Medea
Medea
by Euripides
THE LITERARY WORK
A play set in ancient Corinth, performed in Athens in 431 b.c.
SYNOPSIS
Medea, a foreign princess and sorceress,, is abandoned try her Greek husband Jason. who has married the princess Creusa, Medea lakes terrible vengeance upon her former husband. She murders Creusa and Creusa’s father, then kills her own two sons—lason’s only children—in retribution.
Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place
Events in History at the Time the Play Was Written
Euripides (485-406 b.c.) is regarded as one of the greatest of classical tragedians. Creafor of more than ninety plays (although less than twenty are available in complete form), Euripides is cited by scholars as a dramatist who cultivated a more realistic tone than most of his contemporaries. His works often featured flawed, unheroic characters.
Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place
Medea as an Athenian play
An Athenian citizen, Euripides revolutionized Greek tragedy by treating his mythic characters as if they were people of his own time, subject to the political and social pressures faced by everyday citizens in fifth-century b.c. Athens; although the play is set in Corinth, Euripides has his characters live according to Athenian customs. Medea’s characters are drawn from Greek myth, a body of stories and legends that were passed on orally and regarded as historical accounts by the Greeks who eventually wrote them down. Roughly a thousand years separate Euripides from the mythic past in which Medea and Jason were imagined to have lived; however, the dramatist compresses this time so that the earlier characters seem to inhabit the same historical moment as the audience.
The Play in Focus
The plot
Medea and Jason were best known to Athenians of the fifth century b.c. as the main characters in the legend of the Golden Fleece. This tale concerned Jason’s search for the magic fleece of a ram that was sacrificed by Phrixus and transformed into the constellation of Aries. The character of the nurse in Medea recounts part of this legend in the opening scene of the play, and other characters mention the legend liberally throughout.
In the legend, Jason and his troop of young Greek heroes arrive in Medea’s home of Colchis, located on the farthest shores of the Black Sea. Jason is continuing his search for the magnificent golden fleece that is in her father’s possession. Medea falls in love with Jason and betrays her father by helping the adventurer win the treasure. Jason, Medea, and her brother flee Colchis with the fleece. In some versions of the story she kills her brother and throws pieces of his body overboard to delay her father, who is in pursuit. When the fugitives arrive in Jason’s homeland, Medea commits another murder by dispatching Jason’s uncle, who has usurped the throne. Forced to flee once again, the pair settle in Corinth, where Euripides’s play takes up the story.
Jason becomes involved with Creusa, the daughter of King Creon of Corinth, entering into a relationship he believes is politically advantageous. Creusa and Jason decide to marry despite the presence of Medea. When Medea learns of this, she curses the wedding and the king. Because King Creon fears Medea, he exiles her from his city. She obtains a reprieve for one day to put her affairs in order and to make provisions for her two sons, who are to accompany her. But she has fooled the old king. Instead Medea intends to exact revenge. Although she at first considers killing Jason, his new bride, and Creon, upon second thought she realizes that it would be a greater punishment to let Jason live once she has killed his new family—and the children she had with him.
To further her scheme, she begs King Creon to let her sons remain in Corinth with their father Jason. Medea involves the unwitting boys in her evil scheme, sending them to Jason’s new bride with poisoned gifts—a golden robe and diadem (crown). The horrible poison melts the princess’s skin from her bones. Creon embraces his afflicted daughter and is killed as well. Medea later turns on her own two sons with a sword, confident that the impact of those murders will crush the spirit of her faithless husband. The play concludes as Medea flies off in a dragon-drawn chariof laden with the bodies of her two dead sons, leaving behind a devastated and childless Jason.
Sources
Medea appears in many different guises in the mythological stories on which Euripides based his play. She is sometimes portrayed as the rightful queen of Corinth, or as the granddaughter of the sun, Helios (in whose chariof she departs at the end of Euripides’s play). In some traditions, she is the niece of Circe, a wicked enchantress. The extent to which she is an evil figure varies from story to story; Euripides’s own contribution to the tradition is the grim variation in which Medea purposely kills her own children. Previous versions of the story explained that the Corinthians killed the boys in retaliation for the death of their king and his daughter, or that Medea killed them accidentally while trying to make them immortal.
Women and marriage in fifth-century Athens
Women in fifth-century b.c. Athens were kept cloistered within the home and could not act on their own behalf. In political, economic, social, and legal terms they were largely powerless. The powerful Medea flouts this state of affairs, however. At one point she announces, “Women of Corinth, I have come outside to you” (Euripides, Medea, line 214). Some speculate that this announcement may have signaled to the audience in Athens her rejection of the traditional social role of wife and mother. She protests against the unfairness of such a system, which extends to all Greek women: “Great Themis, lady Artemis, (goddess of oaths), behold the things I suffer, though I made him promise, my hateful husband” (Medea, lines 160-62).
A NASTY RUMOR
Slander ... accrued to Euripides at some point after production of the Medea: that Euripides had accepted a bribe from (he Corinthians to saddle Medea instead of them with the murder of her children.
(McDermott, p. 98)
When Medea rages at being put aside by Jason in favor of Creusa, she assumes sympathetic overtones. Tradition, however, is clearly on Jason’s side. One of her sharpest accusations against Jason is that he has broken his marriage oath to her. But as a Greek man, Jason was not obligated to honor such an oath—a woman could not legally promise herself in marriage, and Medea’s father did not sanction the union. Medea herself had no authority to marry Jason. In fact, the ceremonies surrounding the betrothal were traditionally negofiated by a woman’s prospective husband and the man responsible for her, usually her father. The transaction was finalized by the father’s pronouncement, “I give my daughter to you to plow for legitimate children” (Rabinowitz, p. 4). Marriage was seen as the means of producing offspring who would be citizens and not as a romantic attachment. Jason says as much when he complains: “It would have been far better for men to have gof their children in some of her way, and women not to have existed” (Medea, lines 573-75).
Like marriage, divorce was initiated exclusively by men and was easily accomplished. All a man had to do was publicly renounce his marriage, which is what Jason does, and send his ex-wife home with the dowry with which she had entered the union. The woman had no say in the matter. Athenian men were also allowed to keep a foreign concubine (mistress) with whom they could have children in addition to their “real” Athenian wives. Such was the domestic arrangement that Jason hoped to achieve when the play began. The only reason that Jason’s action might have been considered improper to Euripides’s audience was that Medea had nowhere to go, no father or male profecfor to turn to. The dramatization of these commonplace aspects of Athenian domestic life served as an important element in Euripides’s tragedy.
ARISTOPHANES ON EURIPIDES AND WOMEN
Another Athenian writer, the playwright Aristophanes (448?-388? b.c.), poked fun at Euripides in his work. The following is a comic exchange between Euripides and another character that is featured in one of the plays uf Aristophanes:
Euripides; “I fear that this day will be my last. The women have been plotting against me. And today, at the Thesmophoria, they’re going to discuss my liquidation (death),”
“But why on earth,...?”
They say I slander them in my tragedies,”
Well, so you do. Serve you right if they did get you!”
(Powell, p. 32)
Events in History at the Time the Play Was Written
The Age of Pericles
Pericles dominated Athenian politics from 447 b.c. until around 431 b.c., the year that Medea was performed. An empire builder, he was always searching for ways by which he might increase the number of Athenian colonies and bolster the city’s power throughout all of Greece. His ambitions led Athens to war, but the city also grew in beauty and wealth under his leadership. Huge amounts of money were directed toward buildings, festivals (including dramatic productions), and religious monuments.
THE COLOR OF THE CHARACTER’S SKIN
Herodotus [a Greek historian] mentions that Colchis [Medea’s homeland] was first an Egyptian settlement. According to this evidence, then, Medea was not only a foreigner but also a woman of color and, more important, a member of a well-established civilization, not at all barbaric.
(Rabinowitz, p. 137)
The most famous building in Athens, the Parthenon, was finished in 431 b.c.; this temple was dedicated to Athena, not as the goddess of wisdom but as the patroness of Athens. A cult of city-worship rose during this era; the famous ode to Athens sung by the chorus in Medea might have been a reflection of this trend. Also during this time, the new philosophical school known as Sophism became popular, with Socrates emerging as its most famous teacher. Socrates challenged commonly held beliefs about religion and ethics. The psychology of the average man was studied for the first time, and important questions about truth and virtue were considered through the use of philosophical dialogue. In fact, Socrates is thought to have been an influence on Euripides’s dramatic technique, which mimicked cultural trends of the time, such as the study of psychological motivations behind individual actions.
Drama and Athenian politics
The theater was squarely at the heart of fifth-century b.c. social and political life in Athens; Pericles actually dipped into the civic treasury so that people could go to the great festivals at which drama was presented (Ehrenberg, p. 248). Ten to fifteen thousand people would sit on the grassy slopes in the middle of the city to watch the highly ritualized performances. These began with a parade of representatives from the Athenian colonies who presented tributary money to the city, along with a dance performed by youths dressed in military gear. The festival was very competitive: each play was judged by a panel drawn from the audience, and the results were set down permanently in the public record. How well a playwright did in these competitions would naturally influence whether, and how often, he would be allowed to have his work performed publicly. Although it later became one of Euripides’s most famous plays, Medea was not his most successful effort in the dramatic competitions, possibly because it challenged rather than affirmed traditional values regarding the role of women in Greek society.
Reviews
Medea placed third out of three tragedies that were performed in the spring of 431 b.c. Yet Aristotle, who thought that Euripides produced particularly tragic poetry, held up Medea as an example of a drama that successfully inspires pity or terror in the audience: “The action may be done consciously and with knowledge of the persons, in the manner of the older poets. It is thus too that Euripides makes Medea slay her children” (Aristotle, Poetics, 14.6). Euripides, though, was occasionally the target of later comedies, particularly those written by Aristophanes.
The citizenship law of 450-451
In the play, Jason protests to Medea that his new Corinthian wife is necessary in order to protect the position of his first family: “I wished to preserve you and breed a royal progeny (set of children) to be brothers to the children I have now, a sure defense to us” (Medea, lines 595-97). Medea scoffs at this justification, but it is possible that Euripides is referring in these lines to a law that had been recently enacted in Athens. Under this new law, which was passed by Pericles, only those people whose parents were both Athenian could be citizens of the city. Therefore, the children Jason had with Medea were barred from obtaining citizenship. Even the son of Pericles, who was born to the general’s Milesian lover, could not be a citizen. Some historians feel that the law was drawn up in order to limit the power of certain aristocrats who opposed Pericles’s policies. Others suggest that it was the increasingly large number of resident aliens that necessitated the concentration of power among a relative few. Whatever the case, the citizenship law was probably not far from the minds of Euripides’s Athenian audience as they considered the plight of the foreign princess Medea and her children.
Preparing for war
At the time Euripides was completing Medea, the treatment and status of foreigners became important for other reasons. The play was staged in Athens in 431 b.c., on the eve of the first major war in which Greeks fought among themselves. The Peloponnesian War was named after the Peloponnesus peninsula, which forms the southern part of Greece. The war was the result of tensions between Athens and the cities of the Peloponnesian League—Sparta and Corinth, primarily. A preliminary skirmish broke out between Corinth and one of the allies of Athens, Corcyra. Previous battles had pitted the Greeks against foreign forces such as the Persians, a people with different customs and appearances. Because the warring Greek cities of Corinth and Corcyra shared the same culture and traditions, a different definition of foreign or alien had to be formed. The struggle to arrive at this definition would continue for almost thirty years, until the end of the Peloponnesian War.
For More Information
Aristotle. “Poetics.” In Criticism: The Major Texts. Edited by W. J. Bates. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.
Bulfinch, Thomas. Bulfinch’s Mythology. New York: Crown, 1978.
DuBois, Page. Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1991.
Ehrenberg, Victor. From Solon to Socrates: Greek History and Civilization during the 6th and 5th Centuries. 2nd ed. London: Methuen, 1973.
Euripides. “Medea.” In Euripides 1, The Complete Greek Tragedies. Translated by David Greene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1974.
Hammond, N. G. L., ed. A History of Greece to 322 b.c. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.
McDermott, Emily A. Euripides’ Medea: The Incarnation of Disorder. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1989.
Powell, Anton, ed. Euripides, Women, and Sexuality. London: Routledge, 1990.
Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin. Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Translated by Rex Warner. New York: Penguin, 1972.