Background and Preliminaries

• Produced 431 BC
• "Cypris" in this play is another name for Aphrodite

 

 

Mythic background

• Medea: granddaughter of Helios (the sun): daughter of Aeetes, king of Colchis; niece of Circe (the sorceress in the Odyssey): a WITCH, with a father who is also a sorcerer, and a grandfather who is a god
• Jason: Uncle Pelias, sandal, the golden fleece, the Argo; bulls of Hephaistos (magic ointment); dragon (sleeping potion)
• Medea and Jason: once Medea falls in love with Jason, she betrays her father; and takes hostage her brother Asyrptus, who she cuts into pieces to slow down the pursuing ship and allow Jason to escape (with her)
• Pelias and the daughters of Pelias: renewed youth through cutting up and magical herbs: Medea demonstrates to daughters of Pelias on an old ram; they then try it on their own father (!)
• Corinth is where Jason and Medea flee after the murder of Pelias; there Creon wishes to marry his daughter, Glauce, to Jason
• Medea is, then, an exotic figure: typically taken as the quintessential mythic symbol of the barbarian, of the dangerous sorceress brought by a hero from the edge of the known world: why does Euripides choose to downplay this in deference to his prominent emphasis on male/female?


Ancient variants to the tale
 

• Importantly, our best evidence suggests that Euripides probably invented the variation wherein Medea murders her own children (the introduction to your translation is misleading on this point).
• Other, earlier ways the story was told: Eumelos, in his Korinthiaka (8th c.?) had Medea conceal her children in the temple of Hera, hoping to make them immortal, but they die. Another version of the myth has Medea leaving her children in the temple where they were killed by Creon's kin, who then spread the rumor that Medea had murdererd them.
• The audience then will NOT then expect the killing of the children: this is not the way the story must be, or even usually is, told. When Medea makes this decision, we can assume that the audience would hav been surprised-- and aghast!
• Why then does Eur. choose to have Medea kill her children? What is trying to highlight in the play?

A Dream of Passion (Jules Dassin, 1978): The Two Medeas

• Costa (the director) berates Maya (Melina Mercouri, who plays Medea in the play within the film) for injecting too much of politics into the play: "Medea is about love, passion, witchcraft" in which the poet has created "another world" ... it's about "poetry, not current events" But is he right? Is it true that we are injecting something from our own world, something alien to the play, in insisting that Medea argues for womanhood even as she rejects Jason and works towards her terrible deed?
• Maya does not blame herself for the horrible breakup with Maria earlier in their lifes (over another man): rather, she blames the man, and -- curiously! -- her mother, who taught her to think of the other woman, and not the man, as the enemy, who taught her to find value only through her relationship to a man:
• compare in the play line 247 (towards the climax of Medea's famous speech on the plight of being a woman), and the general relationship built up in the play between the assertion that the "bed" and "sex" is what matters to a woman, and the androcentric (focus on the man) world view that is under question
• note that in the play, too, the women fully participate in the male construct of their self-esteem: Medea, even as she criticizes this world view, also attacks the daughter of Creon as her enemy, and perceives Jason's sleeping with her as central to her loss of womanly honor
• As Maya draws closer to the child murderer Brenda, and finds much of Brenda in herself, she is led by the horror of child murder towards the rejection of the androcentric (male-focused) world view
• "Was it justified for Medea to kill her children?" asks the BBC director; to which Maya replies, "That's the wrong question to ask. Why not ask the right question instead, which is: what desperation led her to kill her children?"

Medea as a woman in defiance of the male view

• Corinthian chorus: a thiasos of womanhood: they side with her, support her, even when they disagree: interestingly, this is ON THE BASIS THAT THEY ARE WOMEN (they, after all, are Greek, and she is a barbarian, so this surprises)
• e.g., 267f, 823
• note esp. striking combativeness at 425f: "if the lyre had not been made for men, we would have sung an answer to the other sex long ago"!
• the misfortunes of the woman
• 231ff: marriage (note, once again, how Euripides perverts things, making what is usually considered positive into a negative!)
• 294ff: being clever (ditto!)
• Typical, unthoughtful male views of woman are shown up as foolish
• End of Jason's speech: 569ff (a typical male argument, but in this context sounds foolish)
• Medea's speech: 886ff (a satire on a typical male view, and on Jason's absurd arguments, which again makes the typical male view sound foolish)
• irony: what motivates Medea's actions is her jealousy over the new bride, the thought that everyone will laugh at her, that Jason will have a new bed-partner (the typical male complaints!):
• see esp. lines 1366ff (!)
• The play seems in some sense to be a meditation on the different roles of man and woman in Greek society (one doesn't need a feminist interpretation to come to this conclusion!), but what sort of commentary is this? Is womanness in the end honored? Is manness?
• Medea is, to be sure, the hero of the play, but what sort of hero?

 

• Christie Wolfgang: compare Jason & Hippolytus (esp. their views on women!); Medea and Electra
• Costa Kalorides: compare Medea & Antigone, both criticized by the ruler as "clever women": but is Medea glorious/victorious at the end?
• ego: compare Medea and Ajax: help your friends, harm your enemies: cf. lines 807ff.(!) But why is a woman made an example of this ancient heroic code?

Medea as a process of inversion: the two AGONs

• Compare the first agon at 446ff with the second agon at 1317ff (both between Medea and Jason, flanking the action of the play):
• Dialogue begins with character who thingks s/he controls the fate of the other (446-64, 1317-22), and adopts a superior, exaggeratedly calm and "reasonable" manner
• Altercation opens with insults by the weaker antagonist, followed by an argument; answered by the stronger; then stichomythia (line by line repartee)
• same insults, accusations, declarations that the opponent's actions have made him/her an abomination in the eyes of gods and men
• in both, they regret having met one another
• In the first agon, Medea catalogues instances of her past kindness, which is then picked up in the second by Jason as stages in the process of his misfortune
• Concluded with a passionate outburst by the weaker antagonist (Medea at 623-26, Jason at 1405-14)
• These two agons are the cardinal points of the tragedy:
• they mark the beginning and end of the dramatic action,
• but also contrast as image and reflection:
• for the second agon represents an exact reversal of the situation in the first
• Between these two points we see the gradual transformation of the initial situation into its opposite

• Medea
• Jason
• Creon, king of Corinth (NOT the same as the Creon in the Theban plays)
• Aegeus
• Helios