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.