Names

None

Appears In

Ovid's Metamorphoses, Ovid's Heroides, Euripides' Medea

Lineage

Daughter of King Aeetes

Character Overview

In Greek mythology , Medea was an enchantress and witch who used her magic powers to help Jason and the Argonauts (pronounced AHR-guh-nawts) in their quest for the Golden Fleece . Later, after Jason betrayed her, she used her witchcraft to take revenge. The daughter of Aeetes (pronounced aye-EE-teez), king of Colchis (pronounced KOL-kis), Medea first saw Jason when he arrived at the king's palace to request the Golden Fleece. According to some accounts, Hera (pronounced HAIR-uh), queen of the gods, persuaded Aphrodite (pronounced af-ro-DYE-tee), the goddess of love, to make Medea fall in love with the young hero.

Aeetes had no intention of handing over the Golden Fleece but pretended that he would do so if Jason successfully performed a series of tasks. He was to yoke fire-breathing bulls to a plow, sow a field with dragons ' teeth, and then fight the armed warriors who grew from those teeth. In return for his promise to marry her, Medea gave Jason a magic ointment to protect him from the bulls' fiery breath and told him how to confuse the warriors so they would fight among themselves. Following Medea's instructions, Jason completed the tasks he had been set.

Aeetes promised to hand over the Golden Fleece, but Medea knew that he would not keep his word. She led Jason and the musician Orpheus (pronounced OR-fee-uhs) into the sacred grove where the fleece was kept, guarded by a vicious serpent. Orpheus sang the serpent to sleep, enabling Jason to escape with the fleece. Medea then joined Jason and the Argonauts as they set sail in the Argo, pursued by her brother Apsyrtus (pronounced ap-SUR-tuhs). When Apsyrtus caught up with them, he promised to let Jason keep the Golden Fleece if he would give up Medea. Jason refused and killed Apsyrtus.

Eventually the Argonauts arrived at Iolcus (pronounced ee-AHL-kuhs), which was ruled by Jason's uncle Pelias (pronounced PEEL-ee-uhs). Pelias had gained the throne by killing Jason's father, King Aeson (pronounced EE-son). Medea brought Aeson back to life by boiling his remains in a pot with magical herbs. In this way, she tricked Pelias's daughters into thinking that they could restore their father to youth by cutting him up and boiling him in a pot. Pelias died a gruesome death, and the furious inhabitants of Iolcus drove out Medea and Jason.

The couple married and settled in Corinth, where they raised several children. Their happy days ended when Creon (pronounced KREE-ahn), the king of Corinth, offered Jason his daughter Glauce (pronounced GLAW-see) in marriage. Anxious to please the king, Jason abandoned Medea and prepared to marry Glauce. Medea took her revenge by sending Glauce a poisoned wedding gown that burned her alive. By some accounts, before fleeing to Athens, she also killed the children she had borne to Jason.

Aegeus (pronounced EE-joos), the king of Athens, agreed to protect Medea if she married him and bore him children. They produced a son, Medus (pronounced MEE-duhs), who stood to inherit the throne. However, Aegeus was unaware that he already had a son, Theseus (pronounced THEE-see-uhs), from a previous marriage. When Theseus came to Athens to claim the throne, Medea recognized him, persuaded Aegeus that Theseus planned to kill him, and prepared a cup of poisoned wine for the young man. Just as Theseus was about to drink the wine, Aegeus recognized the sword that Theseus carried, realized that Theseus was his son, and knocked the cup from the young man's hand. By some accounts, Medea then fled to a region in Asia that came to be known as Media in her honor, and whose inhabitants became known as Medes.

Medea in Context

The myth of Medea reveals much about relationships between men and women in ancient Greece. For one, Medea's escape with Jason after he agrees to marry her was a clear violation of the tradition of family-arranged marriages. Women seldom had input into whom they married, and never did so without the knowledge of their parents. Next, while a woman was duty-bound to remain with her husband until death, a man could renounce his wife publicly for any number of reasons. When Jason fails to do even that before taking a new wife, it may have been seen as an even greater insult to Medea.

Key Themes and Symbols

One important theme in the myth of Medea is exile. Medea leaves her home in Colchis after helping Jason, knowing that her father would view her acts as betrayal. Later, both Jason and Medea are exiled from Iolcus after she tricks Pelias's daughters into murdering him. When Jason later marries Glauce, Medea murders Glauce and flees to Athens. Finally, Medea flees from Athens after her failed attempt to kill Theseus.

Murder and magic are also themes that run throughout the tale of Medea. She provides Jason with a magic ointment of protection so he can subdue the fire-breathing bulls. Although she does not directly kill Pelias, she is responsible for his death by tricking the man's daughters into killing him as part of a magic ceremony. She is also responsible for the death of Glauce by way of a magically cursed gown, and for the attempted murder of Theseus by way of poison.

Medea in Art, Literature, and Everyday Life

The myth of Medea is best known through the stage play written by the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides (pronounced yoo-RIP-i-deez). Over the centuries, the story has been adapted countless times in books and on the stage. Several operas, ballets, and musicals based on the story of Medea have also been produced, most notably a ballet suite by composer Samuel Barber. A film adaptation based on the Euripides play was made for television in 1988 by Danish director Lars von Trier. The character of Medea also appears in the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts.

Read, Write, Think, Discuss

In Greek myth, Medea is a witch and a murderer. However, she also helps Jason obtain the Golden Fleece and tries to help him regain his rightful throne. These seemingly contradictory aspects of Medea's character makes it difficult to categorize her as definitively “good” or “bad.” Do you think Medea was intended to be a sympathetic character to the ancient Greeks, or was she intended as a villain? What do you think Greek writers were trying to say by making their characters so ambiguous? Select a popular figure from a contemporary Western novel and compare the way the author depicts his or her main character to the way the ancient Greeks portrayed their heroes and heroines.

SEE ALSO Argonauts; Golden Fleece; Jason; Theseus

U*X*L Encyclopedia of World Mythology

Medea

views updated May 21 2018

Medea

In Greek mythology, Medea was an enchantress and witch who used her magic powers to help Jason* and the Argonauts in their quest for the Golden Fleece*. Later, after Jason betrayed her, she used her witchcraft to take revenge.

The daughter of Aeëtes, king of Colchis, Medea first saw Jason when he arrived at the king's palace to request the Golden Fleece. According to some accounts, Hera, queen of the gods, persuaded Aphrodite, the goddess of love, to make Medea fall in love with the young hero.

Aeëtes had no intention of handing over the Golden Fleece but pretended that he would do so if Jason successfully performed a series of tasks. He was to yoke fire-breathing bulls to a plow, sow a field with dragons' teeth, and then fight the armed warriors who grew from those teeth. In return for his promise to marry her, Medea gave Jason a magic ointment to protect him from the bulls' fiery breath and told him how to confuse the warriors so that they would fight among themselves. Following Medea's instructions, Jason completed the tasks he had been set.

Aeëtes promised to hand over the Golden Fleece, but Medea knew that he would not keep his word. She led Jason and the musician Orpheus* into the sacred grove where the fleece was kept, guarded by a vicious serpent. Orpheus sang the serpent to sleep, enabling Jason to escape with the fleece. Medea then joined Jason and the Argonauts as they set sail in the Argo, pursued by her brother Apsyrtus. When Apsyrtus caught up with them, he promised to let Jason keep the Golden Fleece if he would give up Medea. Jason refused and killed Apsyrtus.

Eventually the Argonauts arrived back at Iolcus, which was ruled by Jason's uncle Pelias. Pelias had gained the throne by killing Jason's father, King Aeson. Medea brought Aeson back to life by boiling his remains in a pot with magical herbs. In this way, she tricked Pelias's daughters into thinking that they could restore their father to youth by cutting him up and boiling him in a pot. Pelias died a gruesome death, and the furious inhabitants of Iolcus drove out Medea and Jason.

The couple married and settled in Corinth, where they raised several children. Their happy days ended when Creon, the king of Corinth, offered Jason his daughter Glauce in marriage. Anxious to please the king, Jason abandoned Medea and prepared to marry Glauce. Medea took her revenge by sending Glauce a poisoned wedding gown that burned her alive. By some accounts, before fleeing to Athens, she also killed the children she had borne to Jason.

Aegeus, the king of Athens, agreed to protect Medea if she married him and bore him children. They produced a son, Medus (or Medeius), who stood to inherit the throne. However, Aegeus was unaware that he already had a son, Theseus, from a previous marriage. When Theseus came to Athens to claim the throne, Medea recognized him, persuaded Aegeus that Theseus planned to kill him, and prepared a cup of poisoned wine for the young man. Just as Theseus was about to drink the wine, Aegeus recognized the sword that Theseus carried, realized that Theseus was his son, and knocked the cup from the young man's hand. By some accounts, Medea then fled to a region in Asia that came to be known as Media in her honor and whose inhabitants became known as Medes.

See also Argonauts; Golden Fleece; Jason; Theseus.

Myths and Legends of the World

Medea

views updated May 14 2018

Medea

In Greek mythology, an enchantress and daughter of the king of Colchis who fell in love with Jason when he came to that country. Medea enabled him to slay the sleepless dragon that guarded the golden fleece. She fled from Colchis with Jason, who made her his wife, and from whom she exacted a pledge never to love another woman. They were pursued by her father, but she delayed the pursuit by the cruel expedient of cutting her brother Absyrtus to pieces and strewing his limbs in the sea.

Medea accompanied Jason to Greece, where she was regarded as a barbarian. Having conciliated King Peleus, who was now a very old man, she induced him to try to regain youth by bathing in a magic cauldron she had prepared. So great was his faith in her powers that the old man unhesitatingly plunged into her cauldron and was boiled alive. Her reason for this act of cruelty was to hasten Jason's succession to the throne. In due course, Jason would have succeeded Peleus, but now the Greeks would have none of either him or Medea, and he was forced to leave Iolcos.

Growing tired of the formidable enchantress to whom he had bound himself, Jason sought to contract an alliance with Glauce, a young princess. Concealing her real intentions, Medea pretended friendship with the bride-elect and sent her as a wedding present a garment, which as soon as Glauce put it on, caused her to die in the greatest agony.

Eventually Medea parted from Jason. Having murdered her two children by him, she fled from Corinth in a car drawn by dragons to Athens, where she married Argeus, by whom she had a son, Medus. But the discovery of an attempt on the life of Theseus forced her to leave Athens. Accompanied by her son, she returned to Colchis and restored her father to the throne, of which he had been deprived by his own brother Perses.

Much literature has been written about the character of Medea. Euripides, Ennius, Aeschylus, and later Pierre Corneille made her the theme of tragedies.

Sources:

Kingsley, Charles. The Heroes. 1856. Reprint, New York: Dutton, 1963.

Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology

Medea

views updated May 17 2018

Medea in Greek mythology, princess of Colchis and a sorceress, traditionally with a knowledge of poisons. She helped Jason to obtain the Golden Fleece from her father Aeetes, and married him; assisting the Argonauts to escape from Colchis, she murdered her younger brother. When Jason deserted her for Creusa, the daughter of King Creon of Corinth, she took revenge by killing Creon, Creusa, and her own children, and fled to Athens. She is taken as the type of a vengeful and ruthless woman.

The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable ELIZABETH KNOWLES

Medea

views updated Jun 11 2018

Medea Daughter of Aeëtes, King of Colchis, whom she defied to help Jason retrieve the Golden Fleece. Renowned as a sorceress, she lived with Jason for many years in Corinth but fled to Athens after his desertion of her caused her to murder their children, and his new wife, in a jealous rage.

World Encyclopedia

Medea

Medea

Aegeus, King of Athens

Children’s Attendant

Chorus of Corinthian Women

Creon

Jason

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Medea

Messenger

Nurse

Sons of Medea and Jason

Revenge

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Passion

Chorus

Deus ex Machina

Prologue and Duologue

The End of the Golden Age of Athens

Women and Marriage in Ancient Greek Culture

Greek Theater

COMPARE & CONTRAST

Carole L. Hamilton

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

D. J. Conacher

Brooks Atkinson

Medea

Medea

Medea and Jason—the legend

The status of women in fifth-century Athens

Sexual freedom and Athenian men

WOMEN AND REVENGE IN ANCIENT GREECE

Plot summary

MEDEA THE BARBARIAN

Motherhood

Sources and literary context

The Golden Age of Athens

COMPETING AT THE DIONYSIA

Reception and impact

Medea

Medea

Medea as an Athenian play

The plot

Sources

Women and marriage in fifth-century Athens

A NASTY RUMOR

ARISTOPHANES ON EURIPIDES AND WOMEN

The Age of Pericles

THE COLOR OF THE CHARACTER’S SKIN

Drama and Athenian politics

Reviews

The citizenship law of 450-451

Preparing for war

Medea

Medea

Character Overview

Medea in Context

Key Themes and Symbols

Medea in Art, Literature, and Everyday Life

Read, Write, Think, Discuss

Medea

Medea

Sources:

Medea

Medea

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