Medea
Medea
by Euripides
THE LITERARY WORK
A tragic play set in Corinth, Greece, during an unspecified mythological time; first an performed in Athens m 431bce.
SYNOPSIS
A wronged wife exacts a terrible revenge on her husband, who has taken a younger bride.
Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place
Events in History at the Time the Play Was Written
Euripides was born near Athens, Greece, around 480 bce. Little is known about his early life, although his works show an in-depth education that suggests his family must have been financially comfortable. Also an inscription (recorded by Theophrastus) commemorates the young Euripides’ service as a cupbearer to the guild of dancers who performed at the altar of Apollo, a post that suggests the family was not lacking in prominence. In 455 bce Euripides entered Athens’ dramatic competitions and placed third. He first earned the prize for tragedy in 441 bce, winning only five times in his career (the last occasion, posthumously, for The Bacchae), as opposed to Sophocles’ 18 and Aeschylus’ 13 victories. In 408 Euripides left Athens to visit the court of King Archelaus in Macedon, where he died a year and a half later. A prolific dramatist, Euripides is credited with 92 plays, though fewer than 20 survive in complete form. Medea is often considered one of his masterpieces. About an already legendary figure, the play focuses on a non-Greek female, in part to explore the status and power of women, an issue that would fascinate Euripides throughout his career.
Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place
Medea and Jason—the legend
Like other dramatists of the time, Euripides based his plays on classical myths and legends. His audience would have been familiar with the characters of Medea and Jason, who figured primarily in the story of the Golden Fleece. They would have also encountered Medea from other tales in which she made appearances, but all these stories were episodic. There was no single life story of Medea at the time. In the Golden Fleece legend, Jason, son of the king of Iolcus, a city in Greece, is sent away in secret as a child when his uncle, Pelias, usurps the throne from Jason’s father.
When Jason returns as a young man to claim his birthright, Pelias first insists that his nephew free lolcus from a curse. A generation before, a prince named Phrixus—related to the royal family of Iolcus—fled from his homeland to avoid being sacrificed, riding on the back of a divine ram with a golden fleece. Taking refuge in Colchis, a foreign land in Asia at the eastern end of the Black Sea, Phrixus sacrificed the ram to the supreme god Zeus in thanks. Phrixus then deeded the Golden Fleece to King Aeetes of Colchis, who hung the prize from a tree in a grove consecrated to the war god Ares. A great serpent guarded the treasure day and night. Later, when Phrixus died, he was denied a proper Greek burial; a prophecy from the oracle at Delphi (the god Apollo, who answered human questions there) proclaimed that Phrixus’ ghost would not rest, nor would the land of lolcus prosper, until the Golden Fleece was retrieved from Colchis.
Agreeing to undertake this quest, Jason assembles a crew and sails for Colchis aboard a great ship named the Argo. After a perilous voyage that claims several lives, Jason and the surviving Argonauts reach their destination, where they are welcomed by King Aeetes. Angered by Jason’s re-quest for the Golden Fleece, the king assigns the young man a series of dangerous tasks to perform in exchange for the prize. But Princess Medea, Aeetes’ daughter and granddaughter to Helios (god of the sun), has fallen in love with Jason. A powerful sorceress, she secretly helps him to accomplish all of her father’s tasks and ultimately to secure the Golden Fleece as well by lulling the guardian serpent asleep. Jason and Medea then flee Colchis, Medea slaying her own brother Apsyrtus and casting his limbs before her father to delay the Colchians’ pursuit of the Argo. During their homeward voyage, Jason and Medea marry.
On returning to lolcus, Jason learns that Pelias brought about the deaths of Jason’s parents. Jason asks Medea for help in avenging the murders. Under the pretense of restoring Pelias’ youth, the sorceress tricks Pelias’ own daughters into cutting up their sleeping father’s body and casting the pieces into a cauldron. Too late, Pelias’ daughters realize that they have been deceived.
Banished from lolcus, Jason travels with Medea to the Greek city of Corinth, where they live for many years and have children. The ambitious Jason eventually decides to cast off Medea and make a politically advantageous marriage to a princess of Corinth, who is sometimes called Glauce, some-times Creusa (she is nameless in Euripides’ play). This princess is the daughter of King Creon. Enraged at Jason’s abandonment, Medea sends a poisoned robe and crown to the bride who is consumed by unquenchable flames when she wears them. A fugitive once more, she flees Corinth in a chariot drawn by dragons. Accounts vary as to the fates of Jason and Medea’s children. In one version, King Creon kills all but one of them in retaliation for his daughter’s death, while the lone surviving child flees with Medea. In another version, Medea kills Creon as well as his daughter, and his relatives murder her children in retaliation. In yet another version, Hera, Zeus’ wife, promises immortality to Medea’s children if she will lay them on the sacrificial altar of the goddess’ temple. Medea’s murder of her own sons to wound Jason for his unfaithfulness seems to be Euripides’ unique addition. In any case, he was first to fix this plot development into literary form. Medea herself escapes to Athens, where King Aegeus gives her sanctuary.
Thereafter, Medea appears in several other legends. She is credited with curing the Greek hero Hercules of madness and romantically linked with King Aegeus of Athens, father of Theseus, another Greek hero. Driven out of Athens after trying to poison Theseus, Medea is said to have married an Asian king and eventually achieved immortality. Jason is far less fortunate. Shunned by the gods for breaking faith with Medea, he wanders as a lonely outcast from city to city then perishes ignominiously. The prow from the Argo, beached on the Isthmus of Corinth, falls and crushes his skull while he is resting in the ship’s shadow. In Euripides’ play, Medea taunts him with her foreknowledge of his inglorious demise.
The status of women in fifth-century Athens
Although Medea is ostensibly set in the mythic past, Euripides portrays the characters as if they lived within his own time. Athenians of the fifth century bce could thus identify with his characters’ concerns, such as Medea’s diatribe against the oppression of women: “Surely, of all creatures that have life and will, we women / Are the most wretched” (Euripides, Medea, lines 228-229).
Most of the information that survives on the position of women in Classical antiquity comes from male writers. Moreover, scholars disagree as to how much freedom women were truly permitted and whether their degree of freedom meant women were despised or honored. While literature and the visual arts suggest that women of good family enjoyed a prominent role in society, legal and historical data suggest that women were regarded as perpetual minors, to be protected and guided by their male relations.
Some general understandings have nevertheless been gleaned with respect to women in Classical Greece, especially those of the middle and upper classes: they were not permitted to attend, speak at, or vote in political assemblies; they could not hold office; they were considered unfit to make sensible judgments; and they required a husband, father, or guardian to be their agent in economic transactions. Also, while women might be allowed to leave the house to visit friends and relations or attend weddings and religious festivals, they were barred from attending banquets or even the theater. Women of the poorest classes actually enjoyed more freedom: they could travel to the market to sell produce or livestock. Among the higher classes, slaves probably did the shopping.
Women also had little say about whom they married. Until reaching their mid-teens, girls lived under the guardianship of their male relatives, at which point, a marriage would be arranged for them. The girls’ guardians and prospective husbands saw to all the arrangements, such as the size of a bride’s dowry and the groom’s gifts to her father. Political and economic concerns were paramount, and marriages took place whether or not the bridal couple liked or even knew each other. Overall, the bride tended to be considerably younger than the groom, so that he could make the most of her childbearing years. Just after puberty a young woman would enter into a relationship with a man probably 10 to 15 years older (between 28 and 35) than she.
The bearing of legitimate children, especially sons, was recognized as the primary purpose of marriage because it affected inheritance of property and one’s standing in the community (having sons brought honor and promised continuity of the family line). Given these concerns, women’s sexuality was closely guarded, to ensure, above all, that her children were indeed her husband’s. Women were supposedly wild. They had strong sexual desires and could easily fall victim to powerful emotions unless they were contained; their instincts needed to be suppressed by men or else they would create emotional havoc in society. Children were considered the legal property of their father and would remain with his family in the event of their parents’ marriage ending through death or divorce.
Theoretically, either spouse could seek divorce, though the process was more involved for a wife. The husband could, without providing a reason, send his wife out of his house and back to her father’s. By contrast, the wife needed the intercession of her father or some other male citizen to bring the case before the archon (chief magistrate) if she wanted permission to divorce. During the Classical period there were only three known cases of Athenian women initiating divorce proceedings (Pomeroy, p. 64).
Sexual freedom and Athenian men
While wives were expected to remain chaste and completely faithful to their husbands, men—whether married or single—endured no such restriction. Although bigamy, or marriage to two women, was prohibited, Athenian men could, according to the Greek orator Demosthenes, have three women: a wife, for the procreation of legitimate children; a concubine, for regular sexual relations; and a hetaera (companion) who attended drinking parties with aristocratic men and some-times established an ongoing relationship with them. A man’s relationships with his wife and his concubine held certain similarities. Fidelity from both women was expected and any children resulting from the man’s liaison with the concubine were granted certain rights of legal succession, though not the same as those granted to the legitimate offspring of the wife. It was also not uncommon for the concubine to be received in the conjugal home.
By contrast, the hetaera was paid to provide not only sex but also social companionship. She was often more educated than either a wife or a concubine; she also had the freedom to accompany a man to public places where his two other women were not permitted to go. A man’s relationship with his hetaera could therefore be socially and intellectually as well as sexually gratifying. While the hetaera enjoyed more
WOMEN AND REVENGE IN ANCIENT GREECE
In ancient Athens women had no political rights and required men to act for them in most economic and legal matters. Included were matters involving revenge, which in ancient Athens was expected to be exacted “through the laws rather than violently” (McHardy, p. 102). Women could not speak in court; to attain lawful justice, they had to depend on their private ability to influence men. In truth, the figure of the avenging woman appears repeatedly in Greek tragedy, whether she is inciting her male kin to violent retribution or influencing her sons against their fathers. Euripides takes the issue a step further by having a woman exact her own revenge and by making that woman a non-Greek. Modern scholars note that Athenians were anxious to stamp out the possibility of revenge attacks because they threatened civic order. The scholars also point to accounts that circulated about the vengefulness and deceit of foreign women; in one such tale, an Egyptian woman, Nitocris, avenges her late brother by constructing a death chamber and inviting a host of Egyptian nobles, whom she blames for her brother’s death, to a dinner in the chamber. The existence of such stories suggests “that the Creeks believed powerful, foreign women were not only liable to desire revenge, but were also capable of achieving it by using these methods [of persuasion and treachery]” (McHardy, p, 104). Euripides’ play features a Chorus that sympathizes with Medea’s desire for revenge against the husband who has deserted her—“To punish Jason will be just / I do not wonder that you take such wrongs to heart” (Medea, lines 262-263), Interestingly, Medea herself comes from Colchis, not Athens. To Euripides’ audience, her hideous revenge on Jason—killing his bride, father-in-law, and children—would likely have been considered all too typical of a foreign woman.
freedom than other females, she still enjoyed far less than he. In general, the relative freedom—sexual and otherwise—enjoyed by men is another injustice upon which Medea comments bitterly in the play: “If a man grows tired / Of the company at home, he can go out and find / A cure for tediousness. We wives are forced to look / To one man only” (Medea, lines 245-248).
The Play in Focus
Plot summary
The play opens in Corinth, where Jason, Medea, and their two sons have been living for several years. Medea’s Nurse enters, lamenting that Jason ever came to Medea’s home-land of Colchis. She frets that her Medea has fallen in love with him and committed so many crimes on his behalf. The Nurse reveals that Jason has abandoned her mistress to marry the daughter of King Creon of Corinth. Medea, devastated and enraged, has taken to her bed, but the Nurse fears that she is hatching some terrible plan of revenge against her faithless husband.
Just then, the ancient Tutor of Medea’s sons arrives with more bad news for Medea: fearing trouble, Creon plans to banish Medea and her children from Corinth. The Nurse and Tutor discuss Jason’s selfishness and Medea’s heartbreak; Medea herself is heard offstage, alternately bemoaning and cursing her fate.
Do I not suffer? Am I not wronged? Should I not weep?
Children your mother is hated and you are cursed:
Death take you, with your father, and perish his whole house!
(Medea, lines 112-114)
Sensing her mistress’s dangerous mood, the Nurse warns Medea’s sons to keep their distance from their mother.
A Chorus composed of Corinthian women arrives to inquire after Medea’s troubles. As Medea continues to cry offstage for justice and vengeance, the Chorus expresses sympathy and advises caution, remarking that women have been deserted by their husbands before. At the Chorus’ request, the Nurse enters the house to persuade Medea to speak with her friends.
Medea appears, grief-stricken but otherwise composed. She reveals her misfortunes to the Chorus, relating them to the woes women have endured throughout the ages, such as faithless husbands, the difficulty of gaining a divorce, and the pains of childbirth. Medea maintains that her situation as a foreign exile exacerbates her problems and swears to avenge herself upon Jason. The Leader of the Chorus agrees that Medea has a legitimate grievance against her husband, then observes that Creon is approaching.
Confirming the Tutor’s report, Creon arrives to order Medea and her sons into immediate banishment. He has heard of her threats and curses against his house and, fearing her sorcerous powers, wishes her gone for the safety of his family and his country. Medea denies that she has great powers, proclaims her innocence of, any malicious intent, and pleads to remain in Corinth. Creon is unconvinced by her protestations but agrees to give Medea one day to settle her affairs before her departure. Once Creon exits, Medea tells the Chorus that she means to use that day to carry out her revenge against Creon, Jason, and Jason’s new bride. She decides that poison will be her weapon of choice but wonders where she can find safe asylum after committing her crimes. The Chorus delivers a triumphant ode on how standards are changing. Someday the glory of women, it predicts, will become the focus of song and story. Medea’s determination makes her such a woman.
Jason, resplendent in his royal finery, now enters and informs Medea that her banishment is her own fault. He offers her money to support herself and their sons in exile, but Medea furiously rejects his offer. She upbraids him for his abandonment of her, accusing him of selfishness and ingratitude and recalling the many times she used her powers and wiles for his benefit. Jason argues that it was the goddess of love, Aphrodite—working through Medea’s infatuation—who saved him on his legendary voyage for the Golden Fleece. He furthermore contends that Medea has benefited from throwing in her lot with him, going so far as to insist that he married the princess of Corinth to improve the fortunes of his and Medea’s sons. Now they are connected by marriage to the royal family. Jason considers his actions wholly unselfish and even rebukes Medea for her jealousy and possessiveness. When Medea derides him as a hypocrite and again refuses his financial assistance, Jason departs in anger. The watching Chorus recites an ode on the dangers of unrestrained love and the sorrows of exile.
A solution to one of Medea’s problems arrives in the form of Aegeus, King of Athens, who is passing through Corinth on a journey. Medea reveals her woes to Aegeus and begs for asylum in Athens, offering to use her skills to help him and his childless queen have sons. Unaware of Medea’s vengeful schemes, Aegeus swears to grant her sanctuary in his land, as long as she
MEDEA THE BARBARIAN
Medea’s status as a foreign exile is a recurring theme in Euripides’ play. From the beginning, she is set apart from the other characters, a non-Greek woman in an alien land, who is at times considered a barbarian. Her loneliness and isolation make her a sympathetic figure, more sympathetic in many respects than Jason; nevertheless, her vengeful actions, especially the murder of her own children, only widen the gap between her and her Greek neighbors, who in real life often blamed “barbaric” behavior on a person’s foreignness.
The very concept of the barbarian stemmed from a reaction to the rise of Persia, which caused the Greek city-states to identify with one another against a common threat. The concept harks back to the word barbaros, meaning “not speaking Greek.” largely became of the tragedy writers, a number of virtues came to be seen as distinctly Greek—intelligence, courage, order and restraint, and justice. Certain vices, on the other hand, were associated with the barbarian—stupidity, lawlessness, cowardice, and Medea’s flaw, unrestrained passion. Not only the tragedies but also other works of art in ancient Athens championed a familiar set of attributes: order over dis-order, selfdiscipline over irrational behavior, democracy over tyranny, and the Greek over the barbarian, to whom Euripides’ Medea is linked.
gets herself to Athens without his help. Once Aegeus has left, Medea gleefully unfolds the whole of her plan to the Chorus. She will feign acceptance of Jason’s new marriage, ask for their sons’ sentence of banishment to be revoked, and then send the boys with poisoned gifts for the princess of Corinth that will cause her death and that of anyone who touches her. Medea also means to kill her own children to prevent them from falling into enemies’ hands and to hurt their father, Jason. While still sympathetic to Medea, the Chorus pleads with her not to carry out such a cruel plan. Medea remains adamant and commands the Nurse to summon Jason to the house but reveal nothing of her secrets. The Chorus recites an ode in praise of Athens and wonders how this glorious city will receive a woman who has murdered her own children. Again it exhorts Medea to refrain from this most horrible of crimes.
When Jason arrives, Medea feigns remorse, begging his forgiveness and offering to resign their sons to his care if they are allowed to remain in Corinth. Pleased by her change of heart, Jason promises to intercede for the boys. Medea sends her sons and their Tutor back to the royal palace with Jason, bearing gifts of a gossamer robe and a gold diadem for the princess. The Chorus expresses pity for Medea’s children, unwitting accomplices to murder, and even for Medea herself, because her great crimes result from Jason’s betrayal.
Returning from the palace with the boys, the Tutor excitedly tells Medea that her sons will not be banished, after all. Medea is now torn between her love for her children and her hatred of Jason, but the latter ultimately prevails. Firmly resolved to kill her sons, Medea embraces them one last time, then sends them into the house. The Chorus discourses on the blessings and curses of having children, especially when the children perish young without fulfilling their promise.
A Messenger from the palace arrives in haste to tell of the terrible deaths of the king and princess. No sooner had the princess donned the robe and diadem than their poisons began to consume her flesh, the diadem bursting into flame. Embracing his dead daughter, Creon was likewise consumed. A vengeful Medea rejoices to hear this news, then enters the house to kill her sons. The Chorus prays for someone to stop this final murder and tries in vain to beat down the doors while Medea’s sons cry for help on the other side.
Hoping to protect his sons from the Corinthians’ rage, Jason rushes to their rescue but arrives too late. The Chorus reveals that Medea has slain the boys. In a frenzy of grief and anger, Jason orders the doors broken down and vows to kill Medea. Just then, Medea herself appears on the roof in a chariot drawn by dragons, her sons’ bodies at her side. (The chariot belongs to her grandfather, Helios, the Sun, and she sits elevated in it, as if to stress her victory and superiority.) The estranged husband and wife again exchange bitter curses and accusations, each blaming the other for the tragedy. Jason asks for the boys’ bodies to bury but Medea refuses him, saying she will bury them where no one can violate their tomb. She announces that she is fleeing to Athens and mocks Jason with her knowledge of his future death, when his skull will be crushed by the hull of the Argo, the ship on which he first sailed to Colchis. (Such a death would have been far from ideal—young heroes hoped to die nobly to earn a public burial with all due honors.) The play ends as a broken, embittered Jason calls upon the gods to witness his wife’s horrible crimes, while Medea flies away triumphantly in her chariot.
Motherhood
While Euripides follows the established legend of Jason and Medea closely, he invents or introduces into the fixed form of a play at least one striking innovation—namely, Medea’s murder of her own children. In the original myth Medea either lost most of her children to vengeance by the Corinthians or gave them up to Hera (queen of gods), who promised to make them immortal. In Euripides’ play, however, Medea’s killing of her sons becomes the one crime no one can justify. On hearing Medea’s plans, the Chorus pleads with her to refrain from this last act of vengeance:
Contemplate the blow struck at a child.
Weigh the blood you take upon you.
Medea, by your knees,
By every pledge or appeal we beseech you,
Do not slaughter your children!(Medea, lines 851-855)
Medea herself has a difficult time resolving to go through with the deed: “Why should I hurt them, to make / Their father suffer, when I shall suffer twice as much / Myself? I won’t do it. I won’t think of it again” (Medea, lines 1047-1049). She wavers, but then rallies: “What is the matter with me? Are my enemies / To laugh at me? Am I to let them off scot-free? / I must steel myself to it (Medea, lines 1050-1052). Her final decision to carry out the murders sets Medea forever apart from her adopted country, marking her as an outsider in every sense of the word.
The nuclear family—husband, wife, and children—formed the heart of Classical Greek society. The begetting of legitimate offspring was, in fact, the main purpose of marriage; the birth of the first child consolidated the wife’s position in her husband’s household and family. Sons were more highly prized than daughters, who at birth could be exposed to the elements and left for rescue or death if their fathers were unwilling to raise girls.
Although children were the legal property of their fathers, mothers were responsible for their children’s day-to-day rearing. Young children stayed with their mothers in “women’s quarters,” the most remote and protected part of the house. A close bond often formed between mothers and sons, partly because the birth of sons enhanced a woman’s prestige within her husband’s family, partly because women had to part with their daughters much sooner. Once a girl reached her early teens, she was groomed for marriage, then given to another household to ensure its continuance. Custom was not conducive to emotional warmth for daughters: “At birth [women] were viewed as temporary and costly members of the household, for they were destined to leave it to become mothers in a rival oikos (household), carrying away with them a portion of the household wealth in dowry” (Demand, p. 3).
By contrast, sons remained their mothers’ concerns until they reached the age of 18 in Classical Athens. Moreover, sons were responsible for the care and well-being of their aging parents.
As women grew older, sons became ever more important to them. Adult sons of widows acted as their mother’s kyrios (guardian) and managed their dowries, which they [the sons] would eventually inherit. A son thus provided his mother with a public voice for the protection of her property and rights. The law also required him to support his mother, which was crucial in a society in which there was no public system of old-age pensions. A view to the future undoubtedly figured in the family-planning strategies of both parents and contributed to a woman’s joy at the birth of sons.
(Brand in Demand, p. 29)
Thus, by killing her sons, Medea destroys her own future as well as Jason’s, a thought that haunts her as she contemplates their murder: “Oh, yes, I once built many hopes / On you; imagined, pitifully, that you would care / For my old age, and would yourselves wrap my dead body / For burial. How people would envy me my sons!” (Medea, lines 1031-1034).
Sources and literary context
Euripides’ primary source for his tragedy was the extensive body of myths relating to Medea and Jason. Several written versions would have been available to the dramatist, including those in Hesiod’s Theogony and Pindar’s Pythian 4. Euripides chose to concentrate not upon the legend of the Golden Fleece, but rather on the domestic tragedy that takes place many years later, when Jason abandons Medea for the princess of Corinth. While retaining the basic elements of the story, Euripides, as noted, became the first to make Medea’s murder of her children part of a fixed version of the legend, an addition that has since become integrated with the original tale.
Euripides dramatized other Greek figures, including
Alcestis (438 bce)
Medea (431 bce)
Children of Heracles (c. 430 bce)
Hippolytus (428 bce)
Electra (c. 420 bce)
Heracles (c. 416 bce)
Trojan Women (415 bce)
Iphigenia among the Taurians (c. 414 bce)
Orestes (408 bce)
The Bacchae (after 406 bce)
Iphigenia in Aulis (after 406 bce)
He, like other major dramatists in Classical Greece, drew on the mythology of his age. Euripides is most often considered in relation to the tragic playwrights Aeschylus (c. 525-456 bce) and Sophocles (496-406 bce), who also used myth as the foundation for much of their work. Euripides, however, employed a plainer style, one closer to everyday speech. Moreover, while Aeschylus chose to focus on dramatic events and Sophocles on situational irony, Euripides concentrated on the suffering individual in a way that was uniquely his own. His protagonists tend to be flawed and human, struggling with passions that frequently overpower them, which leads to a tragic outcome. Euripides’ emphasis on character and realism has led some to contend that his plays anticipate the modern psychological drama.
Events in History at the Time the Play Was Written
The Golden Age of Athens
Euripides’ life (c. 485-406 bce) spanned what historians have sometimes called the Golden Age of Athens, the era when the city’s power and prominence were at their height. Although sacked and burned by invading Persians in 480 bce, Athens literally arose from the ashes in the years following the Persians’ defeat at Salamis in 480 bce. In 477 bce Athens formed the Delian League, an alliance of Ionian cities on the west coast of Asia Minor, the strait of Hellespont, and the Propontis Sea, to repel further Persian threats. The member states began to meet on the centrally located island of Delos—hence the league’s name. Athens refortified its defenses and ultimately transformed the league into an empire that extended over the Aegean area. At its height in the 430s, the empire included 150 subject states. Corinth, the city-state that is featured in Medea, was not one of them. Rather this city-state and Athens were bitter enemies.
COMPETING AT THE DIONYSIA
From at least the end of the sixth century BCE onwards, tragedies were performed during the Athenian spring festival of Dionysus Eleuthereus, the City Dionysia. The festival was a celebration of Dionysus, god of fertility. Poets competed with one another in the festivals for prizes, producing lyric poems, tragedies, and comedies for the occasion. Besides the dramatic competitions, the festival included such activities as processions, sacrifices in the theatre, libations, and parades of war orphans. The archon—state official—in charge of the festival chose three poets to compete, each of whom produced three tragedies about connected subjects, followed by a satyr-play—a semi-comic play with a Chorus made up of satyrs, mostly human though partly bestial creatures of the woods. Originally, the tragedian would perform in his own play, but later he employed actors to play all the characters. A panel of ten judges assessed the merits of each play, and the results were set down permanently in the public record. Once the victor had been announced, he was crowned with ivy in the theater.
Athens maintained a preeminent role in the empire. Between 479 and 431 bce, the year Medea was first performed, Athens was a leading power in the Greek world politically, intellectually, and artistically. The Athenian statesman Pericles dominated the political scene from about 461 to 429 bce, presiding over one of history’s most democratic governments. While women, slaves, and foreigners were excluded from Athenian democracy, male citizens were granted equal opportunity to participate in their city’s political process, whether that involved speaking at public assemblies or serving as a magistrate or juror.
While Pericles supported foreign policies that would enlarge the Athenian empire and domestic policies that clarified Athenian citizen-ship, his accomplishments were not only political. He also promoted festivals and financed the construction of public buildings and religious monuments during the 440s and 430s bce. Athens grew in wealth and beauty under Pericles’ administration, arousing the admiration and envy of its neighbors. In Medea Euripides includes a choral ode on the glories of Athens, acknowledging the city’s exalted place in the Greek world: “The people of Athens, sons of Erechtheus, have enjoyed their prosperity / Since ancient times. Children of blessed gods, / They grew from holy soil unscorched by invasion, / Among the glories of knowledge their souls are pastured” (Euripides, Medea, lines 825-829). Ironically, tensions between Athens and the cities of the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta and Corinth, erupted into war in 431 bce, the same year that Medea was performed. The conflict, known as the Peloponnesian War, was to last nearly 30 years and cost Athens most of its wealth and prestige.
Reception and impact
During his lifetime Euripides’ work tended to be underappreciated. When performed at the Dionysia in the spring of 431, Medea placed only third out of three tragedies, arguably because of its handling of un-orthodox themes (infanticide, female vengeance). Euripides himself served as the butt of jokes: the comic dramatist Aristophanes (c. 455-385 bce) poked fun at him in The Frogs, presenting Euripides as a ranting bore whose plays about bad women had corrupted the morals of Athenian wives. However, Euripides was not without his admirers. Discussing the merits of tragedy in his Poetics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle described Euripides as “the most tragic of the poets” and praised his handling of the infanticide in Medea as an effective way to arouse pity and fear in the audience (Aristotle, pp. 58-59).
Euripides, of course, influenced later classical writers, including Apollonius of Rhodes (c. 295-215 bce), whose own epic Argonautica features Jason and the winning of the Golden Fleece. Other works that featured Medea were written by Ovid (43 BCE-17 ce) and Seneca (c. 4 BCE-65 ce). Ovid’s Medea, his only tragic play, has been lost to posterity. But his Heroides (“Heroines”), a work of imagined letters from mythological women to their lovers or husbands, includes a letter from Medea to Jason that survives:
Ovid’s Medea
Ah me!… Why did I too greatly delight in those golden locks of yours, in your comely ways and in the false graces of your tongue?… At your bidding I have withdrawn from your palace.… When, all suddenly, there came to my ears the chant of… a wedding-strain… I was filled with fear.… Perhaps… when you wish to make boast to your stupid mate… you will fashion strange slanders against my face and against my ways. Let her make merry.… While sword and fire are at my hand, and the juice of poison, no foe of Medea shall go unpunished!… By the two children who are our mutual pledge—restore me to the bed for which I madly left so much behind; be faithful to your promises, and come to my aid as I came to yours!
(Medea in Ovid, pp. 143, 155, 157)
Seneca’s Medea is portrayed as the vengeful sorceress, in contrast to Euripdes’ image of the wronged wife. Even her final exit is more savage in this later play: before fleeing in her flying chariot, Seneca’s Medea tosses down the slain bodies of their children to Jason, leaving him to rail at her as the play ends. Seneca’s version was better known than Euripides’ version among playwrights of the English Renaissance. But Euripides’ portrayal became and remained preeminent thereafter.
Modern critics have long recognized the power of Euripides’ Medea. In an introduction to his translation of the play, Gilbert Murray wrote, “For concentrated dramatic quality and sheer intensity of passion few plays ever written can vie with the Medea” (Murray in Bloom, p. 71). Much attention has been focused on the title character, who has been viewed by turns as a champion of oppressed women, an eternal outsider, a masculinized avenger, and a being at once more and less than human. Examining Medea in the light of the expectations of Euripides’ original audience, Edith Hall contends that the “vengeful, competitive, sexually honest Medea,” who goes unpunished for her crimes, “was any Athenian husband’s worst nightmare recognized” (Hall in Bloom, p. 86).
—Pamela S. Loy
For More Information
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. James Hutton. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982.
Bloom, Harold. Euripides. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003.
Cantarella, Eva. Pandora’s Daughters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Demand, Nancy. Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Ancient Greece. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Euripides. Medea. In Medea and Other Plays. Trans. Philip Vellacott. London: Penguin, 1963.
Garland, Robert. Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks .Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Hall, Edith. Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
Hall, Edith, Fiona Macintosh, and Oliver Taplin, eds. Medea in Performance 1500-2000. Oxford: Legenda, 2000.
Hornblower, Simon, and Antony Spawforth, eds. The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
McHardy, Fiona. “Women’s Influence on Revenge in Ancient Greece.” In Women’s Influence on Classical Civilization. Ed. Fiona McHardy and Eireann Marshall. London: Routledge, 2004.
Ovid. Ovid 1: Heroides. Amores. The Loeb Classical Library. Ed. Jeffrey Henderson. Trans. Grant Showerman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977.
Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves. New York: Schocken, 1995.
Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin. Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.