Excerpt

MEDEA

Euripides, 431 BCE

Title : Medea was the mythical ancestress of the Medes, an ancient nation in the area we now know as Iran. The Greeks thought of these near-easterners as sinister and somewhat magical, but also related to them. In the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, Medea is a princess of Colchis (between Turkey and Russia) who assists the hero on the condition that he marry her. Then he cheated and she murdered their children, and later bore a son named Medeius with Theseus' father Aegeus.

Premise : Medea takes revenge on her husband Jason for abandoning her to take a new wife.

Falling Off the Wagon

The character of Medea comes from the old supernatural mythology of heroes and quests and monsters. Jason was a prince whose uncle usurped the throne, promising to restore it only if Jason retrieved the legendary Golden Fleece – essentially a suicide mission, from which Jason was expected never to return. But on his voyage he met a princess named Medea who fell in love with him, and used her witchcraft and magical powers to eliminate obstacles (which included killing her own brother and father). When Jason and Medea returned with the fleece, Jason's uncle once again plotted to kill him, and Medea once again used her powers: she showed the king's daughters how to resurrect a slain lamb, and then when they tried the trick again on their father, Medea prevented the magic from working. Unfortnately, even with his royal uncle dead, Jason still had to take Medea and flee, and thus Euripides' play begins with the couple exiled in Corinth (and Jason once again angling for a throne).

When the curtain rises on Medea, its title character is already a serial killer. She's doing her best to be a good, domestic housewife, as we see in her interactions with the chorus of empathetic Corinthian women. But Jason's betrayal causes cracks in her happy-homemaker disguise, through which the local gossips and hired help catch glimpses of a beast inside, part bull, part lion – a chimera, a sphinx, a monster. Other heroes had gone off and fought gorgons (Perseus decapitated Medusa, Heracles beheaded the hydra, Theseus mangled the minotaur), but Jason actually married the monster. ...Or at least she thinks so – Jason seems to view their relationship as informal.

Jason and Medea are locked in the classic tragedy of husbands and wives thinking they can change, and thinking they can change each other. In their first encounter, Jason was a gigolo and Medea was a killer. Apparently they managed to keep these traits in check for a while, they've got a couple kids, but inevitably Jason becomes a gigolo again and Medea resumes serial killing. The play follows the action of Medea slipping back into addiction – the expression “falling off the wagon” comes to mind, except she literally gets back on the wagon, a sun-chariot. She spends the first half appealing for sympathy as an abandoned wife and mother, then brushes the dust from her suppliant knees and gives herself a pep-talk “You have a noble father, descended from the Sun. You have the skill. And, after all, we're women: most helpless when it comes to noble deeds, most skillful at constructing every evil.” Her attempt to play Jason's ideal bride (and mother-of-the-year) has been rejected, so she goes back to doing what she does best. Who knows? Maybe Disney was planning a Medea movie when they commissioned the song “Let It Go.”

Emotional Baggage

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” the old expression goes, but that's an understatement when it comes to Medea: Hellenism hath no fury like this woman scorned. While other Geek heroes and heroines are driven by honor, Medea is driven by emotion. And Medea's emotions are extreme. Her love for Jason must have been extreme because she killed her own father to help him, and when he curtly announces their divorce she kills everyone. Or everyone except Jason, whom she leaves broken to think about what he's done.

While Medea is emotional, Jason is pragmatic, and defends his betrayal in logical terms. At the heart of his argument is the belief that paternity is all that matters: the children Medea bore him are his alone, the children he expects from his next marriage will be his alone, so he expects Medea to be happy that their sons will soon have wealthy siblings with royal connections! He even offers a generous lump-sum alimony to help her get resettled. Jason does not respect maternity, Medea's relationship to their children, and she punishes this disrespect by acting extremely un-maternal. And Medea's idea of “extreme” is extreme-to-the-extreme: she not only kills the children, she also takes their bodies away so Jason can't even participate in their burial and mourning.

Medea's emotions are so extreme that she improvises a plan without an exit strategy. Then she uses her strong emotions to create an escape, eliciting a visiting king's sympathy to the point where he's willing to offer her sanctuary unconditionally. The only hiccup is she needs to provide her own transportation, which will be impossible once she has committed mass murder. But then Medea's emotion manifests a god-machine, an honest-to-goodness Deus-ex-Machina sun-chariot as her escape vehicle.

Transfiguration

Eurpides' Medea is an origin story for a demonic demigoddess. The play begins with a vulnerable woman, a scorned wife and mother, but over the course of the story she takes on a superhuman determination and fury, she is gradually transfigured goddess of vengeance. We see this transformation from numerous perspectives. The male characters, Jason and Creon, initially confine Medea to their misogynistic standards, she is only a woman. But by the end she has totally annihilated them, and Jason declares that she has done what no Greek woman could do, and is no woman at all but a monster. Medea at the start refers to herself with the metaphor of a voyager tossed by the waves, but finally realizes her own power and flies away above the sea.

Medea's metamorphosis is powerfully symbolized in the way she defeats her replacement. As she once assisted Jason in gaining the golden fleece, now she sends golden robes as a gift to the princess. But whereas the fleece was protective, the robes are poisoned (a poison that burns the princess, and also kills the king when he tries to remove them). Medea dresses the princess as her younger self, and in this way symbolically destroys her greatest enemy: the naive young princess she once was.

In her transformation she also transcends boundaries of gender. A good Greek wife in this situation would have hanged herself, but Medea instead usurps the male roles of sacrificer and avenging hero. We should remember here that child sacrifice is not uncommon in Greek myth and tragedy – Agamemnon slaughtered his daughter, Heracles (supposedly in madness) killed his children, Laius left baby Oedipus exposed to die. The special horror of Medea is that a mother commits this act, but by this point in the story Medea has ceased to be a mother, or a human at all...

We today can enjoy Euripides' Medea as the dramatic story of a woman scorned who took a brutal revenge. Viewing the story in strictly human psychological and emotional terms even heightens the drama, and as great theater should, it gives us something to talk about during the ride home. But there's also something to be gained in situating the story in its own context, the ascension of a demonic demigoddess.

Miscellaneous : Medea the play, like Medea the character, is a “screw you” to the whole Greek experiment - the philosophy of moderation, the value of lofty oratory, the theology of divine justice, responsibility to kin and city, even Greek architecture gets broken when Medea drives a flying chariot through the roof (Oh, right – Medea breaks the laws of physics and gravity too). The original audience must have been as stunned as I am: of the three tetrologies entered in the 431 BCE playwriting contest, this one came in last place. It couldn't have helped that the only Athenian in this play, king Aegeus, gets suckered by this mass murderer.

CONTENT

PART I: ANCIENT HISTORY

Prometheus Bound Aeschylus, Date Unknown

The Suppliants Aeschylus, C 463 BCE

Ion Euripides, C412 BCE

Medea Euripides, 431 BCE

The Bacchae Euripides, 405 BCE

Oedipus Tyrannos Sophocles, 427 BCE

Oedipus at Colonus Sophocles, 401 BCE

Seven Against Thebes Aeschylus, 467 BCE

Antigone Sophocles, C442 BCE

Phoenician Women Euripides, 408 BCE

The Suppliants Euripides 423 BCE

Hippolytus Euripides, 428 BCE

Alcestis Euripides, 438 BCE

Heracles Euripides, C418 BCE

Trachinian Women Sophocles, Date Unknown

The Children of Heracles Euripides, C430 BCE

The Persians Aeschylus, 472 BCE

PART II: THE TROJAN WAR

Introduction: The Trojan War

Iphigenia at Aulis Euripides, 405 BCE

Rhesus Euripides, Date Unknown

Ajax Sophocles, C442 BCE

Philoctetes Sophocles, 409 BCE

Trojan Women Euripides, 415 BCE

Hecuba Euripides, 424 BCE

Oresteia I: Agamemnon Aeschylus, 458 BCE

Oresteia II: The Libation Bearers Aeschylus, 458 BCE

Electra Sophocles, Year Unknown

Electra Euripides, C415 BCE

Orestes Euripides, 408 BCE

Oresteia III: The Eumenides Aeschylus, 458 BCE

Iphigenia in Tauris Euripides, C412 BCE

Helen Euripides, 412 BCE

Andromache Euripides, C427 BCE

The Cyclops Euripides, Date Unknown

Conclusion

...AND THREE COMEDIES

Lysistrata Aristophanes, 411 BCE

Women at Thesmophoria Aristophanes, 411 BCE

The Frogs Aristophanes, 405 BCE

Bibliography and Notes

Character Index