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Order 870497: Question on the play Medea, by Euripides

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Questions on Medea, by Euripides Please answer question 5 for this weekly post. Need 240 words and 2-3 references. Q5. How does the relationship between Medea and the Chorus develop? How important (or unimportant) is the Chorus to the overall impact of the tragedy? These are some of the references we can use for this post. References: Durnham, Carolyn A. 1984, ‘Medea: Hero or Heroine?’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol.8, no.1, pp.54-59 Lawrence, Stewart 1997, ‘Audience Uncertainty and Euripides’ Medea’, Hermes, vol.125, no.1, pp.49-55 Rayor, Diane J. 2013, Euripides’ Medea: A new translation, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Extra notes from Medea by Euripides

In the Poetics, Aristotle describes three essential parts to Greek Tragedy and in turn successful art. The three components work in relationship with each other, a collaboration leading to higher consciousness and restored order, whether socially or individually defined. The first is “recognition” which implies the realization of some truth, that often times (initially) appears to the protagonist as a form of ignorance. In Greek culture blindness and seeing are transposed to indicate this moment of recognition as tragic vision; recognition manifests itself in blind prophets like Tiresias the seer and Oedipus’ act of blinding himself (after seeking out the reality of his life). In Greek sculpture,

a few statues have somewhat featureless eyes

, perhaps suggesting the idea of the blind seer again; and of course ancient rumors reported that Homer–in all his visionary poetry–was also blind. Let me remind you that Homer is undoubtedly a tradition–evolving out of three ages of oral culture–rather than a single human being. See optional reading:

The Age of Heroes.

The second component of tragedy is “reversal” where through some form of inquiry or journey, the hero discovers that recognition is held in a kind of 180 degree turn where formerly held truths are actually versions of ignorance or that former versions of ignorance turn out to be visionary. The ancient story of the hunter Actaeon shows us this connection between recognition and reversal. Diana, the woodland goddess, transforms Actaeon into a deer and thus he is hunted down and destroyed by his own vicious hounds. The story tells of the hunter becoming the hunted–reversal–and the recognition of the other’s experience in life (in this case the deer)–Actaeon surely recognizes the perspective of the wild buck before his brutal undoing. The fate of the lovers of Ishtar in The Epic of Gilgamesh also shows us the reality of recognition and reversal–for instance, the gardener is transformed into a mole. And more importantly we see our relation with nature portrayed as a reversal, when Enkidu is transformed from a wild beast into a domesticated man (forever estranged from the wild creatures), who knows the trappings of civilization and culture.

The third aspect of successful tragedy is the “tragic flaw.” This term is elusive. In most cases, it refers to one’s true character, the nature of one’s soul or daemon or “divine spirit.” It is not about being evil. It implies unforeseen consequences that arrive in mass when a hero fails to follow his true character or when one’s character causes a mistake in judgment. Tragic flaw is about the reality of human frailty.

MEDEA

When we talk about Medea, we might begin by thinking about how reversal plays an important role in understanding Euripides’ intentions. First, as the play opens (prologue), the Nurse gives us history and a view of the “diseased love” between Jason and Medea. There is no equivocation; Jason has wronged Medea. The audience (and the reader) will perhaps fill sympathy for this woman and Corinthian women in general. Obviously the patriarchal elitism and the consequent double standard of masculine behavior is put on display. Women live oppressed lives. Jason himself will confirm these sympathies as his reasoning and thus his words (in the second episode) are visibly absurd. He is transparent and vain.

What strikes me as important in reading this play is the notion of reversal as mood. Medea kills her own children and in doing so nullifies any initial sympathy we might have for her. In fact by the end of the play, one might have a great deal more sympathy for Jason instead of Medea and in this Euripides has reversed the sentiments of the audience through dramatic action. It appears that the idea of having Medea kill her own children was solely the creation of Euripides. So while Medea gets away with murder–unlike Clytemneastra–she also brings destruction on Athens (in the future) for King Aegeus offers her sanctuary in that city. Harboring a murder brings the waft of the furies.

The theme of the children is important in this play. They remain central throughout, always visible or nearby. It is the children that bring about this reversal.

MEDEA

Setting: Jason and Medea’s house. There is no need for a shift in scene. In the case of people dying, the messenger conveys the details and thus eliminates the necessity of changing scenes. This alternate depiction of violence through dialogue is indicative of Greek drama–the root of the word obscene is “off stage.”

Prologue: Nurse, Tutor, Medea

What is the purpose of the Nurse’s speech?
Part of her purpose is to tell the audience about the past and thus locate the story in time and place; this is a literary convention–many prologues in Greek drama provide us with necessary information and give us a history lesson. Ask yourself if the prologue generates any sympathy for Medea.

Why does she sail away with Jason in the first place?

Medea’s attitude toward her children concerns the Nurse. Explain. The children play an essential role in this tragedy. The central focus of the play could be characterized around “the theme of the children.” The sons of Jason and Medea are always present to some degree, if not on stage then in the dialogue. They may exist on the margins momentarily, but they are never marginalized.

Euripides is regarded by some people as the first feminist. He shows us that the patriarchal system perpetuates destructive inequality, especially applicable to the double-standard that defines the institution of marriage. Whether we can maintain this perspective is a matter of interpreting the evidence. Euripides does mess with the status quo, for instance, allowing Medea to claim as her own previously held exclusive male rights. The sacrifice of the innocent child has been the prerogative of Kings like Agamemnon, who at Calchas’ decree sacrifices his daughter Iphigeneia. But in the end, the killing of one’s children may also reinforce an ancient archetype, in Medea’s case, that women cannot be trusted. Once again interpretation plays a role. An assessment of Medea’s character sways on our ability to put aside our own version of truth, at least momentarily, in order to consider alternatives. Whatever else, this challenge, this movement toward cognitive dissonance seems catalytically to be Euripides’ modus operandi.

And we have modern women writers who offer a similar challenge. Toni Morrison gives us a female character, a mother, in Beloved who slays her own children rather than have them live as slaves in the southern plantation system. Injustice is a greater cruelty than death.

First Episode: Medea, Chorus, Creon

Medea has been weeping; yet she is lucid. Her speech again underscores the plight of women. “Of all creatures that can feel and think, / we women are the worst-treated things alive.”

For Medea, in marriage the husband becomes the dictator of a woman’s body. Consider the critical Thinking Rubric # 1: What is the problem (or problems)? Separate out the different problems Medea and women in general face and explain the nuances of each.

What request does Medea make to the Chorus of Corinthian women?

Creon arrives! What order does Creon give? What does Medea say about smart women? What does Medea appeal to in Creon’s nature that allows her more time?

After Creon’s departure, Medea reveals her true intentions. What do you think of Medea here? Consider her situation and her motivation and her cunning. Does she still have your sympathy? How does she view the female sex?

First Stasimon (or Ode): Each Stasimon includes Strophe and Antistrophe.

What is the Chorus’ reaction to Medea’s intentions? What does the Chorus say about ballads of the ages gone by? How might the Chorus’ reaction to Medea’s intentions be similar to or different from your reaction? Explain why.

Second Episode: Jason, Chorus and Medea

This episode asks us to consider the character of Jason carefully. What does Jason say he has done for Medea? What has Medea done for Jason in the past? How does Jason rationalize his actions? What do the gods have to do with it? According to Jason what advantages did Medea derive from coming to Greece?

What do you think of Jason’s perspective?

Second Stasimon: The Chorus speaks of the dangers of love. Explain this view. What does the chorus suggest about the relationship between one’s passion and one’s relationship to the State? What are the implications of what these Corinthian women say? Does love fit with politics? Why or why not?

Third Episode: Aegeus, Medea, and Chorus

Medea arranges for her escape and sanctuary in Athens under the protection of King Aegeas. He will receive Medea in his city. Why? Under what condition? What does Aegeus think about how Jason has treated her and their children?

Medea makes Aegeus swear an oath of loyalty to her and their agreement. By whom does Medea make him swear?

After Aegeus’ departure, Medea rejoices. What is Medea’s device for murdering the daughter of the King, Jason’s future bride? What does she plan to do to her own sons? This is a critical turning point in the drama. Evaluate carefully Medea’s intention to murder her own children. What is the Chorus’ reaction to Medea’s plan to murder her sons?

Medea directs the Nurse to go get Jason.

Third Stasimon: The Chorus of Corinthian women desperately try to move Medea from her purpose.

The Chorus sings of Athens plight as well. King Aegeus, it seems, doesn’t realize what Medea has planned when he offers her protection in his city. As natural law, to harbor a murderer within your land spells certain doom. Historically, Euripides was regarded as a seer himself because Athens will indeed be defeated in the Peloponnesian War, and thus the playwright comprehensively prophesies this defeat within the play itself.

Fourth Episode: Jason, Medea, and Chorus

What attitude does Medea now present to Jason?

What is Jason’s reaction to her seemingly change of heart?

Medea asks Jason to ask Creon to let their two children remain in Corinth with their father. She even asks that Jason employ the loyalty of his new wife to plead for the children’s sake. We know this is ruse, a way of delivering the “gorgeous presents.” We know that multiple murders are eminent.

Forth Stasimon:

Notice that the Chorus’ attitude about Medea has changed as a result of her desire to murder her own children. It seems that having Medea murder her own sons was Euripides’ idea. This is a new twist that previously has NOT been associated with the mythology of Medea. Why would Euripides have Medea murder her sons?

Fifth Episode: Tutor and Medea and Chorus

What news does the Tutor report to Medea? The boys return to Medea and she emotionally struggles with her own mind. Who is the only one that can stop Medea from murdering her children?

Fifth Stasimon:

The Chorus suggests that women have a muse of their own that ushers in wisdom. What is this wisdom?

What is the saddest sorrow of all?

Sixth Episode: Messenger and Medea

The messenger reports the deaths of the princess and Creon himself to Medea. How were their deaths accomplished? Euripides gives us a detailed description of the deaths that is particularly gruesome. Explain what happens. Why does Euripides make their deaths so horrible?

What does Medea intend to do now?

Sixth Stasimon: The Chorus prays for something to stop the murder of the children

Seventh Episode: Jason, Chorus, and Medea

What concern does Jason have when he hears of his children’s deaths?

Jason says: “Oh woman, you’ve just killed me.” What does Jason mean?

Medea appears in a chariot drawn by winged dragons. By her side are the two dead boys. What is the significance of this chariot? What is the role of the gods in her escape?

Do you feel sympathy for Jason? If so, evaluate how your sympathies have changed as the drama unfolds. Obviously the event that shifts empathy away from Medea–the child-killer–toward Jason (for most people in the audience) is the death of the children. Is there any perspective at all that might lead you to acquit Medea for this act of infanticide?

Jason’s question: You think it right to murder for a thwarted bed? In fact this question still plagues us. The obvious answer today is “No.” What has replaced murder?

What does Jason ask Medea for in the end? What is Medea’s answer?

Exodos: Jason and Medea and Chorus

In the end Medea is unrelenting. She predicts that Jason will indeed carry this grief into old age.

What comment does the Chorus make at the end of the play?

Questions:

1. Medea’s killing of her children can be juxtaposed to the attempted killing of the infant Oedipus by his father and mother and the sacrifice of Iphigeneia by Agamemnon. Discuss the way or ways you reacted to the different portrayal of “the death of children” as a literary motif in Homer and then in Euripides.

2. Medea has been described as a strong, independent woman, as a woman mad with passion, and as a witch. What view is finally conveyed in the play?

3. Euripides was considered an eccentric and an intellectual radical. In what ways is this true. In what ways is it false.

Medea

by Euripides

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Medea 

Scene One:

Nurse enters from skenē.

Nurse

If only the hull of the Argo had not flown through

the dark Clashing Rocks to the land of Kolchis.

If the pine in Mt. Pelion’s forests

had never been cut and supplied oars

for the Argonauts in quest of the Golden Fleece 

for Pelias. Then my mistress Medea

would not have sailed to the towers of Iolkos,

her heart dazed with love for Jason,

nor persuaded the daughters of Pelias to kill

their father. Then she would not be living 

here in Korinth with her husband and children.

Pleasing the people in her land of exile,

she helped Jason himself in every way.

When a woman does not oppose her man,

the greatest security is hers. 

Now hate infects all the closest bonds of love.

Betraying his own sons and my mistress,

Jason beds down in a royal marriage,

having wed the daughter of Kreon, the king.

Wretched Medea, finding herself dishonored, 

cries out his oaths to her, their joined right hands,

the greatest pledge of all. She invokes the gods

to witness exactly how Jason repays her.

She lies there without eating, surrendering to pain,

dissolving in tears time and time again, 

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 Euripides’ Medea

knowing her husband has wronged her.

Without raising her eyes or lifting her face

from the ground, she listens like a rock

or sea wave to her friends’ advice.

Sometimes she turns her pale face away 

to mourn for her own dear father, her country

and family, since she betrayed all of them

to follow a husband who has dishonored her.

That woman, so miserable, knows through misfortune

what it means to abandon her homeland. 

Filled with hate, she finds no joy in the sight of her sons.

I’m afraid she’s planning something:

Her hard mind won’t stand for mistreatment.

I know her. I fear she may silently

enter the house where the marriage bed is laid 

and stab her heart with a sharp sword,

or kill the king and the bridegroom,

provoking a greater disaster.

She is a strange one. No one battling her

as an enemy will easily claim sweet victory. 

Enter Tutor and two boys from City Path.

Ah, here come the boys, done with their games.

They’re not thinking of their mother’s troubles.

Young hearts are not fond of sorrow.

Tutor

Old household slave of my mistress,

why are you standing alone outside the gates? 

Crying to yourself about your troubles?

Does Medea wish to be left alone?

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Medea 

Nurse

Ancient companion of Jason’s children,

when the dice of our masters’ fortune roll badly,

it touches the heart of good slaves. 

I felt such an overwhelming grief

that I longed to come out here and tell

Earth and Sky about my mistress’s bad luck.

Tutor

Isn’t that poor wretch done moaning yet?

Nurse

I envy your ignorance. Her pain isn’t halfway gone. 

Tutor

The fool – if one may call masters that.

She knows nothing of the latest troubles.

Nurse

What is it, old man? Don’t hold back.

Tutor

Nothing. I regret what I’ve already said.

Nurse

By your beard, don’t hide this from a fellow slave! 

I’ll keep quiet about it, if I must.

Tutor

I heard some talk, while pretending not to listen,

by the gaming tables where the old men

sit near the holy spring of Pirene.

They say Kreon, Lord of Korinth, 

intends to banish these boys

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 Euripides’ Medea

with their mother. I do not know

whether this tale is true. I hope not.

Nurse

Even if Jason has a quarrel with their mother,

will he allow his own sons to suffer exile? 

Tutor

Old marriage ties are abandoned for new

and he is no friend of this house.

Nurse

We’re sunk if new troubles wash over

before we bail out the old!

Tutor

You keep quiet. It’s not the right time 

for your mistress to learn this. Keep the news secret.

Nurse

Oh children, do you hear what a father you have?

May he be cursed – no, he is my master –

but he is caught in cruelty to his family.

Tutor

What man is not? Did you just learn 

that everyone loves himself best of all?

Because of his new bedmate,

their father does not love these boys.

Nurse

Go inside the house, children; it will be all right.

To Tutor:

You must keep them out of the way as much as possible – 

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Medea 

do not let them near their ill-tempered mother.

I have seen her eye them like a bull,

as if she has something in mind. Her rage

won’t end, I know well, until it blasts someone.

May it strike enemies and not friends. 

Medea wails from offstage inside skenē.

Medea

Oh! Misery, I’m miserable in my troubles.

Oimoi! I wish I were dead.

Nurse

Here she goes. Dear boys, your mother

stirs her heart, stirs her rage.

Hurry faster into the house. 

Don’t let her see you;

stay away from her.

To Tutor:

Guard against her fierce temper and

the hateful nature of her willful mind.

Now go. Go in as quickly as possible. 

Tutor and children exit skenē as Nurse continues.

Clearly that cloud of woe,

rising from its source, will soon flash

with still greater passion. What

will her enraged and untamed spirit

do when bitten by such evil? 

Medea

Oh! I’ve suffered miserably, misery

worthy of great woe. O cursèd sons

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 Euripides’ Medea

of a hateful mother, may you die

with your father! May his entire line vanish.

Nurse

Oimoi! Miserable indeed! What share 

do your sons have in their father’s crime?

Why hate them? Dear children,

I’m worried, afraid that you might suffer.

The tempers of tyrants are strange.

They have so much power and so little guidance 

that their moods change violently.

To face life on equal terms is better.

For me at least, may I grow old

without greatness, secure.

To speak the word moderation, 

then to act on it, is best for men

by far. There’s no right time for excess

in human life, but when a god

becomes angry with a household,

even greater ruin follows. 

Entrance Song: Chorus enters from City Path.

Chorus (sings)

We hear her voice,

we hear the cry

of the unhappy woman of Kolchis.

Is she not yet calm? Old woman, tell us.

We hear her cry within the gated hall. 

Woman, since we are her friends,

we do not rejoice

at the grief of this house.

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Medea 

Nurse

What house? It’s already gone.

The bed of a royal family claims him, 

while my mistress wastes her life away

in her room. No words from friends

or family comfort her in any way.

Medea

May lightning from heaven strike my head.

What do I gain by living any longer? 

Oh, in death may I take my rest,

abandoning this hateful life.

Chorus (sings)

Zeus, Earth, and light,

do you hear the miserable bride

sing such a dirge? 

Foolish woman, why do you

desire that cold, cruel rest?

Why hurry death’s end?

Don’t pray for this.

If your husband 

worships at a new bed,

do not be sharp with him.

Zeus will take your case. Do not waste away

weeping too much for your bed partner.

Medea

Great Themis and Lady Artemis, 

do you see what I suffer, despite binding

my accurséd husband with sacred oaths?

May I gaze upon him and his bride

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 Euripides’ Medea

gouged out, scraped away, house and all.

They dared to wrong me first. 

O father! Homeland I abandoned,

shamefully killing my brother!

Nurse

You hear what she says? She shouts

an invocation to Themis and to Zeus,

whom mortals honor as overseer of the oath. 

The rage of my mistress will not

end with some trivial deed.

Chorus (sings)

We wish she would let us see her, come out

and hear our voice,

listen to our words, 

dismiss her mind’s temper

and angry passion.

Let our willing support

not abandon our friends.

Step in, bring her out of the house, 

and tell her we, too, are friends.

Hurry in before she harms someone.

This sorrow rushes on and grows.

Nurse

I’ll do it. But I fear

I won’t persuade my mistress. 

I’ll do you this favor of my labor –

although she glares like a bull,

like a lioness with newborn cubs,

whenever a slave approaches to have a word.

If you said that men of old were foolish 

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Medea 

and not at all wise, you would not be wrong.

They invented songs for festivals, banquets

and dinner parties, merry music for life.

Yet none has discovered poetry

or songs played on the lyre 

to end such bitter human suffering

that unleashes death and terrible

misfortune, wrecking homes.

The lives of human beings

benefit from songs that heal. 

During abundant feasts,

why strain the voice in vain?

The plenty of the feast at hand

holds delight in itself for humans.

Nurse exits skenē.

Chorus (sings)

We hear her cry, a mournful dirge; 

she calls out shrilly, wailing in distress

about her bed betrayer, her wicked husband.

Having suffered injustice, she invokes

Zeus’ Themis, goddess of oaths,

who bade her journey to Greece 

across the strait through the brine

by night toward the Bosporos

barrier of the treacherous Black Sea.

Scene Two:

Medea enters from skenē.

Medea

Women of Korinth, I’ve come out of the house

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 Euripides’ Medea

to avoid reproach. I know that many people 

prove themselves arrogant either behind closed doors

or in public. Others win a bad reputation

for indifference just by living quietly.

It isn’t right for people to hate at a glance

before understanding the core of a man, 

even though wronged not a whit.

A foreigner certainly must conform to the state.

Even for a citizen, I don’t approve if he carelessly

pleases himself while offending his fellows.

But for me, this unexpected catastrophe 

has destroyed my life. I am lost, my friends,

and casting away life’s joy, want to be dead.

I know well, the one who was everything to me

has turned out to be the worst of men, my husband.

Of all who live and can think, 

we women are the most miserable species:

We must buy a husband with abundant goods

and, an evil even more hurtful than the initial purchase,

take him as master of our body. That

is the greatest challenge, whether we win a bad husband 

or a decent one. Divorce ruins a woman’s reputation,

nor is it possible to refuse a husband.

Without instruction at home, you must be a prophet

to understand new habits and customs,

and what sort of bedmate you will need to manage. 

If we do a good job with that and a husband

lives with us without protesting the marriage yoke,

then our life is enviable. If not, better to die.

When those at home annoy a man,

he leaves, ending his heart’s distress 

by turning to a friend or companion,

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Medea 

while we women must look to one soul alone.

They say that we live a life in the house

without danger, while they fight with spears.

They think wrongly. For I would rather stand 

in the line of battle three times than give birth once.

My story, though, is not the same as yours.

You have this city and your father’s homes

and advantage in life and company of friends.

Bereft of my city, I am humiliated by the man 

who stole me from a foreign land.

I have no mother, no brother, no kin

to shelter with away from this disaster.

That’s why I want you to go along with one thing:

If I should find some way or means 

to pay back my husband for these wrongs,

(and his bride and the father who gave her to wed),

keep silent. In other matters, a woman is full of fear

and weak in weapons and strength.

But when she finds herself wronged in the marriage-bed, 

no one wields a mind more murderous.

Chorus Leader

Medea, we will keep silent while you justly pay back

your husband. I am not surprised that you grieve at your fate.

Here I see Kreon, Lord of Korinth,

coming to announce new decrees. 

Kreon with silent attendants enters from City Path.

Kreon

You there, scowling and angry with your husband.

Medea, I command you to leave this land,

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 Euripides’ Medea

banished with your two children without delay.

As the enforcer of this order myself,

I will not return to the palace 

until I cast you beyond my borders.

Medea

No! Misery, utter destruction!

My enemies unfurl all their sails against me

and I can find no safe harbor from ruin.

Still, although in agony, I will ask: 

Kreon, why do you banish me?

Kreon

I fear you – no need at all to cloak my words –

afraid you may incurably harm my daughter.

The evidence points that way: You are clever

by nature and skilled in myriad means of destruction. 

And you grieve, deprived of your man’s marriage-bed.

I hear, as the report goes, that you threaten the groom,

the bride, and me, who gave her in marriage.

So I will be on guard before anyone suffers.

Better for you to hate me now, woman, 

than for me to be soft now and later groan in regret.

Medea

Puh! Not now for the first time, Kreon, but often,

has my reputation hindered and injured me.

No sensible man should ever educate

his sons to be overly clever. 

Aside from seeming lazy, they earn

envy and resentment from their neighbors.

If you bring a new idea to fools

you will seem useless, not clever.

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Medea 

But if the public considers you superior 

to the experts, they will be offended.

I, too, share in this lot:

The experts envy me for being clever,

while fools consider me a bother.

No, I am not so very clever. 

Yet you fear me. What unpleasantness could you suffer?

Kreon, don’t be afraid of me. I’m not the kind

to make a mistake with a man of the royal line.

What injustice have you done me?

You gave your daughter where your heart led you. 

Yes, I hate my husband. You, I think, acted sensibly.

Even now, I don’t resent that your affairs prosper.

Keep the marriage and fare well.

But allow me to live in this land. I will keep quiet,

even if wronged, conquered by those more powerful. 

Kreon

I hear your mild words, but I am terrified

that you may be planning something evil.

I trust you even less than before:

much easier to guard against an angry, sharp-tongued

woman – or man – than a silent clever one. 

Leave as quickly as possible: no more talk.

The matter is fixed and you cannot contrive

a way to remain among us, while hostile to me.

Medea

No, I beg you by your knees, by your newlywed daughter.

Kreon

You waste words. You will never persuade me. 

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 Euripides’ Medea

Medea

Will you cast me out, showing no respect at all for prayer?

Kreon

Yes, because I do not love you more than my home.

Medea

O my Fatherland, how strongly I remember you now.

Kreon

After my child, I love my country by far the most.

Medea

Puh! Loving is a great evil for mortals. 

Kreon

I suppose that depends on the circumstances.

Medea

Zeus, may you not forget who caused these troubles.

Kreon

Crawl away, foolish woman, and end my toils.

Medea

I have toils – no shortage of toils.

Kreon

My attendants will force you out at once. 

Medea (on her knees, grabs Kreon’s hand)

No, not that! Kreon, I beg you!

Kreon

You are making a scene, woman.

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Medea 

Medea

We’ll leave. I’m not pleading to revoke my exile.

Kreon

Then why still pressure me by not releasing my hand?

Medea

Allow me to remain for this one day 

to fully consider the means of our exile

and a refuge for my boys, since their father

does not care enough to plan at all for the children.

Pity them – you, too, are a father,

so naturally you would favor children. 

If we go into exile, I have no thought for myself,

but I weep for their lives in disaster.

Kreon

In no way is my temper tyrannical by nature;

I have often ruined matters by showing consideration.

Although I see I am making a mistake, woman, 

you shall succeed in your request. I proclaim to you:

If tomorrow the light of Helios sees

you and your children within our borders,

you will die. This sentence is fixed infallibly.

So now, if you must stay, stay for just one day. 

You will not do in a day the terrible things I fear.

Kreon exits City Path.

Chorus (chants)

Oh, unhappy woman,

miserable under your burdens,

where will you turn? What ally

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 Euripides’ Medea

or household or country 

will deliver you from troubles?

Medea, a god set you to sail

on a trackless sea-swell of troubles.

Medea

It has gone badly in all ways. Who will deny that?

But by no means are things set; don’t assume it. 

There are struggles ahead for the newlyweds

and no small labor for the one who made the match.

Do you think I would ever fawn on that man

without some profit or plan?

I would not have spoken or ever laid hands on him. 

Though he could block my plans by throwing me out,

he has reached such a pinnacle of foolishness

that he allows me to remain this one day,

in which I will make three of my enemies

corpses: the father, the daughter, and my husband. 

My friends, with so many fatal paths for them,

I do not know which to lay my hands on first.

Shall I set fire to the bridal home,

or stab through the heart with a sharp sword,

silently reaching the palace where their bed is laid? 

Just one thing bothers me. If I were caught

entering the house and in the act,

my death would provide my enemies a good laugh.

Best is the direct path, in which my nature

is most clever: to kill them with poison. 

Good.

They’re dead. Then which city will welcome me?

What host will save my skin, offering

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Medea 

refuge from violence and a safe house?

There is none. Then I must still wait a short time.

If some tower of safety should appear, 

I will silently pursue murder through deceit.

Or if inescapable fortune drives me out,

I’ll take up a sword, even if I am certain to die,

and kill them. I will go to the extremes of daring.

No one – by the mistress I chose as partner 

and revere most of all, Hekate,

who dwells in the innermost center of my hearth –

no one will torment my heart and rejoice.

I will make them a bitter and sorrowful marriage,

bitter the father-in-law and my exile from this land. 

Come now, Medea, spare nothing

from your skill in planning and devising.

Charge into the terrible fray! Now is the test of courage.

You see what you suffer? You must not be mocked

by Jason’s marriage into the house of Sisyphus: 

you, born of a noble father, himself from Helios the Sun.

You know how. Women by nature

utterly lack the means for noble actions,

but are the most clever architects of every evil.

Second Song

Chorus

Holy rivers run upstream; 

justice and everything flows in reverse.

With deceptive plans

men no longer keep

their pledge sworn to the gods.

Now the stories will change 

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 Euripides’ Medea

our lives for glory.

Honor arrives for womankind

and ugly rumor will settle

upon women no more.

The Muses of ancient bards 

will end the songs

of our unfaithfulness.

Apollo, god of music,

did not endow us

with inspired song to the lyre 

or we would have sung

a reply to mankind.

Long ages have much to tell about

the destinies of women and of men.

You sailed from your father’s home 

with a maddened heart, traveling through

the rocky shores of the Bosporos.

You live here as a foreigner,

your bed, now a manless union, lost.

Miserable woman, 

driven in exile from Korinth,

dishonored.

The Grace of oaths has vanished.

Shame no longer stays

in wide Greece, flown into the ether. 

Unhappy woman, you cannot find shelter

from your troubles on your father’s shore,

and another woman, a princess,

stronger than your marriage-bond,

commands your house. 

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Medea 

Scene Three:

Jason enters from City Path.

Jason

Not now for the first time have I observed, but often,

how a prickly anger causes impossible problems.

Although you could have stayed in this land and house

by lightly bearing the deliberations of your betters,

you will be banished for your foolish talk. 

It doesn’t matter to me that you never stop

blathering that Jason is the worst possible man.

But with your talk against the royal family,

consider it profit that you are only punished with exile.

While I always tried to calm the anger 

of the impassioned king and wanted you to stay,

you hung on to your stupidity, always slandering

the royal family. So you are banished from here.

Nevertheless, not denying the family in such circumstances,

I have come to provide for your welfare, woman, 

so that you might not be poor while in exile with children

nor in need of anything. Exile brings with it

many troubles. Even if you hate me,

I cannot ever think badly of you.

Medea

Vile bastard! I call you the worst curse 

my tongue can speak to your unmanly self.

You come to me, you come here most hated

by the gods and me and all the human race?

Such confidence is not courage,

to face the family you have wronged, 

but the greatest of all diseases among humans:

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 Euripides’ Medea

brazen shamelessness. You did well to come, though.

I can lighten my spirit by cursing you

and to listen will strike you with pain.

I will begin at the beginning: 

I saved you – as all the Greeks know

who sailed in the Argo with you –

when you were sent to tame and yoke fire-breathing

bulls, and sow the field with a deadly crop.

I killed the sleepless dragon that kept 

the Golden Fleece safe in its tangled coils

and so held up the light of salvation for you.

After I betrayed my father and my home,

I went with you to Iolkos,

more eager than wise. There I killed Pelias 

in the most dreadful way to die, at the hands

of his own daughters, destroying his whole house.

Then, after you benefited from all that I did,

worst of men, you betrayed me and took a new bride –

even though you have sons. If you were childless, 

one could understand you lusting for a new bed.

Trust in oaths has vanished. I cannot figure it out:

Do you think that the gods then in power no longer rule,

or that new laws now prevail for humans?

Since you know full well that you broke your oath to me. 

Puh! The pledge of my right hand that you often clasped.

These knees grasped falsely, beseeched by a wicked man.

I missed the mark in my expectations.

All right, I’ll talk with you since you are family.

What can I expect to gain from you? 

Under questioning, you’ll prove more shameful.

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Medea 

Where shall I turn now? To my father’s house,

which I betrayed along with my homeland to come with you?

Or to Pelias’ wretched daughters? They would give me,

their father’s killer, a warm welcome in that house. 

It’s like this: My kin in Kolchis despise me

and for your sake I made enemies

of those Greeks whom I need not have hurt.

In return for all that, you made me blessed

among Greek women. Unlucky me, 

I have marvelous, trustworthy you for husband,

while I flee the land, bereft of friends,

discarded, alone with the children, alone.

A fine reproach for a new bridegroom that your sons

wander as beggars, and I, too, who saved you. 

Zeus, why did you give humans signs

to clearly identify counterfeit gold,

but no mark on a man’s body

to distinguish the bad among men?

Chorus Leader

Terrible anger and hard to heal 

when kin clash with kin.

Jason

It seems I must prove myself an eloquent speaker,

woman, like an alert pilot on a ship

with sails mostly furled, to run from under

your loudmouthed, yapping tongue. 

Since you raise a monument to gratitude,

I consider Aphrodite alone the savior

of my expedition – of all gods and humans.

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 Euripides’ Medea

You do have a subtle mind. Yet to detail the whole story

of how Eros compelled you with his inescapable arrows 

to save my skin would cause resentment.

I will not itemize it too precisely.

Where you really did benefit me, you didn’t do badly.

In return for my salvation, though, you got

better than you gave, as I will explain. 

First, you live in Greece instead of a barbarian

land and you know justice and the rule

of law that doesn’t bow to force.

Second, all Greeks know you are clever

and you have fame. If you lived on the mountainous 

edge of the earth, nobody would know your story.

I would rather have a remarkable destiny

than either a house full of gold

or a song more potent than Orpheus.

I tell you these things about my labors 

because you started a contest of words.

As to the royal marriage for which you reproach me,

I will show that in this matter, I have been clever,

and sensible, and also a great friend to you

and my sons – but keep calm. 

When I moved here in exile from Iolkos,

dragging along many inescapable disasters,

what luckier find could I have found than the king’s

daughter to marry? Not because I hated your bed –

that’s what truly grates at you – 

or struck with desire for a new bride.

Or eager to hold a baby-making contest –

the current sons are sufficient. I have no complaint.

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Medea 

But most importantly, so that we might live well

and not lack things, knowing that everyone 

flees the path of a friend without means.

And that I could raise sons worthy of my house

and sow brothers for the children from you,

set them on the same footing, and prosper

by merging the family line. Why do you need sons? 

It is profitable for me if future children benefit

those alive now. Surely, I have not planned badly?

You would agree, if sex did not grate at you.

You women have reached a point where you think

that if things are right in bed you have everything. 

But if any misfortune happens to the marital bed,

you consider the best and finest as the worst.

Mortals should have another way to father sons

and no need for the female race.

Then mankind would have no trouble. 

Chorus Leader

Jason, you presented this story well.

In my opinion, contrary to your judgment,

you have unjustly betrayed your wife.

Medea

How very different I am from mortals in many ways.

In my mind, whoever speaks cleverly, 

while being unjust, deserves the most punishment.

Confident that his tongue will nicely cloak injustice,

he dares to do wrong. Yet he is not so very clever.

So you, too. Don’t wear a façade of decency to me

with a terribly clever speech. One point will knock you out. 

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 Euripides’ Medea

If you were not evil, you should have persuaded me

before making this marriage, not hidden it from your family.

Jason

Sure, I think if I had told you about my marriage,

you would gladly pull your oar for it. Even now

you can’t bear to cast off your heart’s great rage. 

Medea

No, you were thinking that a foreign wife

wouldn’t provide you glorious status in old age.

Jason

Now understand this: Not for the sake of a woman

did I marry into the bed of royalty as I now have,

but, just as I said before, wanting to rescue you 

from danger, and to produce for my boys royal

sons from the same source, a safeguard for my house.

Medea

Grant me no painful life with “prosperity,”

or “wealth” that grates on my mind.

Jason

You know how to change your prayer and seem wiser? 

Pray that good things never seem painful to you

and when you’re fortunate don’t think it bad fortune.

Medea

Add insult to injury, since you have refuge,

but I will be in exile from this land, abandoned.

Jason

You chose this. Blame no one but yourself. 

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Medea 

Medea

I did what? Took a wife and betrayed you?

Jason

No, cursed unholy curses against the royal family.

Medea

And I am truly a curse on your house.

Jason

I won’t dispute these things with you further.

If you want some aid from my wealth 

for the boys or yourself in exile, say so.

I am prepared to give my ungrudging hand

and send tokens to allies, who will treat you well.

Woman, you would be a fool to reject this.

Forget your anger. You’ll profit more. 

Medea

We would not use your connections

and won’t accept anything – don’t give it to us.

Gifts from a wicked man benefit no one.

Jason

So be it. I invoke the gods as witness that I wish

to do everything for you and the children. But no, 

good things are not enough for you. You reject friends

to please yourself. Well, you will suffer even more.

Jason begins to exit City Path.

Medea

Go on! Desire for the freshly-tamed girl seizes you,

out of sight of the palace for so long.

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 Euripides’ Medea

Go bed your wife! Perhaps, with a god’s favor, 

you marry such a marriage as will make you mourn.

Jason exits City Path.

Third Song

Chorus

The extreme passion of Eros

never grants men prestige

or virtue, but when Aphrodite

sends just enough love, 

no other god is so gracious.

Goddess, may you never shoot me

with inescapable arrows

from your golden bow,

anointed with desire. 

May moderation, the finest gift

of the gods, grace me.

May terrible Aphrodite

never cast into me

angry quarrels and endless strife, 

striking my heart for another bed.

Respecting peaceful unions,

may she judge marriage

for women wisely.

O fatherland, O home, 

may I never live without my city,

leading that difficult life without means,

most pitiable of sorrows.

I would rather death conquer me,

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Medea 

death ending my last day. 

No troubles can compare

to being deprived

of one’s native land.

We ourselves know

and can tell your story: 

No city, no allies

will pity your suffering,

most terrible suffering.

May anyone so ungrateful perish,

who is unwilling to honor his friends 

with the open doors of a pure heart.

Never will he be a friend to me.

Scene Four:

Aigeus enters from Gate Path.

Aigeus

Medea, I wish you joy! No one knows a finer

greeting than this to address friends.

Medea

Aigeus! Joy to you, King of Athens, son of wise Pandion. 

From where do you come to visit this land?

Aigeus

From Apollo’s ancient oracle.

Medea

Why travel to the earth’s center where prophecies are sung?

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 Euripides’ Medea

Aigeus

To inquire how I could sow the seed for children.

Medea

By the gods, no child through the course of your whole life? 

Aigeus

We have no children, by the grace of some god.

Medea

Do you have a wife or are you unmarried?

Aigeus

We are yoked in the bed of marriage.

Medea

Then what did Apollo tell you about children?

Aigeus

Words too clever for a man to interpret. 

Medea

Is it right for me to know the oracle of the god?

Aigeus

Certainly, since it truly needs a clever mind.

Medea

What was the response? Tell me, if indeed I may hear.

Aigeus

“Not to release the wineskin’s jutting foot –”

Medea

Until you do what or reach what land? 

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Medea 

Aigeus

“Until I return to my hearth and home.”

Medea

Then why have you sailed to this land?

Aigeus

To see Pittheus, lord of Troizen –

Medea

A son of Pelops and most virtuous, they say.

Aigeus

I wish to share with him the god’s prophecy. 

Medea

He is a clever man and skilled in such things.

Aigeus

Dearest to me of all my allies in battle.

Medea

Then good luck and may you attain your desire.

Aigeus

But why is your face so gaunt? And your eyes?

Medea

Aigeus, I have the worst husband of all. 

Aigeus

What are you saying? Why are you upset?

Medea

Jason wrongs me although suffering nothing from me.

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 Euripides’ Medea

Aigeus

Tell me more plainly. What has he done?

Medea

He has a woman other than me as mistress of his house.

Aigeus

No, surely he hasn’t dared this most shameful act? 

Medea

Now you know: He dishonors those he once loved.

Aigeus

From passion or despising your bed?

Medea

Oh, a great passion; he is unfaithful to his family.

Aigeus

Let him go then, if he is as bad as you say.

Medea

A passion to acquire a tyrant for a father-in-law. 

Aigeus

Who gave his daughter to Jason? Tell me more.

Medea

Kreon, who rules this land of Korinth.

Aigeus

Woman, no wonder you feel pain.

Medea

I am lost. And banished from the country.

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Medea 

Aigeus

Another new trouble. Who banishes you? 

Medea

Kreon banishes me from Korinth.

Aigeus

Jason will allow it? I don’t approve.

Medea

In words no, but he’s willing to endure it.

I beg you by your beard,

by your knees, I am a suppliant! 

Pity, pity me the unfortunate,

and after expulsion, don’t let me be abandoned.

Accept me in Athens, at the hearth in your home.

So may your desire for children, by gods, be fruitful

and may you be prosperous until death. 

You do not know what a find you found.

I will stop you from being childless, help you

sow the seeds for children. I know such a potion.

Aigeus

Woman, I am eager to grant this favor to you

for many reasons, and for the gods first of all. 

Then for your promise of children –

on that matter, I am utterly lost.

For my part, if you come to Athens,

I will try to protect you, as is just.

Nonetheless, I declare to you, woman, 

that I will not arrange your passage.

If you come to my house on your own,

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 Euripides’ Medea

you will remain safe. I will not give you up to anyone.

But you shall depart from this land on your own feet.

I wish to be blameless to my allies. 

Medea

So be it. If I might have a pledge

of this, it would set my mind at ease.

Aigeus

What is the problem? Surely, you don’t distrust me?

Medea

I trust you. But Pelias’ house is hostile to me

and Kreon’s, too. If you are bound by oaths, 

you would not release me to those who banish me.

With just a verbal agreement, not sworn to the gods,

you might become their friend and their demands

quickly persuade you – since my position is weak

and they have wealth and the palace of royalty. 

Aigeus

Your speech shows much forethought.

If an oath seems best to you, I won’t refuse.

After all, it is safer for me to be able

to show your enemies a proper excuse,

and it gives you more security. Name your gods. 

Medea

Swear by Earth’s plain and Helios, father of my father,

and the whole race of gods altogether.

Aigeus

Tell me what I ought to do or not do.

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Medea 

Medea

To never yourself cast me out of your land

and, if any of my enemies want to take me, 

to not willingly extradite me while you live.

Aigeus

I swear by Earth and the bright light of Helios

and all the gods to abide by what I hear from you.

Medea

Good. If you do not abide by this oath, what will you suffer?

Aigeus

Whatever happens to immoral men. 

Medea

Farewell, then, and safe journey. All is well.

I will come as quickly as possible to your city,

after doing what I intend and attaining what I wish.

Chorus (chants)

May lord Hermes, son of Maia,

escort you home. May you accomplish all 

that you have in mind to strive for,

since you seem to me,

Aigeus, a noble man.

Aigeus exits City Path.

Medea

O Zeus, and Zeus’ Justice, and light of Helios!

Now, my friends, we will have sweet victory 

over my enemies. We have set foot on that path.

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 Euripides’ Medea

Now I can hope my enemies will pay the just price.

Since that man appeared as the safe harbor

for my plans, satisfying my greatest concern,

I will fasten my cable 

to moor with him

in the city of Pallas Athena.

Now I will tell you my entire plan:

Accept what I say without hope of pleasure.

Sending off a servant of mine, 

I will ask Jason to come face me.

When he arrives, I will speak soft words to him:

that I see it his way, that he marries well

marrying royalty as he has (betraying us)

and that it is profitable and well conceived. 

Then I will ask if my sons can remain.

Not as if I would leave them here

for my enemies to abuse,

but for me to kill the king’s daughter through deceit.

I will send them with gifts in hand: 

a delicate dress and a golden tiara.

If she places the pretty things upon her skin,

the girl and all who touch her will die horribly;

I will anoint the gifts with such poisons.

Now I’m done with that subject. 

But I cry out at what deed I must do next:

I will kill my children, my own –

no one can rescue them.

After wiping out Jason’s whole house,

I will leave the land, 

flee the murder of my dearest boys,

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Medea 

daring this most unholy deed.

Friends, I will not tolerate mockery by my enemies.

Let it go! What profit in staying alive?

No country, no home, no way to turn from evil. 

I made a mistake when I abandoned my homeland,

trusting in the words of a Greek man.

Now he will pay me justice, gods willing.

Never will he see the sons I gave him alive

or father children from his newlywed bride – 

the evil girl must die an evil death by my poisons.

Let no one think me simple, weak,

or passive, but the opposite:

hard on my enemies and kind to my friends.

Those who live by this creed win the greatest glory. 

Chorus Leader

Since you have shared this account with us,

wishing to help you as well as supporting the laws

common to humanity, we forbid you to do this.

Medea

It can’t be otherwise. I forgive you for saying so,

since you aren’t suffering and I am. 

Chorus Leader

Woman, will you dare to kill your own seed?

Medea

Yes, to bite into my husband hardest.

Chorus Leader

You would truly be the most miserable woman.

Medea

So be it. All talk in the meantime is too much.

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 Euripides’ Medea

To Servant:

Hurry away and bring Jason, 

since I call on you in all matters needing trust.

Say nothing of my resolutions,

if you think well of your mistress and are a woman.

Servant exits City Path.

Fourth Song

Chorus

Since ancient times in Athens,

the sons of Erechtheus prospered: 

children of the blessed gods,

born from sacred land, unconquered,

feeding on most glorious wisdom,

ever strolling gracefully

through luminous air. 

Where, they say,

the nine holy Muses

of Pieria gave birth

to fair-haired Harmony.

Athenians celebrate how 

Aphrodite, drawing water

from the beautiful river Kephisos,

blows temperate breezes

over their land with her sweet breath.

Ever wearing a fragrant garland 

of roses on her hair,

she sends Love

to join with Wisdom,

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Medea 

partners in every kind

of excellence. 

How will this city

of sacred rivers

and safe passage for friends

keep a child-killer, you

unholy among the pure? 

Think again about striking these children;

think whose blood you shed.

By your knees, we beseech you

in every possible way:

Do not slay your children! 

Where will you find the audacity –

from your mind or from your children –

to lead your hand and heart

in such terrible daring?

How will you gaze at your children 

without tears, embracing the destiny of murder?

As your children fall pleading,

you will not have the strength

to wet your hand in their blood

with rash and reckless heart. 

Scene Five:

Jason enters from City Path.
Jason

I’ve come as you asked. You won’t fail in this

even though you dislike me. I will listen.

Woman, what new business do you wish of me?

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 Euripides’ Medea

Medea

Jason. I beg you to be understanding about

what I said. One expects you to bear my moods, 

since our long love has prepared the soil.

I talked it over and scolded myself:

“Stubborn woman, why be mad and bear

hard feelings against those who plan well?

Why stand as an enemy to the ruler of the land 

and to my husband, who acts most favorably for us,

marrying a princess and fathering brothers

for my children? Shall I not divorce my passion?

What is wrong with me, when the gods provide so well?

Don’t I have the boys, and don’t I know that 

we are exiles from this land and lack friends?”

With this in mind, I realized that I have been

misguided and pointlessly enraged.

So now I praise you and you seem to me sensible

to make this alliance, and I thoughtless. 

I ought to share in these plans and help out

and stand by the bed, pleased to tend your bride.

Well, we women are such as we are –

I won’t say exactly “wicked.”

Still, you should not match our wickedness, 

or pay back foolishness with foolishness.

I ask for pardon and claim that I reasoned wrongly

then, but now reconsider for the better.

Oh boys, boys, come here, leave the house

and come outside! Welcome your father 

Children with Tutor enter from skenē.

and speak to him with me. Join mother

in changing hate into friendship.

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Medea 

We made a truce and the rage is gone.

Clasp right hands . . .

(Oimoi! I’m thinking of hidden harm. 

My boys, will you reach out your dear arms

like this your long life through? I am miserable,

close to tears and full of fear.)

My quarrel with your father over at last,

this tender sight fills me with tears. 

Chorus Leader

A fresh tear falls from my eyes, too.

May greater harm not follow this one.

Jason

I approve, woman, and I don’t blame you.

One expects females to get mad

when husbands smuggle in other marriages. 

But your heart has changed for the better;

you recognize the winning plan at last.

These are actions of a sensible woman.

Sons, your father has most thoughtfully

created great security for you, gods willing. 

I believe you will yet be among the elite

with your future brothers here in Korinth.

Grow up, and the rest your father will handle,

with whoever of the gods is kind.

May I see you when you’ve grown into strong, 

young men, triumphant over my enemies.

Woman, why do you turn your pale cheek,

your eyes wet with fresh tears,

and not accept my words gladly?

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 Euripides’ Medea

Medea

It’s nothing. I’m thinking about these children. 

Jason

Now, take heart. I will arrange all things well for them.

Medea

I’ll do that. I won’t distrust your words.

But a woman is female and prone to tears.

Jason

Why so much moaning about these children?

Medea

I gave birth to them. When you prayed that the children 

would live, pity washed over me. Will it happen?

Never mind, you came to speak with me for their sake:

Part I’ve said; the rest I will mention.

The royal family has decided to banish me.

I know well that this is best for me, too, 

not to be underfoot for you or the rulers,

since I seem unfriendly to the palace.

All right, I will leave here for exile.

But ask Kreon not to drive your sons from this land

so that you may raise them with your own hand. 

Jason

I might not persuade him, but I must try.

Medea

Then urge your wife to entreat her father

not to banish your sons from Korinth.

Jason

Certainly. And I do expect to persuade her,

if she is a woman like all the rest. 

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Medea 

Medea

I, too, will help you in this task,

by sending her gifts far more beautiful,

I know, than any among mortals:

a delicate dress and a golden tiara,

which your sons will carry. One of the servants 

should quickly bring the pretty things here.

Servant hands Medea dress and tiara in a box or basket.

Your bride will be happy, not in one but myriad ways:

She wins you for bedmate, the best of men,

and the finery which my grandfather

Helios once gave to his own descendents. 

Grasp the dowry, boys, in your hands

and give it to the blessed princess bride.

She will welcome these faultless gifts.

Jason

You fool, why empty your hands? Keep these riches.

Do you suppose the royal palace lacks dresses 

or, do you suppose, gold? Don’t give them away.

If a wife considers me worthy of any account,

I know that she’ll rank me higher than rich goods.

Medea

No, they say “gifts persuade even gods.”

Gold is stronger to mortals than countless words. 

A lucky spirit favors her, now a god makes her fortune grow:

She’s young and a princess. I would trade my life,

not just gold, to revoke the exile of my boys.

Children, go to the wealthy palace

to your father’s new wife, my mistress. 

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 Euripides’ Medea

Beseech her, beg her not to banish you,

give her these pretty things. Take care that

she receives these gifts into her own hands.

Medea gives them to the children.

Go quickly, and bring back the good news

mother desires – of your success. 

Jason, children, and Tutor exit City Path.

Fifth Song

Chorus

Now we can no longer hope for the children’s lives,

not now, when they march off to their murder.

The bride will accept the golden headband,

the poor girl will accept ruin.

Her own hands will set 

the finery of Hades

upon her yellow hair.

Charm and the ambrosial gleam will persuade

her to put on the dress and gold wrought crown.

Already she wears her bridal dress, 

a bride among the dead.

She will fall into such a trap,

the destiny of death, poor girl.

She will not escape from ruin.

(To Jason)

You reckless, poorly wed 

son-in-law of royalty,

ignorant that you bring

destruction upon your children’s lives,

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Medea 

and your wife a horrible death.

Unhappy man, how far you’ve strayed 

from your destiny.

(To Medea)

Next, we mourn with your grief,

reckless mother of sons, who will murder

children for the sake of a bridal bed

because your husband lawlessly 

abandoned you to join in another union.

Scene Six:

Tutor enters with the children from City Path.

Tutor

Mistress, your children have escaped exile,

and the royal bride gladly accepts the gifts

from their hands. There is peace for the boys.
What?

Why are you upset with good fortune? 

Medea

Ah, no!

Tutor

That is not in tune with the news.

Medea

No, again!

Tutor

Surely I’m not the messenger of misfortune

without knowing it? Was I wrong to think it good news? 

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 Euripides’ Medea

Medea

You brought the message – I don’t blame you.

Tutor

Then why are your eyes downcast? Why are you crying?

Medea

Necessity forces me, old man. I was thinking wrongly

when I – and the gods – arranged these things.

Tutor

Take heart. Your sons will bring you back yet. 

Medea

I will sooner bring down others, miserable me.

Tutor

You are not alone in being parted from your children.

Human beings must lightly bear misfortunes.

Medea

So I will. But go inside the house

and prepare for the children’s daily needs. 

Tutor exits skenē; children stay on stage.

Boys, my boys, this is your city and home

where you will live, forever deprived

of your mother, leaving me in misery.

I go to another land, a refugee,

before enjoying you and seeing you happy. 

Before prenuptial baths and wives, before

I adorn your wedding beds and raise the torches.

Most miserable from pleasing myself !

I raised you in vain, children, after all.

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Medea 

In vain, I labored and was torn with pains, 

bearing cruel grief in childbirth.

This unhappy woman once had many hopes in you,

that you would take care of me in old age,

and all would envy me when I die

since your own hands would shroud me. 

Now these sweet thoughts perish. Without you

I will lead a painful life, full of grief.

Your dear eyes will no longer see your mother

when you withdraw to another state of life.

Oh! Boys, why this look in your eyes? 

Why do you smile your last smile at me?

Ah! What shall I do? Women, my heart is utterly lost

looking into the bright eyes of my children.

I cannot do it – goodbye my plans.

I will take my boys from this land. 

Why should I hurt their father with their anguish,

and win twice as much anguish for myself ?

No, I cannot. Goodbye plans.

And yet . . . why should I suffer? Do I want

to be mocked for not punishing my enemies? 

I must dare to do this. Such cowardice

to even admit soft words in my mind.

Children, into the house.

Children head toward skenē but are occupied by attendant by the doors.

Medea moves to where they cannot hear her.

Whoever thinks it not right to attend my sacrifice,

stay at your own risk. I will not weaken my hand. 

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 Euripides’ Medea

Ah! No truly, my heart, no, don’t do it.

Let them be, wretched heart! Spare the children.

Living there with us, they will bring us joy.

No, no by Hades’ avengers,

this can never be, that I surrender 

my boys to my enemies to abuse.

Anyway, what’s done is done.

The royal bride won’t escape.

Now in the dress, with the crown

on her head, she dies, I know. 

Since I will travel the most miserable road

and send them down one more miserable still,

I wish to speak to the children.

Medea and children come together.

My boys, give, give mother

your right hand to caress. 

Dearest hand, children’s mouth,

noble form and face so dear to me.

May you be happy, but there; your father

took away life here. O sweet embrace,

the soft skin and sweetest breath of children. 

Go in, go! I can’t look at you any longer

while anguish defeats me.

Children exit skenē.

I understand what evil I intend to do,

but my heart is master of my plans.

That heart causes mortals the greatest evil. 

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Medea 

Chanted interlude in place of song.

Chorus

Often we speak about subjects more subtle

and engage in debates greater

than womankind should seek.

For the sake of wisdom,

the Muses also speak 

with a few of us, not all,

maybe one among many.

Yet the Muses do inspire

a small group of women.

We say those who never bear children 

nor have anything to do with them

find greater happiness than parents.

Without trial and error,

the childless never discover

whether children bring pleasure or pain, 

and so escape from many labors.

But those with the sweet sprout

of children in their home, we see them

worn down by care every day.

How will they nurture the children? 

How to leave them a livelihood?

Even then, who knows

if they labor for bad children or good?

We must state the worst anguish of all

for every human being. 

Suppose parents find an adequate living

and the young bodies grow into youth

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 Euripides’ Medea

and the children truly are good.

If Fate brings it about,

Death flies off to Hades 

with the children’s bodies in tow.

How is this most painful sorrow,

piled onto the rest

that gods inflict upon mortals,

worthwhile for the sake of children? 

Scene Seven:

Medea

My friends, after waiting so long, I’m watching

to see how the affairs in the palace turn out.

Look – a messenger approaches, a servant of Jason.

His frantic breathing shows

he must be bringing bad news. 

Messenger enters from City Path.

Messenger

Flee, Medea, flee! Neglect

no transport by land or sea.

Medea

What has happened that merits my flight?

Messenger

Just now the royal princess and her father

Kreon, too, perished from your poison. 

Medea

You tell the loveliest tidings. You’ll be among

my friends and benefactors from now on.

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Medea 

Messenger

What are you saying?

Woman, are you thinking straight, not mad?

You rejoice at the news and fear no consequences 

after assaulting the hearth of the royal family?

Medea

I could offer some kind of rebuttal.

But don’t be hasty, friend.

Tell me: How did they die? You would please me

twice as much if they died horribly. 

Messenger

When the two children, your offspring, arrived

with their father, and entered the newlyweds’ apartment,

we were pleased, we slaves who wearied of your

troubles. Straightaway our ears picked up the talk

that you and your husband had resolved your quarrel. 

One of us kissed a little hand, another a child’s

blond head. I even followed the children

in pleasure into the women’s quarters.

The mistress we honor now instead of you

eagerly kept her eye on Jason 

until she saw your two children.

Then she covered her eyes

and turned her pale cheek,

loathing the boys’ entrance. Your husband,

to sooth the temper and rage of his bride, 

said: “You won’t be unfriendly to family, will you?

End your anger and turn your head,

considering as kin anyone your husband does.

Won’t you accept these gifts and for my sake

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 Euripides’ Medea

ask your father to release my sons from exile?” 

When she looked at the finery, she could not resist,

but agreed with her husband on everything.

Before father and sons had gone far from the palace,

she put on the embroidered dress,

and placing the golden tiara around her curls, 

she arranged her hair in the shining mirror,

smiling at the lifeless image of her body.

Then rising from her chair, she walked about

the house, her pale white feet stepping daintily.

Utterly charmed by the gifts, her eyes 

kept checking the hem, her ankle.

After that, it truly was a terrible sight to behold:

Her skin changing, her limbs trembling,

she staggered, bent over,

fell into a chair, nearly sinking to the ground. 

An old servant entered and, thinking either

divine possession by Pan or another god,

raised a joyous cry – until she saw white foam

frothing from her mouth, the pupils of her eyes

rolling back, and her bloodless skin. 

Then instead of the cry of joy, the old woman sang out

a loud shriek. Straightaway one servant rushed

to her father’s quarters and another to her new husband

to tell them of the bride’s calamity.

All the palace pounded with a flurry of running. 

Before a fast sprinter could reach the finish line

in the last leg of a stadium race,

the poor girl, mute with eyes shut tight,

started up, groaning terribly.

A twofold pain attacked her: 

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Medea 

The golden tiara encircling her head

shot forth a miraculous stream of all devouring fire,

while the delicate dress ate the white flesh

of the bedeviled girl – the gifts from your children.

Rising from the chair, she fled, on fire, 

shaking her hair and head every which way,

desperate to throw off the crown. But the gold band

held firmly, and the fire, after she shook

her hair, blazed twice as fiercely as before.

She fell to the ground conquered by disaster. 

Only a parent could recognize her:

The shape of her eyes and noble face

distorted, as blood mixed with fire

dripped down from the top of her head.

Her flesh melted away from the bones, weeping 

like pine resin from the poison’s unseen jaws,

a terrible sight. Everyone feared to touch

the body, for we thought her fate a lesson.

Her reckless father, ignorant of her misfortune,

suddenly entered the room and fell upon the corpse. 

He groaned, throwing his arms around her,

kissed her, and said: “My poor daughter,

what god destroyed you so dishonorably?

Who makes childless an old man near his grave?

Oimoi! May I die with you, my child!” 

When he stopped mourning and lamenting,

he needed his aged body to rise,

but he stuck to the delicate dress like ivy

to shoots of laurel. They wrestled terribly

as he tried to pull himself to his knees, 

while she held him fast. When he applied force,

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 Euripides’ Medea

she ripped his old flesh from the bones.

In time he gave way and the doomed man surrendered

his life, no longer stronger than the poison.

The bodies lie together, daughter with old father, 

a calamity longing for tears.

I left your part out of the telling:

You will know your own punishment in turn.

Not for the first time, I think human life a shadow,

and I would say without fear that those people 

who seem to be clever and play with words

bring upon themselves the greatest folly.

Nobody human can be happy.

When wealth flows in, one man may

be luckier than another, but not happy, no. 

Messenger exits City Path.

Chorus Leader

A divinity seems to justly merge

many disasters for Jason in one day.

How we pity your misfortunes,

daughter of Kreon, vanished to Hades

because of marriage with Jason. 

Medea

My friends, I am determined to act:

kill the boys at once, then depart.

I must not, by lingering, give the children

to someone else to murder with a harsher hand.

It is necessary for them to die, and since they must, 

I who gave them birth will kill them.

Now arm yourself, my heart! Why delay

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Medea 

doing the terrible and necessary evil?

Yes, my reckless hand, take up the sword,

take it. Step up to the painful start of your life. 

Don’t be cowardly, don’t remember the children,

how very dear, how you gave them birth,

but for this brief day forget your sons,

then mourn. Even if you kill them, even so

they are dear – unfortunate woman that I am. 

Medea exits skenē to kill the children – her first exit.

Sixth Song

Chorus

Earth and all-shining ray of Helios,

look down on the destructive woman,

before she attacks her children

with a bloody, kin-slaying hand.

She grew from your golden race, and now 

we dread that blood descended from a god

will spill upon the earth by mortal hands.

Zeus-born light, hold her,

stop her, rid the house of the reckless

and bloodstained avenging Fury. 

The labor of childbearing is lost, in vain.

Leaving the most inhospitable

strait of the dark Clashing Rocks,

you bore dear offspring in vain, after all.

Sorry creature, why does mind-oppressing 

rage fall on you and frenzied murder

follow these other deaths?

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 Euripides’ Medea

The stain of kindred blood is hard for humans;

grief from the gods in due measure

falls upon the house of murderers. 

Children speak from inside skenē.

Child

Oh, help me!

Chorus (speaks)

Do you hear a shout? Hear the children?

O reckless woman, evil fate!

Child A

Oimoi, what can I do? Where run from mother’s hands?

Child B

I don’t know, dearest brother – we’re lost!

Chorus (sings)

Shall I enter the house? I am determined 

to prevent the children’s murder.

Child A

Yes, by the gods, stop her in time!

Child B

We are so close now to the sword’s trap.

Chorus (sings)

Wretch, so you truly are rock or iron,

since you will kill the crop of children 

you bore, their doom by your own hand.

Children’s screams stop abruptly.

Only one we’ve heard of, one woman before

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Medea 

who cast her hand against her own children.

When Zeus’ wife Hera drove Ino mad

and sent her from the house in a daze, 

the miserable mother fell into the sea

for her children’s unholy murder.

Stretching a foot over the sea cliff,

Ino perished, dying with her two sons.

What terrible act is still impossible? 

O women’s marriage bed of many woes,

such evil you have already done to humankind!

Scene Eight:

Jason enters City Path.

Jason

Women standing out here,

is she in the house? She’s done terrible deeds.

Medea. Or has she already fled? 

She must be hidden beneath the earth

or her body aloft on wings into the high ether,

not to pay the just penalty to the royal palace.

Does she think she can escape from this house

unpunished after killing the rulers of the land? 

But forget her – my thoughts are for the children.

Those she harmed will do the same to her.

I came to save the lives of my sons,

fearing that the king’s kin would act against us

to exact retribution for their mother’s unholy murders. 

Chorus Leader

Miserable man. You do not know your troubles,

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 Euripides’ Medea

Jason, or you would not have said those words.

Jason

What is it? I expect she wishes to kill me, too?

Chorus Leader

Your sons are dead by their mother’s hand.

Jason

Oimoi! What do you mean? Woman, you destroy me! 

Chorus Leader

Understand that your sons no longer live.

Jason

Where did she kill them? In the house or out?

Chorus Leader

Open the gates to view the murder of your children.

Jason

Unfasten the bar quickly, servants.

Release the lock, so I can see the double evil: 

the dead and her – to exact justice.

Medea enters on crane above stage in a dragon chariot (the deus ex

machina).

Medea

Why knock about and try to pry open the gates,

searching for the corpses and me who did it?

Cease your labor. If you have need of me,

say what you want. Your hand will never touch me. 

Helios, father of my father, gave me this chariot,

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Medea 

a defense against an enemy hand.

Jason

Vile woman! The gods, I, and all

the human race utterly despise you!

You had the audacity to plunge a sword 

into your children, destroying me, childless.

Can you look upon the sun and earth,

after daring this most monstrous deed?

Damn you! I see now what I was blind to

when I brought you from your barbarian 

home to a Greek household: an abomination,

traitor to your father and land that raised you.

The gods have hurled your avenging spirit at me

ever since you killed your brother by the hearth

and set sail on Argo, my beautiful ship. 

So you began. Even though you were married

to me and had born me children, you murdered them.

All because of sex and a marriage bed.

No Greek woman exists who would ever

dare this, yet I picked you to marry – 

a hateful, destructive marriage for me –

a lioness, not a woman, more savage

than the Etruscan Scylla.

But a million more insults would not bite into you,

such boldness is your true nature. 

Die, you shameless, polluted child-killer.

What’s left for me but to mourn my fate?

I won’t profit by my new bride

and cannot speak to my sons alive,

sons I bred and reared, and then lost. 

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 Euripides’ Medea

Medea

I would say much to refute your tale,

if father Zeus did not know

how you benefited from me and what you did.

You could not dishonor my bed

and live a delightful life mocking me. 

The princess and Kreon, your marriage broker,

could not have impunity to throw me out of here.

That’s the way it is. Go on, call me a lioness,

if you wish, and Etruscan Scylla.

I attacked your heart, as needed. 

Jason

You hurt yourself and share in the suffering.

Medea

True – but it’s worth the pain to still your laughter.

Jason

Children, what an evil mother you had!

Medea

Boys, a sick father destroyed you.

Jason

No, my right hand did not destroy them. 

Medea

But your arrogance and new marriage did.

Jason

You thought it right to kill them over sex?

Medea

You think this a minor insult for a woman?

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Medea 

Jason

Yes, for a sensible one. You are pure evil.

Medea (points at corpses)

These here no longer live – that will bite at you. 

Jason

They live on – oimoi – as avengers for your head.

Medea

The gods know who began this calamity.

Jason

They know well your despicable mind.

Medea

So despise me. I loathe your bitter voice.

Jason

Just as I yours – so parting is easy. 

Medea

What shall I do? I’m ready and willing.

Jason

Let me bury these bodies and then weep.

Medea

No. I shall bury them with my own hand,

bringing them to the sanctuary of Hera Akraia

where no enemy can abuse them, digging up 

their graves. I shall establish for all time

in this land of Sisyphus a hallowed festival

and due rites for this unholy murder.

I will depart for the land of Erechtheus

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 Euripides’ Medea

to live with Aigeus, son of Pandion, in Athens. 

You will die badly, as a bad man deserves:

struck on the head with a timber scrap from Argo,

having seen the bitter end from my marriage.

Chanted from here to end.

Jason

May the children’s Furies

and deadly Justice destroy you. 

Medea

What god or spirit listens to you,

oath liar and deceiver of allies?

Jason

Foul abomination! Child-killer!

Medea

Go home and bury your wife.

Jason

I go, deprived of two children. 

Medea

You don’t mourn yet. Just wait for old age.

Jason

O dearest children.

Medea

Dearest to their mother, not you.

Jason

And so you killed them?

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Medea 

Medea

To hurt you.

Jason

Oimoi, the misery! How I long to press

my sons’ dear mouths close to me. 

Medea

You speak to them now, embrace them now.

Back then you pushed them away.

Jason

By the gods, allow me

to touch the soft skin of my children.

Medea

Not possible. You fling words in vain.

Medea flies off.

Jason

Do you hear how I am driven away, Zeus, 

and what I suffer from this foul,

child-killing lioness?

With all my strength

I sing a dirge and invoke the gods

as my witness. Medea, you killed my children, 

then prevent my hands

from touching them, burying their bodies.

If only I never had them

to see them slain by you.

Chorus

Zeus in Olympos oversees many things; 

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 Euripides’ Medea

much the gods accomplish despite our hopes.

The expected did not come to pass;

a god found a passage for the unexpected.

Thus ends this matter of Medea.

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Audience Uncertainty and Euripides’ Medea
Author(s): Stuart Lawrence
Source: Hermes, 125. Bd., H. 1 (1997), pp. 49-55
Published by: Franz Steiner Verlag
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AUDIENCE UNCERTAINTY AND EURIPIDES’ MEDEA

In the words of Charles SEGAL writing on the ‘Bacchae’, Euripides’ “‘ feeling
for the tragic antinomies of life”…finds its clearest expression in doubling, the
pairing of opposites, and the sliding of opposites into one another’.’ Ambiguity
and unresolved contradiction are typical of this tragedian. In the ‘Bacchae’ for
example the god Dionysus embodies various polarities: male and female, Greek
and foreign, rational and non-rational, agent and victim, god and beast, god and
human being. In some sense, literal or figurative, all of these oppositions apply
also to ‘Medea’, and the play is disturbing because the protagonist arouses
conflicting responses2. Indeed, Euripides fosters ambivalence and ambiguity part-

ly through the play’s tadvotx and partly at the emotional level by eliciting at
different times sympathy or alienation. The spectators (and especially the men)
are compelled thereby to view, however reluctantly, Medea’s psychology as
relevant to their own, although after the infanticide they may feel the impulse to

dismiss her as totally alien, as a highly emotional and irrational barbarian sorcer-

ess who could have nothing in common with a sensible and decent Greek male.
Ambivalence and ambiguity are at once to the fore in the prologos where, if the

audience entered the theatre expecting to see Medea the exotic criminal, they
received essentially (though not entirely) the opposite impression3. The nurse, the

tutor and the chorus of Corinthian women are all well-disposed towards Medea
and severely critical of Jason4. We are informed of her services to him at

1 C. SEGAL, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ ‘Bacchae’, Princeton 1982, 25. SEGAL here
quotes F. WASSERMANN, Man and God in ‘Bacchae’ and ‘Oedipus at Colonus’, in: Studies

presented to David M. Robinson, ed. C. Mylonas and D. Raymond 2, St Louis 1953, 563.

2 ‘The ‘Medea’s’ harsh effect on the audience is further intensified by the fact that the
reactions demanded from them at various points are so turbulently contradictory. Euripides did

not simply show his audience complexities; he made them feel them in the confused tumble of

their emotional responses to the characters and their actions’ (E. A. McDERMOTI, Euripides’

Medea. The Incarnation of Disorder, Penn State UP 1989, her emphasis 78). G. H. GELLIE, The

Character of Medea, Bull.Inst. Class.Stud. 35, 1988, 19, sees Medea as ‘a conglomerate of

qualities shaped by various influences into a creature who can fill a stage or a story but was never

seen walking down a street.’

3 D. L. PAGE, Euripides. Medea, Oxford 1938, xviii-xxi, thought that Euripides’ audience

would respond to Medea the foreigner in terms of certain stereotypes. The view has found little

favour, but the poet may have counted on the existence of such prejudices and then set about
overturning them. E. HALL, Inventing the Barbarian, Oxford 1989, 17, 35 n. 110, suggests that it

may have been Euripides who transformed Medea into a barbarian.

4 E.g. 49ff., 82-88, 173ff.

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50 STUART LAWRENCE

considerable cost to herself, of her subsequent loyal submissiveness as his wife, of

her acceptance by the Corinthians and of Creon’s intention to banish her from

Corinth. We hear too her heartbroken cries from within the house5. In counter-

point to all of this, however, we are reminded that in helping Jason Medea was

prepared to go to barbarous lengths, that she is a dangerous and formidable

adversary, that she hates her own children, that she may strike down friends

indiscriminately with foes and that she is impervious to advice or influence6.

These antithetical ideas and feelings merge or alternate. The Pelias affair is cited

as a service to Jason, but it is also an instance of Medea’s ruthless criminality.

Medea’s sufferings move us to pity but also alienate us by their almost inhuman

excess (she is likened to inanimate nature at 28-29) – and there is the threat to the

children7.

The technique of Medea’s great address to the chorus (214ff.) is similar. The

audience would sympathise with Medea the victim of an extreme situation to the

point perhaps of wanting revenge for her sake, but the retaliation intimated is

clearly a murder (iaucpovoycpa, 266) of which the audience could not have

morally approved. It will not do here to appeal to the dictum ‘harm your enemies’

because, firstly, the audience’s sympathy is too equivocal to count as identifica-

tion with Medea, and, secondly, what is in prospect is the killing of a husband and

that for a crime considerably less than Agamemnon’s in Aeschylus where the

chorus, despite their condemnation of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, are utterly

appalled by his wife’s deed8.

Medea’s argument in this speech creates a further unease. In describing the

social disabilities of women so readily recognisable to an audience she provides

S E.g. 9-15, 31-35, 70-72, 96-98, 143-47. B. GREDLEY, The Place and Time of Victory:

Euripides’ ‘Medea’, Bull.Inst.Class.Stud. 34, 1987, 27-29, remarks on the importance of the

crvij, or the area behind it, as the locus of Medea’s alienation, from which her emotions spill

out on the stage.

6 E.g. 9, 28f., 36-45.

7 ‘Medea herself is presented in all the alarming violence of her passion, but framed by the

sympathy of the Nurse and chorus, and therefore to be seen by the audience as a victim, even if

also as a potential criminal’. P. E. EASTERLING, The Infanticide in Euripides’ ‘Medea’, Yale

Class.Stud. 25, 1977, 181. D. J. CONACHER, Euripidean Drama, Toronto 1967, 187, observes: ‘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’.

Euripides’ use of the mythic sources and the question of the originality of the deliberate

infanticide is discussed by PAGE (n. 3) xxiff. The question of the priority of Neophron’s play is the

subject of a study by A. N. MICHELINI, Neophron and Euripides, Medea 1065-80, T.A.Ph.A. 119

(1989), 115-35. W. STEIDLE, Studien zum antiken Drama, Munich 1968, 154 n. 16, finds the

references to Medea’s hatred of the children fully intelligible to an audience only if they were

aware of a prior tradition of deliberate infanticide, whereas T. V. BUTTREY, Accident and Design

in Euripides’ ‘Medea’, AJ.Ph. 79 (1958), 12-14 discusses possible audience reactions to refe-

rences to the children precisely on the opposite assumption.

8 Ag. 1399ff.

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Audience Uncertainty and Euripides’ Medea 51

one context at any rate for explaining her later deeds, at least when she appends

the exacerbating factor of her status as an exile. There is no attempt here to define

her situation by ethnicity or individual temperament, i.e. that she is a barbarian

and naturally passionate,and therefore more likely to kill. If an audience goes with

Medea on this, they may well have to think that a Greek woman in this extreme

situation might have been capable of similar bloody deeds9. There is no invitation

to dismiss Medea as alien to the spectator’s psychology or culture.

If an audience experiences a blend of amoral admiration and moral unease at

Medea’s Odyssean manipulation of Creon and exploitation of his sensitivity to a

supplication10, a higher intensity of emotional ambivalence and conceptual uncer-

tainty arises out of Medea’s reactions after that scene. In this monologue, which

falls into two parts, Medea begins by relishing the fulfilment of her vindictive

schemes now spelt out fully for the first time (364-85), at which point it is at least

doubtful that the audience are actively supporting Medea rather than standing in

awe of her singleminded audacity. If they are responding morally at all they will

condemn a revenge that cuts down the innocent with the guilty. In any event

Medea is not here explicable as the representative Greek or Athenian woman, and

the reference to her skill in drugs (384-85) recalls the tradition of Medea the

sorceress11. On the other hand, her determination to silence the laughter of her

enemies puts her in the company of the male heroes of Greek legend and morally

on the same ground in principle as such decent men as Plato’s Polemarchus12.

9 Euripides makes his audience aware that ‘pressures analogous to those working upon

Medea exist in their own comfortable homes’. K. J. RECKFORD, Medea’s First Exit, T.A.Ph.A. 99

(1968), 339. ‘Medea is a barbarian with incalculable power; she is also an archetypal Married

Wife, and as such an isolated foreigner. This second aspect of Medea, together with the

relentlessly recognizable portrait of her as a woman wronged, is designed to prevent every man in

the audience from comfortably dissociating her from his own Greek spouse’. M. VISSER, Medea:

Daughter, Sister, Wife and Mother, in: Greek Tragedy and its Legacy (ed. CROPP. et al.), Calgary

1986, 152. H. ROHDICH, Die Euripideische Tragodie, Heidelberg 1968, 47f., sees Medea as a

‘normal’ woman different from the chorus only in the extremity of her circumstances.

10 R. G. A. BUXrON, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy, Cambridge 1982, 35, commends

Creon’s sense of ai&& here. For a dissenting view see D. KoVACS, Zeus in Euripides’ ‘Medea’,

A.J.Ph. 114 (1993) 56.

11 B. M. W. KNox, The ‘Medea’ of Euripides, Yale Class.Stud. 25 (1977) 211-16, denies

that Medea is any more a sorceress than Creusa or Deianeira who have recourse to drugs with

supernatural associations or ingredients. But Medea is a professional: S. P. MILLS, The Sorrows of
Medea, Cl.Phil. 75 (1980) 291-93, cites ‘the magical aid Medea gave Jason in his Colchian

adventures… (476-82)’, the murder of Pelias, ‘alluded to frequently (9-10, 486-87, 504-5, 734),
…Medea’s origin as not merely a foreigner but as someone who entered Greece from outside the
whole known world… (1-2,.. .210-12, 431-33, 1262-64)’, and Medea’s offer to cure Aegeus’
childlessness. See also CONACHER (n. 7) 186, M. P. CUNNINGHAM, Medea &no’ gqXcavfj;, CI.Phil.
49 (1954) 153.

12 Republic 332b. When ‘Euripides gives the barbarian witch the ideals of a traditional

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52 STUART LAWRENCE

In the second part of the monologue (386-409) Medea the victim briefly

reappears (386-89), but before sympathy has developed any momentum Medea

the sorceress re-emerges with Medea the desperate and determined ‘Sophoclean’

hero13 (391ff.), the woman who forms her self-view on the basis of her highly
distinguished ancestry (406). So by the time the speech ends with a sarcastic

reference to a stereotype about evil, scheming women that seem to offer an escape

hatch to those who would dissociate themselves from Medea (407-9), it is at least

clear that nothing is as clear as such stereotypes would suggest.

In a short ode (410-45) the chorus claim that Jason’s treatment of Medea has

discredited the traditional prejudice about female deceitfulness, making the barba-

rian woman the positive pole of an antithesis that has Greek males at its other end

(410-30, 439-40). But the audience can reflect that Medea herself has just shown

herself to be the arch-deceiver. The play will offer no evidence at all for (or indeed

against) the cultural superiority of non-Greeks. None of Medea’s behaviour up to
this point has been explained as the product of an alien society14. The nurse

attributed her excesses to her royal upbringing (1 19-21)15, and even Creon, while
expressing fear of her ao(pia in drugs, made no mention of any suspect foreign

vOgoI (282-91).
The first two scenes with Jason explore in a problematical way the relation of

reason to emotion. In his criticism of what he clearly considers Medea’s stupid

emotionalism (446-58) Jason casts himself in the role of a cool, sensible man who

plans intelligently for the future (459-63, 547-73). But the spectator cannot

accept this implied antithesis. Medea is certainly emotional, and her threats were

stupid, but she is now concealing her feelings in the interests of a carefully plotted

revenge. People sometimes assume, as Jason does here, that strong emotions are

antithetical to and incompatible with rational planning. But the spectator knows

from what he has seen of Medea how simplistic this is. The scene of false

reconciliation will confirm it and the Great Monologue show just how reason and

emotion are tragically related in Medea. Jason, who to his own misfortune does

not realise it, himself appears immune to strong feelings, the good as well as the

bad. But not only is Jason unemotional; he is unheroic. We see this when Medea

reinterprets his exploits as her own (476-87). Again we are debarred from taking
refuge in stereotypes. It is worth noting too that Jason’s male Greek fame is based

on the achievements of a barbarian female16.

Greek hero he is surely suggesting that there is no safe dividing line; civilized life is always most

precariously poised, continually threatened from within’ – EASTERLING (n. 7) 191.

13 KNox (n. 11) 196-206.
14 ‘If Medea is to be seen as a distinctively oriental type.. why does Euripides make her

talk like a Greek, argue like a Greek, and to all appearances feel like a Greek? – EASTERLING (n. 7)

180, her emphasis. See also KNox (n. 11) 217.

15 For Medea as virtually a tyrannus see PAGE (n. 3) ad 119-30 and K. VON FRIrz, Antike

und moderne Tragodie, Berlin 1962, 357.

16 On Medea’s contribution and Jason’s status as a flawed hero see VON FRITZ (n. 15) 33 If.,

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Audience Uncertainty and Euripides’ Medea 53

In the brief ode that follows the scene of spurious reconciliation (976-1001)

the chorus divide their sympathy among all the parties, and all are viewed as

victims. Medea herself is now two people: Medea the agent and Medea the victim

of Medea the agent. Now that she has effectively removed all her opposition, only

Medea can oppose her own resolve17. If, with KoVACS18, we accept that the entire

Great Monologue is genuine (apart from 1056-64), we encounter in the final

couplet a Medea who dissociates herself emotionally from her irresistible ihjgo6;
(as the source of her terrible sufferings)19. Those of us who consider the lines

authentic can look upon Medea at this point as the woman and mother disowning

an alien entity. (Otherwise she is to be identified with the ftugo6;, and the maternal
feelings will be secondary20.) Medea, once all focussed t3Rugo6, is at this point also
a mother and a detached critical awareness. Yet this awareness knows that its

rationality will soon be harnessed to the terrifying irrationality of the itg6o;21.

The ugly murders of Creon and the princess and the perpetrator’s response to

them (1133-35) could hardly fail to revolt the Greek audience, as they do the
messenger, for Medea is not torn on this issue as she was about the infanticide, to
which she now turns, resigned to its necessity (whether as the perfect revenge or to

forestall the children’s murder by the Corinthians: 1236-41). She is not dehuma-
nised yet but aware of the lasting sorrow their loss will bring (1247-50), and even
ex machina she admits that she suffers, although at this point she claims that it is

worthwhile. (Contrast 1362 with 1046f.)

The resolution ex machina has aroused endless controversy, largely because it

seems to belong to a different level of the dramatic illusion, with supernatural

elements negating the earlier realism. But there is no absolute break between the

scene and what precedes it, for Medea needs transport from Corinth (Aegeus

356; S. A. BARLOW, Stereotype and Reversal in Euripides’ ‘Medea’, Greece and Rome 36 (1989)

162; A. P. BURNETr, Medea and the Tragedy of Revenge, CI.Phil. 68 (1973) 16; D. BOEDEKER,

Euripides’ ‘Medea’ and the Vanity of logoi, Cl.Phil. 86 (1991) 104-6.

17 KNox (n. 11) 200f., CONACHER (n. 7) 195.

18 D. KoVACS, On Medea’s Great Monologue, Cl.Qu. 36 (1986) 343-52. For references to

recent debate see GREDLEY (n. 5) 36, n. 4.

19 G. R. STANTON, The End of Medea’s Monologue: Euripides’ ‘Medea’ 1078-80, Rh.M.

130 (1987) 97-106.

20 See E. SCHLESINGER, On Euripides’ ‘Medea’, in: Euripides, ed. E. SEGAL, New Jersey

1986, 72.

21 H. D. F. Kirro, Greek Tragedy, London 1961, 195, finds Medea’s struggle with her
maternal feelings ‘theatrical’ rather than ‘psychologically convincing’ in line with his view of her

as a monolithic embodiment of i5it6;. EASTERLING (n. 7), 188, is more judicious: ‘The detail of

the speech suggests that despite a certain rhetorical formalism of manner Euripides keeps close to

observed patterns of human behaviour.’ Medea’s disdain for and manipulation of feminine

stereotypes fail in the case of the maternal instinct which is more than a stereotype (BARLOW [n.

16] 164f.); ‘the Medea who expressed earlier such contempt for the traditional views of women

cannot after all escape her nature as one’.

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54 STUART LAWRENCE

offered only sanctuary at 725-30), and the logic of a fully triumphant revenge

requires a further confrontation with Jason during which she must remain inviola-

ble22. Doubtless these requirements could have been met without recourse to a

supernatural device23, but the dragon chariot has obvious theatrical and figurative

advantages. With respect to theatrical considerations, Euripides has kept his

audience guessing about Medea’s mode of escape; he now satisfies their curiosity

in spectacular fashion24. On the figurative plane Medea can appear an implacable

deity, an embodiment of her own vengeful i5Thg6. This is manifest in so far as she

is revealed as a Euripidean deus25. But that the break between the Medea of the

epilogue and the earlier woman is not absolute is evident from her words: she

gloats before Jason (which is what the earlier Medea always wanted), while she

admits that she suffers (1362), as she admitted earlier (1247-50). So while some

of her pronouncements are appropriate to a deus but not to a mortal (her prophecy

at 1386-88 in particular), others are equally characteristic both of a Euripidean

deus and of Medea the woman26. In this respect this pseudo-deus contrasts with,

for example, the epilogue of the ‘Orestes’ which in its reversion to myth is

completely dissonant with the realistic drama that precedes it. Here the realistic

Medea spills over into the epilogue, and the relevance is preserved (and indeed

enhanced) by the figurative dimension of the scene.

Critics who have been impressed only by the gulf between the epilogue and the

earlier scenes have tended to claim that the real Medea, the woman, is now dead or

dehumanised, sometimes without clarifying whether this dehumanisation is literal
or merely figurative27. CUNNNINGHAM, however, rightly insists that the apotheosis

is merely figurative, for Medea is en route to Athens and Aegeus, rather than to

Olympus28. Indeed she is invested with characteristically Euripidean ambiva-

lence: she remains a woman but she is also a sort of &Xdat&p. The &XiJLov is
perhaps only within29. So in this sense a mortal may incorporate an immortal. But

22 SCHLESINGER (n. 20) 75-77, EASTERLING (n. 7) 190, W. SALE, Existentialism and Euripi-
des, Melbourne 1977, 32.

23 SALE (n. 22) 32, suggests ‘a pre-arranged escort from Aegeus’.
24 See N. E. COLLINGE, Medea ex machina, Cl.Phil. 57 (1962) 170-72. For this reason, if for

no other, Medea must betray (or simply possess) no foreknowledge of the chariot.

25 See especially KNox (n. 11) 206-10, and CUNNINGHAM (n. 11) passim.
26 On Medea’s humanity ex machina see BUXTON (n. 10) 169; C. E. COWHERD, The Ending

of the ‘Medea’, Cl.World. 76 (1983) 135; EASTERLING (n. 7) 191; STEIDLE (n. 7) 168.

27 E. g. BURNErT (n. 16) 22, KNox (n. 11) 206-9, E. B. BONGIE, Heroic Elements in the

‘Medea’ of Euripides, T.A.Ph.A. 107 (1977) 55, RECKFORD (n. 9) 333f., 359; LUCAS, The Greek

Tragic Poets, 3rd ed., London 1959, A. LESKY, Greek Tragedy, tr. FRANKFORT, London 1965, 197;

PAGE (n. 3) xiv; MILLS (n. 11) 296; BARLOW (n. 16) 167.

28 CUNNINGHAM (n. 11) 159.

29 As Hecuba tells Helen at ‘Troades’ 988, ‘Your mind was turned into Cypris’.

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Audience Uncertainty and Euripides’ Medea 55

there is also traditionally a gulf between mortals and gods which it is i,S”pt; to
attempt to bridge. Euripides here undermines that holiest of polarised distinctions

by actually reifying in a visual metaphor the idea that a mortal may be ‘demon-
ic’30.

Medea is also a monstrous beast, for (one might wish to believe) only a beast
could kill her own children (1342f., 1358f.), and yet the gods condone by their
silence or actually assist – as Helios does in his inscrutable way3l. This is implied
in the chorus’ appeal to prevent the infanticide (1251-60) and in Jason’s disbelief
that Medea could do the deed while looking at the sun (1327f.). Why should a

polluted Helios signal his gratitude with the gift of a winged chariot? Morally, is
there anything to choose between the superhuman and the subhuman? If Medea is

a beast or a god, it is because of her iv,io ;, and though this 15vgo6; is excessive, it
is still in principle human, and not aberrantly human but dressed in respectability

by the heroic code which converts its non-rational impulses into a hallowed

vogo;, a principle of justice. It follows that the audience cannot dismiss Medea as
uncivilised or inhuman or un-Greek, insofar as her motivation is legitimised by
the code. Jason claims that no Greek woman would have done it (1339f.), but the

play does not show the infanticide to be the product of Colchian customs,
whatever they might have been.

There remains Medea’s sorcery. That she habitually employs drugs with
Hecate’s help is undeniable. But a witch is still a woman, and the supernatural
dimension applies only to the means by which she dispatches her victims. It does

not contaminate her motives which originate in the 15vRO6. It does, however,
affect the success of her revenge, guaranteeing her invulnerability against Jason.

In conclusion, Euripides invites questioning of rigid categorisations, stereoty-

pes and antitheses. During the course of the play the spectator will have come to

sympathise with and understand a foreign witch by seeing that she is not entirely
unlike Athenian wives, and even in some degree resembles Athenian men in her
moral outlook32. But he will also have experienced an uneasy sense of alienation
from Medea and therefore from his own human nature and Greek culture and he
will have come to see that his vaunted rationality, far from being an effective
weapon against this evil, may turn out, perfidiously, to be its formidable accom-

plice.

Massey University, New Zealand Stuart Lawrence

30 Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra claims to be an iaBoato(op, denying her identity as
Agamemnon’s human wife, but the chorus insist on the dual operation of the woman and the

assisting avenger (Ag. 1498-1508). The visual metaphor of Medea in the chariot, playing the role

of deus, suggests that she is herself the avenging spirit.

31 See Krrro (n. 21) 201, KNox (n. 11) 204-5.

32 Contrast BARLOW (n. 16) 158, who believes that the fact that Medea is a foreigner and a

sorceress are ‘the author’s get-outs – loop-holes in case the action turns out to be too controversial

for the audience to stomach’.

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Contents

[49]
50
51
52
53
54
55

Issue Table of Contents

Hermes, Vol. 125, No. 1 (1997), pp. 1-132
Volume Information
Xenophanes’ Physics, Parmenides’ Doxa and Empedocles’ Theory of Cosmogonical Mixture [pp. 1-16]
Wissen und Skepsis bei Xenophanes [pp. 17-33]
Pindarica [pp. 34-48]
Audience Uncertainty and Euripides’ Medea [pp. 49-55]
P. Clodius Pulcher: Eine Politische Ausnahme-Erscheinung der Späten Republik? [pp. 56-74]
The Similes in Catullus 64 [pp. 75-84]
Die Chronische Unpässlichkeit des Messalla Corvinus: Rudolfo Kassel septuagenario [pp. 85-91]
Servius ad Aen. I 592 [pp. 92-99]
Zum Theoderich-Panegyricus des Ennodius. Textkritische Überlegungen im Rahmen Einer Neuedition und Übersetzung [pp. 100-117]
Miszellen
Eratostene Sulle Muse e il re [pp. 118-123]
Einige Bemerkungen Über Zwei Handschriften des Rhetors Menandros [pp. 123-129]
Back Matter [pp. 130-132]

Medea: Hero or Heroine?
Author(s):

Carolyn A. Durham

Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1984), pp. 54-59
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
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Medea: Hero or Heroine?

Carolyn A. Durham

Two of the more common assumptions of feminist
literary criticism may be both logically consequential and
potentially contradictory. That most western literary
genres have been essentially male is hardly surprising in
a cultural tradition in which masculinity alone has generic
status. It follows, then, that women achieve the stature
of protagonists only at those times or in those world views
in which female experience becomes representative of the
human condition. Or does it follow? This argument’s
implicit contradiction can be seen in Carolyn Heilbrun’s
and Catharine Stimpson’s provocative discussion of
theories of tragedy, which they characterize as “largely
masculinized. “1 Maintaining that the woman hero (note
the masculine) was born “from the author’s realization
that women at that moment best symbolized the human
condition” (p. 65), Stimpson and Heilbrun go on to
distinguish the “tragic hero” from the “societal fact”; the
former’s passion results from the limitations inherent in
being human and not from social evil that can be remedied
(p. 70). One might well argue that, precisely to the extent
that women remain women and therefore heroines, their
situation stems from rectifiable social conditions, that they
are therefore always “societal facts” and never “tragic
heroes.” In this context, Medea provides a useful exam-
ple. Although she has the central role in three major plays,
each representative of a different, dominant western
culture, she never achieves the representative stature of the
tragic hero. The treatment of Medea in the plays of
Euripides, Seneca, and Corneille suggests that the limita-
tions associated with women somehow never seem to be

those inherent in being human.
The original audience of all three plays would have been

thoroughly familiar with the story of Medea. To succeed
in what Adrienne Rich calls the task of “re-vision-the

act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of enter-
ing an old text from a new critical direction,”2 feminist
criticism must examine the original sources of the legend
as well as the way in which each playwright effects its
transposition into dramatic form. (There is a certain
unavoidable circularity in this procedure, since Euripides
represents a key source for the legend itself.) This does
not, of course, imply that we can have access to an
ideologically neutral account, for to the extent that we
must depend upon standard guides to mythology, our
information arrives already encoded.3

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Medea
enters into myth through the story of Jason and his heroic
quest for the golden fleece. To regain the throne of the
Greek state Iolcus, usurped by his uncle Pelias, Jason
eagerly agrees to recover the golden fleece from King
Aeetes of Colchis. In what has passed into collective
memory as the oldest story in Greek tradition and the first
important maritime adventure, Jason sets sail with the
Argonauts, the greatest heroes of Greece. In Colchis,
Aeetes agrees to give up the golden fleece if Jason
can triumph over the formidable forces that protect it.
Whether charmed by Jason, who promises marriage, or
by his divine protector Aphrodite, Aeetes’ daughter Medea
falls in love with Jason and uses her magic powers to allow
him to steal the golden fleece. Medea and her younger
brother Absyrtus flee with the Argonauts; and in what
Thomas Bulfinch calls “another story of Medea almost
too revolting to record even of a sorceress, a class of per-
sons to whom both ancient and modern poets have been
accustomed to attribute every degree of atrocity,”4 Medea
assures the escape of the Greeks by killing her brother
and scattering his limbs across the water to slow her
father’s pursuit.

Carolyn Durham teaches French, comparative literature, and women’s studies at the College of Wooster where she
currently chairs the Women’s Studies Program. Durham is the author of L’Art romanesque de Raymond Roussel and
has published on feminist issues in Jump Cut, Bucknell Review, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation,
Twentieth Century Literature, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. She is presently working on a monograph of
Marie Cardinal.

FRONTIERS Vol. VIII, No. 1 @ 1984 FRONTIERS Editorial Collective

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Durham 55

In Iolcus, where Pelias still refuses to surrender the
throne, Medea tricks his daughters into murdering him
in the belief that his death will lead to his rebirth and

rejuvenation. After Pelias’ death, Jason and Medea are
forced to flee to Corinth with their two sons; there Jason
abandons Medea to marry Creusa, daughter of King
Creon. Though, in general, Bulfinch’s hostile attitude
is common, there exist some sympathetic accounts of
Medea, and two important issues are clear in all the
sources: Medea acts not for herself but for Jason, and
Medea believes that Jason will honor her love and the

actions she performs in its name with the fidelity he has
sworn.

All three dramatic versions of the Medea legend are set
in Corinth-immediately after the day of Jason’s wed-
ding to Creusa (Euripides), on the day of the wedding
(Seneca), and immediately before the day of the wedding
(Corneille). All three dramatists recount Medea’s revenge:
to repay Jason for his faithlessness, Medea sends Creusa
a poisoned robe that destroys both the princess and her
father; Medea then kills her own sons and flees to Athens,
where King Aegeus has promised her protection. In the
basic focus of their interest and in the specific events they
choose to dramatize, the three plays are very similar. In-
deed, Seneca bases his play on Euripides’ version, and
Corneille, in accordance with French neoclassical doctrine,
borrows from both the Greek and the Roman dramatists.

In all three dramatic versions, Creon’s decision to
banish Medea determines her vengeance, which takes
place during the one-day reprieve Creon grants her. Each
includes at least one confrontation between Medea and
Jason in which she reminds him of all he owes her and

scorns his efforts at self-justification. The dramatis
personae of the plays include both partisans and enemies
of Medea, and dramatic tension builds through the con-
trasting failure of all attempts to prevent Medea’s revenge
and the growing strength of her own determination. All
three plays end with Jason’s despair as Medea trium-
phantly displays the bodies of their slain children.
Thematically, Euripides, Seneca, and Corneille all deal
to some degree with issues centering on love, jealousy, and
infidelity; all address the conflict within Medea between
her conjugal and maternal love and her desire for revenge;
all suggest on some level a political and cultural opposi-
tion between Medea and the Greek state or civilization.

Factual differences among the three plays tend to be minor
and to center entirely on secondary characters-for
example, the presence or absence on stage of the children,
of Aegeus, and of Creusa.

Since all three versions of Medea focus on the analysis
of the central character, important distinctions among
Euripides, Seneca, and Corneille result precisely from the
character the three dramatists ascribe to Medea and the

motives they attribute to her actions; these alone deter-
mine what her magical powers represent, how her legen-
dary past functions, how Jason is portrayed, how the
community reacts, and, ultimately, what our attitude
toward Medea will be. Differences among the three plays
can be and have been attributed to historical and cultural

factors. In the fourth century B.C., Euripides uses Medea
to illustrate by contrast the Greek ideal of moderation.

In Seneca, Medea functions as metaphor for the disorder
of first-century Rome. In seventeenth-century France, Cor-
neille’s Medea illustrates the threat an independent, proud,
and sanguinary nobility poses to the authority of the state.
But despite changes in the conception of what constitutes
a human and social being, all three dramatists share a
definition that excludes women, however differently. It is
these differences and similarities in the dramatic depic-
tion of Medea as woman-treacherous daughter, betrayed
lover, destructive mother, and powerful sorceress-that
I now wish to examine.

Certainly the femaleness of the legendary Medea stands
unquestioned, as does the misogynist flavor of this male-
authored fable. Medea herself, of course, hates men
(curious absence in western languages of a convenient
adjective); she is, in fact, homocidal in the gender-
particular sense of the term. In an inversion of the com-
forting and comfortable myth of Isis as female gatherer
and weaver, as savior of the male Osiris, Medea
dismembers and scatters in the first place. Not only
defined as a killer of men, Medea also incarnates the
destruction of the private, domestic, traditionally female
world of the family.5 Herself guilty of fratricide and in-
fanticide, she arranges parricides through others: Pelias
is killed by his own daughters, and Creusa, although un-
wittingly, puts on a dress–delivered, moreover, by her
newly adopted children-that poisons her father as well
as herself. In accordance with the message of the legend,
the three dramatic treatments of Medea suggest that it
may be a contradiction in terms to speak of a tragic
heroine, that women characters who achieve heroic stature
in tragedy necessarily reject their femaleness or participate
in its devaluation. Medea becomes the central character

in each play to illustrate in turn the destructive plight of
women (in Euripides), the destructiveness of women (in
Seneca), and the destruction of women (in Corneille).

If the word could ever be taken without moral or emo-

tional connotations, the heroine of Euripides’ The Medea
might qualify as the most “human” of the three dramatic
characters. She is carefully departicularized, stripped of
her legendary powers and aura, to become not simply an
ordinary woman but, in fact, Everywoman. Up to the
point of her crime, Euripides portrays Medea as the
stereotypically perfect female within the male power struc-
ture of his dramatic universe. In the opening scene of the
play, the Nurse characterizes her mistress as the good wife;
Medea is supportive, submissive, other-oriented:

She gave
Pleasure to the people of her land of exile
And she herself helped Jason in every way.
This is indeed the greatest salvation of all-
For the wife not to stand apart from the husband. (11-15)6

Now abandoned by Jason, “poor” Medea, to be “rightly”
female, must necessarily be depicted from both within and
without as victim. Euripides underplays Medea’s poten-
tial for violent revenge in favor of an insistence upon her
passivity and helplessness. Much like Racine’s Phedre,
though without the latter’s sense of choice and will,
Medea has been reduced to a pitiful, suffering object who
desires death:

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56 FRONTIERS

She lies without food and gives herself up to suffering,
Wasting away every moment of the day in tears.
So it has gone since she knew herself slighted by him.
Not stirring an eye, not moving her face from the ground.

(24-27)

Accepting the cultural definition of her rejection as
“dishonor,” Medea at first predictably cries to other men
for assistance: “She calls upon the gods” (22), “calling
out on her father’s name” (31).

The use to which Euripides puts Medea’s magic powers
reveals with particular clarity the price a woman pays for
an apparently sympathetic presentation as heroine.
Originally the source of her superiority, magic becomes
in Euripides’ “humanized” view of Medea a metaphor
for intelligence in a world in which female intelligence is
little valued. Medea’s response to Creon’s admission that
he fears her because she is “a clever woman” (281-85) con-
firms that she is simply too bright and has failed to con-
ceal her sharpness of mind with proper female decorum:

This is not the first time, Creon. Often previously
Through being considered clever I have suffered much.
A person of sense ought never to have his children
Brought up to be more clever than the average.
For, apart from cleverness bringing them no profit,
It will make them objects of envy and ill-will.
If you put new ideas before the eyes of fools
They’ll think you foolish and worthless into the bargain;
And if you are thought superior to those who have
Some reputation for learning, you will become hated.
I have some knowledge myself of how this happens;
For being clever, I find that some will envy me,
Others object to me. (292-304)

The male characters in the play express a hatred of
women so strong that Jason’s insistence that his alliance
with Creon “was not because of a woman” (593) appears
absolutely convincing. Sadly but more significantly, the
female characters in Euripides’ world have internalized
the negative image that men project upon them. One
potentially positive consequence lies in the female soli-
darity represented by the Chorus members’ total sympathy
and support for Medea; their speeches generalize Medea’s
experience into the female condition of slavery, oppres-
sion, and pain. But the Corinthian women of the Chorus
in fact covertly support female subservience. Euripides’
Medea, virtually free of her legendary violence against
Absyrtus and Pelias, becomes criminal only with the
murder of her children. The Chorus finds the infanticide
alone unacceptable-in fact, absolutely condemnable-
and logically so: it is the single act through which Medea
denies the female role as men have defined it and as
women have accepted it. Note Jason’s opposition: “A
monster, not a woman” (1342). The play’s plea for
moderation, constantly reiterated by the female Chorus,
discloses its real message: be moderate, be human, be nor-
mal; that is, be female-according to the rules laid down
by men. It matters greatly then that Euripides’ heroine
is a woman, and it matters even more that she remain so,
but her female characteristics are not elevated as human

values but merely pitied as inevitable limitations on full
humanity.

Although in many ways the heroine of Seneca’s The
Medea contrasts with that of Euripides, she is equally and
as necessarily female in a world in which femaleness
now openly equals subhumanity or even nonhumanity.
Carrying such standard gender traits as emotionalism,
irrationality, and capriciousness to their logical conclu-
sion, Seneca’s Medea acts as an enraged, sadistic beast.
Typically, Creon retreats from her as from a wild animal:
“Threatening and fierce, she seeks to speak with us; /
Attendants, keep her off” (II.ii).7 She is a pure frenzy of
passion whose hesitations and abrupt changes of mood
bear witness to her almost total loss of self-control. She

is characterized throughout the play as “mad,” “reckless,”
“wild,” and it is in a fit of total madness, when she is
held in the power of the Furies, that she murders her sons
(V.ii). Moreover, Seneca’s Medea also incarnates the prin-
ciple of cosmic destruction; she seeks to bring down the
entire universe with her, to destroy all around her without
regard for the guilt or innocence of her victims (III.i), and
her behavior is categorically condemned by the moral
universe of the Chorus. This conception of Medea deter-
mines that of the secondary characters; Seneca’s Jason,
progressively ennobled as Medea is degraded, represents
self-control and reason in the face of Medea’s blind

passion.
Despite her extension of stereotypically female

characteristics to logical extremes, despite the hatred and
fear she arouses, Seneca’s Medea might, in her isolation
and in her very exaggeration, have been seen as more
individual than female. But, in fact, Seneca’s very devalua-
tion of Medea’s femaleness, her so-called “madness,”
leads to what I think must be a unique insight for a male
author and the period. Seneca’s Medea is not only
rebellious as male-defined but also authentically revolu-
tionary. Seneca implicitly equates female innocence not
with freedom from crimes against men but with freedom
from men themselves. Medea’s last crime repeats her first;
the killing of her son becomes an explicit act of expia-
tion for the murder of her brother, and, more remarkably,
the repetition produces literal erasure. Medea regains her
virginity and the lost paradise of her girlhood by the total
destruction of the wife and mother within her:

I have regained now my crown and throne,
My brother and my father; Colchians hold
The golden fleece; my kingdom is won back;
My lost virginity returns to me!

(V.iii)

This is an excellent example of virginity in Annis Pratt’s
sense: “a form of negative emancipation in the freedom
to reject the forfeiture of the self to patriarchal demands-
by suicide, if necessary.”8 Yet however perceptive this par-
ticular insight-or perhaps precisely because of it-
Seneca views Medea’s female destructiveness as directly
responsible for the unhappiness of men and for the chaos
of the world. Indeed, in the final lines of the play, Jason
confirms that Medea has brought about the total dissolu-
tion of the patriarchal order: “Go through the skies
sublime, and in thy flight / Prove that where thou art
borne there are no gods” (V.iii).

I think few readers would argue for Medea’s experience

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Durham 57

in Euripides or Seneca as metaphorical of the human con-
dition; rather, it represents a particular male view of a
specifically if not uniquely female situation. At first sight,
Corneille seems to have rejected such gender-specific
interpretations to raise his Medea to universal stature; it
is indeed, however, a question of ascension, for Corneille’s
Medea will have to be superhuman to qualify for the
masculinity that alone can guarantee her humanity.
Even so, Medea’s physical femaleness may have lessened

critical interest in Corneille’s first tragedy. In spite of the
largely successful efforts of twentieth-century critics to
reconstitute Corneille’s theater in its entirety, his Medea
has remained largely ignored. For example, Medea and
its companion piece, The Golden Fleece, are the only plays
omitted from Serge Doubrovsky’s otherwise comprehen-
sive study of the Cornelian hero.9 This and other such
oversights stem from the common centering of critical
inquiry on the nature of the male protagonist. Yet Medea
stands clearly as the prototype of the Cornelian hero, the
first of a long line of central heroic figures, most of whom
will be men. 10

Medea already illustrates the primary values of Cor-
neille’s heroic universe: unity of word and action; crea-
tion and cult of the self; surhumanity, defined against the
natural. Medea opposes efficacious action to the sterile
complaints of the other characters. She is able to keep
her word, to accomplish what she has announced. Medea
acts alone; she is self-sufficient in the fullest sense of the
term; and she preaches revolt in response to Jason’s pleas
for submission. Her two accounts of the winning of the
golden fleece, echoing with “me” and “I alone” (II.ii;
III.iii),11 constitute an autocelebration. Medea’s constancy
symbolizes faithfulness to the self; her continued love for
Jason results not from the self-alienation in the face of

irrational passion so common in Racine’s heroines but
from a recognition of and insistence on her own identity.

Corneille’s Medea first defines herself as hero(ine)
against the nonheroic world of the male characters who
surround her. In an inversion of sex roles, Jason represents
the “feminine” principle of passivity. In the face of
Medea’s active energy, he preaches submission: “let us
yield to fortune” (III.iii.881). His willingness to adapt to
circumstances leads directly to his “feminine” fickleness,
his inconstancy. Jason’s very thought processes-his am-
bivalence about his own motivations; the contradictions
in his multiple explanations of his actions, ranging from
Creusa’s beauty to political necessity to paternal love; the
continual shifting and confusion of his argument-reflect
the constant metamorphoses of his sense of self. Male
sexuality has always been metaphorically allied with
masculine power, and Jason’s is no exception. But Jason
pursues position and power through a goal that is tradi-
tionally the resort of women-marriage. All Medea’s
sorcery does not permit her to act on Jason’s heart and
will; ironically, the weak and cowardly Jason has precisely
this most “magic” and most female of powers: Jason “is
born only to charm princesses” (I.i.22); he is an “infamous
sorcerer who charms minds” (II.v.680).

Since Corneille’s sympathies undeniably lie with Medea,
and since the traits that make up her strength-autonomy,
rebellion, efficacy, constancy-are clearly unexpected in

a woman, we might think that we have here the “reassess-
ment in woman’s favor of the relative capacities of the
sexes” that Ian MacClean considers a workable defini-

tion of feminism for the seventeenth century.12 But,
in fact, Corneille has merely transposed masculine
characteristics onto female characters and feminine

characteristics onto male characters, while continuing to
value the former alone. As Medea and Creusa define

themselves through the individual identity and auton-
omous action normally associated with men, Jason and
Creon define themselves as women traditionally have,
through passivity and relationships with others. Medea’s
qualifications as heroic and universal thus depend upon
her masculinization, dangerous in and of itself, and upon
her denial of a femaleness that is degraded and devalued
elsewhere in the play.

Given the rejection of nature as a central tenet of Cor-
neille’s theory of the superhuman hero, woman’s tradi-
tional identification with the world of the natural may
well have made her the logical choice to serve as the
original illustration of his doctrine. Medea’s magic powers,
which “force nature” (IV.v.1246) and “hold nature
enslaved” (III.i.706), function initially as a metaphor of
this conception of heroism. But more importantly, Cor-
neille’s reversal of sex roles also permits him to illustrate
conveniently the problematical character of heroism, the
potential destructiveness of the strong-willed individual,
without needing to condemn masculinity in the process.
Corneille focuses the necessarily unnatural and therefore
monstrous aspects of his conception of heroism on the
female realm of Medea’s life: her roles as daughter, sister,
and mother. Medea herself stresses that her own unnatural

acts, her willingness to betray her father and to kill her
brother, and not her magic powers, were the essential fac-
tors in the successful quest for the golden fleece:

If I had then limited my desire to my duty,
If I had preserved my glory and my faithfulness,
If I had felt horror at so many outrageous crimes,
What would have become of Jason and all your

Argonauts?
(II.ii.431-34)

Medea’s ultimate act of heroism results in the murder of

her children.13 Thus, Corneille manages to have it both
ways: when Medea is masculine, she is good, but when
she is bad, even though this results only from carrying
male characteristics to an extreme, she becomes female
again.

The legendary Medea is, of course, remembered first
as a mother. Even though Corneille underplays his
heroine’s direct involvement with her children far more

than do Euripides and Seneca, his play may still in fact
be the one most directly concerned with Medea as mother.
Her motherhood is first of all literal. For Medea to be

authentically heroic-and authentically monstrous-she
must love the children she sacrifices. Without a clear and

deep bond of affection to overcome, no heroic test and
no act against nature would occur. In Seneca, where
Medea carries out the murders in a fit of madness, they
lose all heroic and moral meaning.14 Corneille takes two
innovative steps in his Medea to insure our interpretation

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58 FRONTIERS

of the murders as an heroic act. In both Euripides’ and
Seneca’s versions, Medea herself requests the right to leave
her children in Corinth. In Corneille’s version, the children
are taken away by Medea’s enemies, an act she sees as a
mutilation of her own self:

Barbarous humanity, that tears me from myself,
And feigns gentleness to take from me what I love!
If Jason and Creusa have so ordered it,
Let them return the blood I gave my children.

(II.ii.497-500)

Corneille’s greatest originality is to make Jason plan to
kill the children. Because this intention is based on his

identification of Medea’s only vulnerable spot-“Let the
sorceress begin to suffer in you / Let her first torment
be to see you die” (V.v.1535-36)-it focuses our attention
on her maternal love at the very moment when she is
murdering her sons.

But Medea’s motherhood is also metaphorical. Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in The Madwoman in the
Attic for a literary interconnection between maternity,
monstrosity, and creativity. Medea’s fearful powers
originate in her “grotto,” the witch’s cave whose womb
shape makes it the central seat of female power. For
Gilbert and Gubar, maternal creativity represents the
“sexual/artistic strength that is the female equivalent of
the male potential for literary paternity.”15 Medea is a
storyteller, and the tale she recalls of her role in the con-
quest of the golden fleece deals essentially with the female
power to generate male success. The speech itself contains
a curious abundance of generative vocabulary–“to sow,”
“sterility,” “fertile,” “brought forth,” “sown,” “gave
birth” (II.ii.409-50)-and it ends with Medea’s willingness
to accept her past crimes in the clear role of mother: “In
short, all your heroes owe life to me” (II.ii.441). More
importantly, it would seem at first that Medea’s mater-
nal creativity is not merely the equivalent but, for once,
the metaphor of literary creativity. Theatrical producer,
director, and playwright, Medea views her revenge as a
spectacle staged for her own pleasure: “I must create a
masterpiece” (I.iv.253). This is the principal reason why,
at the risk of offending classical doctrine and taste, Creon,
Creusa, and Jason must all die on stage: “I am not”
avenged, if I do not see the result; / I owe my anger the
joy of so sweet a spectacle” (IV.v.1276-77).

But female power is viewed as destructive. Medea uses
for her own purposes that most maternal power of life
and death over men. Moreover, while Medea originally
seems to possess the essential literary power of naming,
symbolized by her magic-“Fire obeys me, and I control
the waters; / Hell trembles, and the heavens, as soon as
I name them” (III.iii.908-09)-this most male of rights
will prove as always to be denied to women.16 Medea is
asked to be quiet and to forget what Jason owes her, to
exhibit in fact “aphasia and amnesia-two illnesses which
symbolically represent (and parody) the sort of intellec-
tual incapacity patriarchal culture has traditionally re-
quired of women.”17 Medea understands clearly the link
between silence and submission:

Nerine, after that you wish me to keep quiet!

Shouldn’t I also appear pleased,
Shouldn’t I wish for the happy day of the royal wedding,
And turn all my attention to serving his love?

(I.v.301-04)

Medea knows as well that the power of language stands
on the side of the law. Her ironic response to Jason
acknowledges the male prerogative to define terms at will,
to rewrite the past-metaphorically represented by his
constant shifting of ground-even as she mocks it:

I have only been banished! oh sovereign goodness!
Then it’s a favor, and not a penalty!
I have received a pardon instead of a punishment!
And I owe thanks again for my exile!
Thus the brigand, his miserly thirst once satisfied,
Attributes the sparing of our lives to compassion;
When he doesn’t slaughter, he believes he has pardoned,
And what he doesn’t take away, he thinks he has given.

(III.iii.833-40)

Medea’s efforts to write her own story, that is, the story
of her quest for self-definition,18 fail as she is obliged to
become the Medea whose image Jason and Creon project.
Things will now be as men have named them; notably,
Creusa takes into death the name of Jason’s wife:
“Farewell: give me your hand; that, in spite of her
jealousy / I may carry off to Pluto the name of your wife”
(V.v.1497-98).

Creon and Jason wish Medea to accept the role of
scapegoat, to assume all of Jason’s crimes so that he may
stand cleansed and innocent:

Give him back his innocence by going away from here;
Bear to other regions your insolent anger;
Your herbs, your poisons, your pitiless heart,
And all that ever made Jason guilty.

(III.ii.467-70)

Ultimately, Medea agrees. In so doing, she adopts a role
that Judith Fetterly has identified as traditionally
female. 19 There is a sense, as we have seen, in which, by
becoming a murderess, Medea accedes to subjective
responsibility for her identity; but it is hardly liberating-
particularly for a woman-to become what others-
particularly men-say that she is. Medea allows herself
to be “killed into image” (in the words of Gilbert and
Gubar), to become safely “constant” through her accep-
tance of a male vision of herself.20 Jason regains his lost
memory to promise Medea a fixed portrait in exchange
for his freedom:

Your virtuous love is my greatest glory;
I would betray myself should I put it out of my mind;
And my love for you, which remains eternal,
Leaves you the solemn vow in this farewell.
May my head shatter under the sharpest arrows
That the most bitter anger of the great gods shoots out;
May they join together to punish me,
If I do not surrender my life before your memory!

(II.iii.33-40)

In Medea Corneille appears to value maleness, even if
incarnated in women, and devalue femaleness, even if

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Durham 59

represented by men. When he returns to the Medea legend
twenty years later in The Golden Fleece, he has changed
his mind about the behavior to be valued. He now une-

quivocally backs the relational female traits disparaged
in his earlier Medea and defends Jason’s solution of

passivity and love against the Argonauts’ reactionary
belief in action and merit. In the prologue to the play,
the individualistic hero whose self-realization comes at

the expense of others’ happiness is condemned as destruc-
tive, and a symbolic France repudiates victory and
replaces war with marriage. But these newly valued
qualities are embodied by Jason, a male character, and
not by the female protagonist the Stimpson-Heilbrun
theory would have predicted.

The assumption that women can achieve the stature of
protagonists in masculine genres-or, at least, the assump-
tion that they can achieve such stature with any
frequency-may be too optimistic. So long as human
traits are distinguished by gender, it may well be that no
character, either male or female, can be generic, regardless
of how writers or readers have tried to use them. So long
as Medea is subhuman or superhuman, so long as her
humanity comes only at the price of her autonomy, so
long as we equate her humanity with mediocrity or with
masculinity, the significance of both her gender and her
humanity is lost to us. Perhaps only with the creation of
a gender-free value system can we really have a tragic
female hero, and only then will her femaleness no longer
matter.

NOTES

1. Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson, “Theories of Feminist
Criticism: A Dialogue,” in Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Josephine
Donovan (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1975), p. 67.

2. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,”
College English, 34 (October 1972), 18.

3. My discussion of the story of Jason and Medea draws upon Edith
Hamilton, Mythology (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1942); and
Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch’s Mythology, ed. Edmund Fuller (New York:
Dell, 1959).

4. Bulfinch, p. 113.
5. According to Ann Jones (Women Who Kill [New York: Fawcett

Columbine, 1981]), this is generally true of homocidal women: “Unlike
men, who are apt to stab a total stranger in a drunken brawl or run
amok with a high-powered rifle, we women usually kill our in-
timates…. The story of women who kill is the story of women”
(pp. xv-xvi).

6. Euripides, The Medea, trans. Rex Warner, in Euripides I, ed. David
Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955).
All quotations are from this edition.

7. Seneca, The Medea, trans. Ella Isabel Harris, in An Anthology
of Roman Drama, ed. Philip Whaley Harsh (New York: Rinehart, 1960).
All quotations are from this edition.

8. Annis Pratt, “The New Feminist Criticism,” College English, 32
(May 1971), 876. One might argue that Medea’s original murder of Ab-
syrtus simply represents with particular horror the shifting of allegiance
from father to husband required of women.

9. Serge Doubrovsky, Corneille et la dialectique du htros (Paris:
Gallimard, 1963).

10. Recent articles by William Goode (“Me’de’e and Jason: Hero and
Nonhero in Corneille’s Me’de’ French Review, 51 [1978], 804-15) and
Andre de Leyssac (Introduction, Me’d6e [Gen’eve: Droz, 1978]) examine
Medea as the prototype of the Cornelian hero.

11. Pierre Corneille, Theatre complet, ed. Maurice Rat, 3 vols. (Paris:
Garnier, 1966). All quotations from Medea are from Volume 1 of this
edition; all quotations from The Golden Fleece are from Volume 3.
Translations are my own.

12. Ian MacClean, Woman Triumphant (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1977), p. viii.

13. One is reminded of Ellen Harold’s criticism of Emma Peel, heroine
of the British television series “The Avengers”: “What is truly sad is
that, though she is equal to a man and superior to most men, the measure
of her competence is a strictly macho one-her capacity for violence”
(cited in Donovan, p. 21).

14. Euripides also makes of the infanticide a conscious, intentional
act: “I know indeed what evil I intend to do” (1078).

15. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 97.

16. See, for example, Julia A. Sherman and Evelyn Torton Beck:
“Women constitute an enormous, historically submerged group of peo-
ple, deprived of the power to conceptualize, to name, and to categorize
reality” (The Prism of Sex [Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1979],
p. 4); and Mary Daly: “It is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact
that women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have
not been free to use our own power to name ourselves, the world, or
God” (Beyond God the Father [Boston: Beacon Press, 1973], p. 8).

17. Gilbert and Gubar, p. 58.
18. For Gilbert and Gubar, this is the most often repressed of literary

plots (p. 76).
19. Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to

American Fiction (Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1978), p. xii.
20. Gilbert and Gubar, p. 17.

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Contents

[54]
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56
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59

Issue Table of Contents

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1984), pp. i-iv+1-75
Front Matter [pp. i-iii]
To Our Readers [p. iv]
Women, Disability, and Feminism: Notes toward a New Theory [pp. 1-5]
Japanese American Women during World War II [pp. 6-14]
Keeping My Name [p. 15]
The Journal as Source and Model for Feminist Art: The Example of Kathleen Fraser [pp. 16-20]
The Impact of “Sun Belt Industrialization” on Chicanas [pp. 21-27]
Upstairs [p. 28]
A Letter to Matthew [pp. 29-31]
The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” [pp. 32-38]
Olympia in the Four Poster [p. 39]
Lotus Will Bloom in Summer [pp. 40-44]
The Limits of Sisterhood: The Woman’s Building in Seattle, 1908-1921 [pp. 45-52]
Near Kent Falls [p. 53]
Medea: Hero or Heroine? [pp. 54-59]
Feminist Aesthetics in Jazz: An Interview with Susanne Vincenza of Alive! [pp. 60-63]
The Killing [p. 64]
Self-Defense for Women: Translating Theory into Practice [pp. 65-70]
Of Note [p. 70]
Reviews and Responses
Review: untitled [pp. 71-73]
Back Matter [pp. 74-75]

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