Friday, April 1, 2022

Medea by Euripides - No other soul can hold so many thoughts of blood

With Euripides’s Medea (431 BCE) we’ve reached the point that inspired me to read the Greek plays in some kind of chronological order.  From Medea on for more than twenty-five years, there is a surviving play, sometimes two or three, in almost every year, a mix of Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophocles.  And meanwhile, the Peloponnesian War begins, just a few months after the performance of Medea, ending in 404 BCE with the conquest and destruction of democratic Athens.  I have, perhaps incorrectly, placed the final surviving tragedy, Oedipus in Colonus in that year, rounding off not the great tradition of Greek tragedy just as the culture that supported it is violently transformed into something else.


Euripides and Aristophanes, in the plays we have, directly respond to the events of the war in their plays.  They perhaps invent the protest play.  Sophocles may well have been above it all.  The reader interested in putting the plays alongside the History of Thucydides will find many interesting things.  I am not so interested in that right now, but rather the literary interactions among the playwrights, the way they respond to each other.  But of course the entire tradition was always deeply intertextual, telling the old stories again and again.

As with Medea.  I wondered, as I read it, what a reader unfamiliar with the story might be thinking.  The audience knew it in detail, so from the first lines, as soon as we learn where we are in Medea’s story (meaning, this is not about the Golden Fleece, and not about the gruesome trick murder of King Pelias) we anticipate a series of horrible deaths, even if, give the variety of stories, we are not sure exactly how everyone will die.  Was the audience prepared for the detailed gore of the Messenger’s description of the death of Jason’s bride, eaten away by Medea’s poisoned dress?  Or was the gore an innovation?

The prizes were likely awarded as much on the costumes, music, and dancing as for the plays themselves, and we know nothing of the competition, or of the other three Euripides plays presented with Medea, but still, Euripides came in last place that year. It was later writers – Ovid, Seneca – who identified Medea as one of the best plays.

Let’s see.  What do I think about this one.  Medea is an archetype of the Strong Female Character, getting stronger as the plays progresses, transcending humanity by the end, if she were ever such a thing:

Let no one think me a weak one, feeble-spirited,

A stay-at-home, but rather just the opposite,

One who can hurt my enemies and help my friends;

For the lives of such persons are most remembered. (p. 86, tr. Warner)

Medea cannot give up the murder of her own children because it might make her look weak.  To whom, I wonder, but as is often the case in Euripides the psychology is pretty individual.  The gods and fate are distant.  Himadri, the Argumentative Old Git, has been writing about the curious split structure of so many of the plays, but Medea is pure – one single rising, or falling, action, from Medea’s feminist manifesto in her first speech (”We women are the most unfortunate creatures,” 67 - the bit in the title is also from this speech) to, mounted on her dragon chariot, her triumphant humiliation of her no-good ex-husband at the end.

The clueless chorus is amusing.  The open flattery of Athens is odd, except see above.  As the Peloponnesian War progresses, the flattery will dry up.

Quotations have been from the Rex Warner version.  I also read Jean Anouilh’s 1946 Médée, an adaptation, not a translation, and I found it thin, humanizing Medea a little too much, making her into a “crazy ex-girlfriend” without any mythic weight.  Not as interesting as his Antigone or Eurydice.  The French was easy, at least, a sign of progress.

I put a 1606 Italian print, an illustration from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, atop the post.  It is at the Met.

Next week’s play is The Heracleidae or The Children of Heracles, dated to 429 BCE entirely because of a link to a contemporary event.  So who knows, really.  It is, in a number of ways, a strange play.  I believe we are all used to that by now.

9 comments:

  1. A truly great play, this. I wrote about it back in 2015 here. I'm sure I'd write something quite different about it now, but I do remember noticing back then (I was reading through all the Greek plays, just like we're doing now) how Euripides tends to present his mythic characters as sort of everyday people, not poetic abstractions.

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  2. I apologize for the silence. Work and all that.

    There's an interesting (to me) tie-in between the play and current events. Right in the middle of the play, Aegeus (king of Athens) goes to Corinth (an enemy of Athens in 431) to ask Medea to interpret an oracle. An innocent gesture, leading to being duped into offering asylum, exposing Athens to something untoward, something they can't escape. In a way, it's almost a harbinger of not just the war but the looming plague.

    The chorus may be clueless most of the time, but their lines after Aegeus being tricked foreshadow Pericles' funeral speech the next year and possibly the audience's expected reaction. Dramatically it's fun to see.

    Euripides does a great job of showing how the ordinary and the monstrous co-exist.

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  3. I am still reading along and enjoying tge reading immensely. I have now got used to the strangeness of the genre, and plays are addictive. I really had fun reading "Medea". I have got carried away and am immersed in the best play. I have also obtained several books on Greek drama and they have been a great help. I am so grateful to thus blog for introducing me to this superb experience.

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  4. This is strong stuff. Medea manages to be both sympathetic and terrifying for the entire play. And Jason could have been a pretty stock character, but he feels like a real person and fuels Medea's anger wonderfully. "Yet, in spite of everything, I come, Medea, patient to the last with someone I am fond of, to do what I can to help." What a sanctimonious jerk.

    There's not as much oddness as in some of the Aeschylus plays, but still some surprises. I liked two bits that almost act as a justification for the play itself. First, the Nurse: "The men of old times had little sense... They invented songs, and all the sweetness of music, to perform at feasts, banquets, and celebrations; but no one thought of using songs and stringed instruments to banish the bitterness and pain of life... If music could cure sorrow it would be precious; but after a good dinner why sing songs? When people have fed full they're happy already." Then later, the Chorus: "The ballads of ages gone by that harped on the falseness of women, will cease to be sung... If only Apollo, Prince of the lyric, had put in our hearts the invention of music and songs for the lyre, wouldn't I then have raised up a feminine paean to answer the epic of men?"

    Some other great little touches, like the conversation between the Nurse and the Tutor on how they should tiptoe around Medea's temper. I also liked Medea's closing speech to Jason: "I myself shall go to Athens, land of Erechtheus, to live with Aegeus, Pandion's son... you to a paltry death that fits you well: your skull smashed by a fragment of the Argo's hull: ironic ending to the saga of your love for me." I suspect that this was maybe a reminder to the audience of Jason's eventual feat, but in context it's an extraordinarily brutal kissoff.

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  5. I read through the plays let's say 25 years ago. Yes, Euripides is the humanist of the bunch, one reason he's my favorite, despite his messiness. Because of. I don't know.

    Dwight, that is interesting. Poor Athens - don't take in Medea! The story does continue, although Medea's adventures in Athens are hardly the most famous part of her story.

    Clare, that is so nice to hear. I should use your words as a testimonial on Twitter. I have found, like you, that the entire subject - the theatrical practice, the cultural meaning, the textual issues - are almost endlessly interesting.

    Dolly, yes, these characters are so human. 2,500 years ago, and they are so recognizable. I had not really noticed the passages about song. So interesting.

    It has puzzled me since my childhood how the Greeks liked to come up with anti-heroic deaths for their heroes: Jason clobbered by the figurehead of the Argos; Aeschylus clobbered by a turtle. Heroes rarely die heroic deaths.

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  6. Jean Anouilh’s translation of Lysistrata is also fun.

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  7. I am having trouble finding an Anouilh Lysistrata, but I am perhaps not recognizing it under its French title.

    If I can find it, I will read it.

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    1. I apologize; I've evidently entered the doddering prof stage where it's time to retire. I was mixing up a translation of Antigone which sets it in WWII with one of the 1960's-era translations of Lysistrata. Maybe it was Germaine Greer? I used to take a 2-page section of the Sarah Ruden translation, and have students read it in succession with the Greer, Parker, and I think the Sommerstein translations, to show students how differently the ideas can come across. If I were teaching it today, I'd add a verse translation, the Mulroy.

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    2. Thanks, I was wondering which additional Lysistrata to read. I have Parker but would not mind a second.

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