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.

life is probably nothing other than happiness - Jean Anouilh and Anne Carson adapt Greek plays, and Jean Giraudoux adapts something else

The French went nuts, in the 1930s and even more so in the 1940s, for adaptations of ancient Greek plays.  I don’t know why.  I have guesses.  The one I read most recently is Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (1944).  The play’s major theme of “duty to the state” versus “duty to something else” (the gods in Sophocles, perhaps the self in Anouilh) sounds like the perfect way to get in trouble with Nazi censors, but no, they seemed all right with the debate. 

A third of the play, one long scene, is nothing but the debate between Creon and Antigone.  Each debater is convinced, by the end, that they are less right than they thought.  Creon is, to a large degree, arguing to Antigone that she should live, that she should let him protect her from his own law:

You’ll despise me more than ever for saying this, but finding it out, as you’ll see, is some sort of consolation for growing old: life is probably nothing other than happiness. (tr. Barbara Bray)

Meanwhile Antigone argues, in contemporary French fashion, that life is nothing other than absurdity and Creon should execute her as soon as possible.  Psychologically, it often seems like she buries her brother not out of duty but as a form of “suicide by cop.”

Greek plays in general, and this one in particular, are ideal for stripped down sets, avant-garde musical accompaniment, and anachronisms.  The big surprise to me was the large, goofy part of the guard, pure comic relief, perfect for, say Lou Costello or Stan Laurel.

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Anne Carson has a new adaptation of (riff on) a Greek play, the Herakles or Euripides (c. 416 BCE) turned into the H of H Playbook of Carson (c. 2021 CE).  Like her Antigonick (2012), but I think not her Antigone (2015), it is a mix of poetry and art book, jokes and tragedy, aggravation and brilliance.

I thought the piece starts to snap together when H of H takes the stage, his labors complete, his existentialist doubts just beginning.  Was that really such a good way to spend a life?  I mean, killing a lion, what’s the point of that?  He finds reading Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951) helpful for understanding his own psychology:

Our business was to crush the counterrevolution.  And Victor Serge sums it up: occupational psychosis.

This dang book has no page numbers.  Here it is:

Maybe another photo, too.  It is an art book:

H of H:

I should have left you in The Chair of Forgetfulness.

Th[eseus]:

Maybe you did, Daddio, maybe you did.

H of H:

One correction.  I don’t call them gods.  If god exists, god is a perfect thing, not some hooligan from bad daytime TV.

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Anouilh was deeply influenced – in fact inspired to become a playwright – by Jean Giraudoux, and I have trouble telling them apart.  Giraudoux’s “Greek plays” are mostly from the 1930s, while Anouilh’s are form the 1940s, so there’s a difference.  Their styles and interests are similar.  It is strange to think that plays by both writers were once commonly staged in English.

I read a non-Greek Giraudoux adaptation recently, Ondine (1938), where the lovely 1811 fairy tale novella of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué is turned into what else but absurdist French proto-existentialism.  Can a man survive the love a pure water spirit?  No, for he is human.

Parts – the tragic ending – are still lovely, parts ridiculous.  Parts both:

HANS: I’m being called too, Undine; called by something pale and cold.  Take back your ring, and be my true widow under the water. (almost at the end, tr. Roger Gellert)

Giraudoux stuffs in plenty of magic and trickery and surrealist goofing.  Unlike stripped-down wartime Anouilh, he had a budget.

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I have been thinking about organizing some kind of readalong for next year, and one idea that seems almost good is to read through the extant Greek plays, all of them, at a pace of one a week.  They are all short, and there are only 45* survivors.  They are foundations of Western literature in multiple ways, and mostly a great pleasure in their own right.  Anyone interested? 

* I first wrote "44," miscounting Euripides, but now I think I will do a 46 week event, reading Menander's complete Dyskolos and also his completed The Girl from Samos.