Looking at Medea

by David Stuttard

  Indeed, Athenian audiences were notoriously volatile. At the beginning of the fifth century BC, they had imposed a heavy fine on the playwright, Phrynichus, for upsetting them with his tragedy, The Capture of Miletus. Later, they are said to have rioted when, thinking that some lines of Aeschylus revealed details of the sacred (and taboo) Eleusinian Mysteries, they invaded the stage – only by clinging to the altar of Dionysus did Aeschylus escape death. On another occasion, feelings between one faction, which supported Aeschylus, and another, which supported Sophocles, ran so high that, instead of the usual civilian judges, Athens’ ten generals were co-opted onto the panel. However, this did not stop playwrights (comedians especially, but also – pace Jasper Griffin – tragedians) from imbuing their work with (albeit veiled) references to, and comments on, current affairs. So, it is to the politics of 431 BC that we must next turn.

  Athens in 431 BC

  In 431 BC, Athens was at her height. For more than a hundred years (since the time of Peisistratus, who had inaugurated the City Dionysia), despite some severe setbacks, Athens had enjoyed a seemingly unstoppable growth in power and influence. At the end of the sixth century BC, her citizens had embraced isonomia (equality under law), a prototype democracy, and, at the beginning of the fifth, they had recovered with remarkable resilience from temporary defeat at the hands of Persian invaders, quickly establishing their dominion over the poleis (city states) of the Aegean islands and the western coast of modern Turkey. In the late 460s BC, Pericles, a dangerously charismatic aristocrat, who knew how to bend the people’s will to suit his own, began to imbue the Athenians with his own brand of nationalism, plunging them into occasionally disastrous but ultimately survivable wars (a campaign against the Persians in Egypt in the 450s BC was particularly catastrophic), while enhancing their city and the surrounding countryside with an ambitious building programme, at whose heart was the Parthenon.

  By the time that temple was dedicated (in 438 BC) and its sculptures complete (a year before Medea, in 432 BC), Athens’ economic dominance could be felt from Sicily in the west to the Black Sea in the east. A list of imports by the contemporary comedian, Hermippus, includes carpets from Carthage, ivory from Libya, salt fish from the Bosphorus and almonds from Paphlagonia on the Black Sea’s southern shores. But not everyone was happy. Athens’ economic rival, Corinth, just over forty miles away to the west, found the situation particularly irksome, especially when Athens (bent, thanks in part to Pericles’ propaganda, on being recognized as the leading polis in the Greek world) became increasingly determined to impose her military dominance as well.

  In 433 BC, the two cities clashed over Corinth’s colony, Corcyra, on the island known today as Corfu, where a failure of delicate politicking led to Athens’ victory in the sea-battle of Sybota. The next year, Athens and Corinth were fighting once again, this time in northern Greece over control of Potidea, a city whose status was ambiguous, being both a colony of Corinth and a tribute-paying member of Athens’ imperial league. Meanwhile, to punish her for choosing the wrong side at Sybota, Athens imposed a trade embargo on Megara, a city halfway between her and Corinth, forbidding Megarian merchants access to any ports under Athenian control. In support of Megara, Corinth set about enlisting the help of fellow members of the Peloponnesian League and especially the militarily powerful Sparta. In 431 BC, as Athenians took their seats in the Theatre of Dionysus to watch Euripides’ tetralogy, of which Medea was the first play, the international stage seemed set for a major war.

  Indeed, as Thucydides (writing in the third person) explains at the beginning of his history:

  he believed that it would be a great war, more deserving of record than any which had gone before. There was good reason for his belief. Both sides were in a state of perfect readiness and he could see that all Greeks everywhere were taking sides …

  The air was thick with expectation.

  Medea, a tragedy for its time

  Only ten lines into Medea, Euripides reveals the scene of his tragedy: ‘this land of Corinth’. In many respects, the drama is set firmly in the heroic world of Jason and his Argonauts – a world, moreover, ruled by kings (whereas fifth-century Corinth and Athens were respectively an oligarchy and democracy). But many of the audience must have been familiar with contemporary Corinth, having visited the city either on business or while attending the nearby Isthmian Games or, like the orator Lysias a generation later, to enjoy the delights of its internationally renowned brothels. So, the almost throwaway yet homely detail, which Euripides gives to the tutor (‘I was going to play back-gammon where the old men sit around the sacred waters of Peirene’), cannot but have conjured up personal memories. For modern visitors, the Fountain of Peirene is still an unforgettable site. Thus, as was usual in Greek tragedies, Euripides allows the mythical world to elide with the contemporary in such a way as to blur the boundaries between Corinth ‘then’ and Corinth ‘now’. And Corinth ‘now’ was the enemy.

  Whether the audience did gloat at Euripides’ depiction of the murder of Corinth’s leading family members we cannot tell. Possibly not. But the link between Medea and Athens, which Euripides takes care to emphasize, must surely have caused many in the theatre to stop and think. In a pivotal scene positioned exactly halfway through the play (there is nothing haphazard about Euripides’ craftsmanship), Aegeus, king of Athens, ignorant of the horrors which Medea is about to unleash, is duped into offering her asylum. Despite what Aristotle may have thought, the episode is dramatically brilliant. Having arrived at Corinth with an innocent agenda – to ask Medea to interpret an oracle about his fathering children – Aegeus has become embroiled in something altogether more nasty, exposing Athens to the corrupting influence of an infanticide. The choral stasimon, which comes a little after Aegeus’ departure, is surely crucial in giving us at least a flavour of the audience’s expected response. Beginning with an achingly beautiful evocation of Athens and Attica, the Chorus imagine the impact of Medea’s arrival:

  Since time began, the citizens of Athens have been rich indeed, the children of the blessed gods, dwellers in a holy land that’s whole and pure. And so they grew strong in the shining light of wisdom, stepping lightly in the clear pellucid air, where once they say that golden-headed Harmony gave birth to the nine sacred Muses – and the clear-flowing waters of Cephisus nurtures them.

  And so they say that Aphrodite, goddess of Desire, drinks deep of the Cephisus, sailing in her barge to Athens, fanned by breezes scented in the honeyed air, and on her hair her retinue of Lusts, which bring sweet knowledge in their train, sweet loveliness, scatter flowers, seductive in the soothing scent of garlands twined with blushing damask rose.

  And so I ask, how will the city welcome you, Medea? How will Cephisus with his sacred streams, how will the very soil of Athens learn to love you, stained by the blood-guilt of your sacrilege, your own sons’ murderess.

  All has been made more chilling by the oath which Medea forces a reluctant Aegeus to swear (and after which she bundles him off without another word), especially as the audience (familiar with myths, which described the aftermath, and which are outlined in Richard Rutherford’s essay) would know what happened, once she reached Athens. For, in mythology, Medea sets up house with Aegeus (the scene between them in this play may already contain a frisson of eroticism), has sons by him, and then tries to murder Aegeus’ elder son, Theseus (whom he fathers in Trozden shortly after leaving Medea in Corinth). As a result, Aegeus exiles Medea from Athens – according to Herodotus, she flees east, giving her name to the Medes, synonymous in Athenian thought with Greece’s foes, the Persians – and so he breaks his oath, which adds significance to the interchange between the two:

  Medea But if you don’t abide by what you’ve sworn, what would you suffer then?

  Aegeus The punishment that waits for all who break the bonds of piety.

  By breaking his oath, Aegeus will provoke the Erinyes, or Furies, against Athens – and, lest we, the audience, somehow forget Medea’s dest
ination at the end of the play, Euripides has her remind us. Snarling from her flying snake-drawn chariot, the matricide gloats to Jason, ‘I shall go to Aegeus in Athens, and there shall live with him’. There can be no escaping her.

  So, tricked, Aegeus, the representative of Athens, invites the plague, that is Medea, to come from Corinth to take up residence in Athens. What seemed straightforward at the time (poor Medea, so badly treated by her husband, surely deserves compassion) will turn out to have quite ghastly, unforeseen consequences. Is it too far-fetched to see Medea as an allegory for war? To repeat George Kennan’s words, ‘war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it’. I suspect that there were at least some in Euripides’ first audience who saw this warning in the play. Sadly, the reality of what happened next was even more hideous than anyone could possibly have foreseen.

  The historical aftermath of Medea

  In spring 431 BC, a matter of weeks after the City Dionysia, the first fighting in what would become known as the Peloponnesian War came, when Thebes (not strictly a Peloponnesian polis but an old enemy of Athens) attacked the little town of Plataea, Athens’ only ally at the Battle of Marathon fifty-nine years earlier. Soon most of mainland Greece was under arms. In time, the conflict would spread not only east throughout the Aegean to Ionia, the Bosphorus and Byzantium, but west to South Italy and Sicily, too. War’s momentum would, indeed, carry its architects away from all thoughtful intentions.

  Figure 1 Medea in her chariot drawn by serpents, depicted on a Calyx-Krater attributed to Near the Policoro Painter c. 400 BC (© ArtPix/Alamy)

  Nonetheless, in 430 BC at the end of the first year of the war, Pericles (whose war, in the main, it was) was chosen to make a speech in honour of Athens’ fallen. After elaborating at length on his city’s greatness and the heroism of its men, Pericles addressed the women, advising that for them (in Thucydides’ account): ‘glory lies in not showing greater weakness than is natural for the female sex, and not being spoken of by men, either for good or evil’.

  Since Pericles himself had recently been attacked in the lawcourts through his association with the clever Aspasia, this may have been heartfelt advice, but, in its reinforcement of prejudices about the lower status of women compared to men, it reflects, too, the boast of the philosopher Thales (ascribed by some to Socrates), that he gave thanks to Good Fortune, ‘first, that I was born a human being and not an animal; second, that I was born a man and not a woman; and third, that I was born a Greek and not a barbarian’. (No wonder that the barbarian Medea says with only a little exaggeration, ‘of everything that lives, all creatures sentient, we women are most abject of them all’.)

  But Pericles’ policies had unforeseen consequences. To avoid fighting the Peloponnesians on land, where the Athenians were weaker, Pericles had ordered all the inhabitants of Attica (the land of which Athens was the chief city) to leave their homes and villages and take refuge within the city walls. The city, Pericles assured them, could easily survive on imports from abroad, shipped in to their port at Piraeus. As a result, Athens’ population was swollen to bursting point. Conditions were bad enough, but in 430 BC, months after Pericles had delivered his Funeral Oration, ships arrived, carrying in their holds an unwelcome cargo: plague. Rapidly it spread through the crowded city, and by the time it had eventually abated some four years later, it had claimed the lives of a third of Athens’ population. Among its victims was Pericles.

  ‘Life’, as Oscar Wilde observed, ‘imitates art far more than art imitates life’. Euripides could not have foreseen the extent to which his grim warning would come true. Yet, for us, who have the benefit of hindsight (albeit coupled with the disadvantage of having lost the other plays from the original tetralogy and thus being unable fully to appreciate its context), Medea can seem almost prophetic: just as welcoming the infanticide from Corinth would threaten to destroy Aegeus’ household and risk the life of his son, Theseus, so embracing war with Corinth and her allies would lead to plague, the loss of countless Athenian lives and, in the end, the defeat of Athens herself. Pericles (who was undoubtedly present at the City Dionysia of 431 BC) would not be the only father in Euripides’ audience, who would soon be burying his sons.

  As for Medea, the princess, whose story predates Homer, she continued to inspire both fascination and fear, the leading character in further plays and epic poems, the heroine of operas and films, but always remembered above all as the protagonist of Euripides’ great tragedy, the subject of the chapters which follow in this book.

  1

  Murder in the Family – Medea and Others

  Jasper Griffin

  Medea and the world of myth

  The myths and legends of the Greeks, like those of most peoples, reach us only in the form which they were given, and which was enduringly preserved, by men. There were also, hardly less importantly, stories that were told and retold by women. They certainly existed, and they were repeated by mothers, both to their sons and also, and (no doubt) especially, to their daughters. Those stories have very rarely come down to us in anything like an original form or colouring. They are now merely a part of that huge and haunting subject: the lost literature, or the lost literatures, of Hellas. Of the very large mass of literature in Greek that once existed, we must always remember that we possess, and that we can read, only a small fraction.

  Very often, no doubt, such mythical stories were never written down at all. When they were, their female versions were drowned out for posterity by the usually narrated forms, and by the generally accepted versions. That, consequently, dictated the shape in which they came to be embodied, sooner or later, in the standard works of high and serious literature; and that was how they made a crucial step: on to the syllabus of works that were read in schools.

  The beginnings of the Medea story seem, in outline, to be very simple. A dashing young prince, oppressed by his wicked uncle – and uncles in stories all over Europe are all too often wicked – was sent off on a deadly mission: he must sail to the very edge of the world, passing various terrific perils, there to find, and to bring home, a marvellous Golden Fleece. The possession of a fearsome tyrant, it was guarded – to make the situation apparently quite hopeless – by a dragon which never slept. From such an adventure, clearly, the young man was not expected to return.

  But the fearsome Eastern tyrant has a daughter, and she will be his fatal weakness. There is a secret that every tyrant should know: however powerful you may be, and however formidable to your subjects, you cannot really control, and you cannot completely trust, your own womenfolk. Women are, by nature, emotional and volatile creatures. Careful and inscrutable in handling, in expressing, and (still more) in concealing, their thoughts and their feelings, they do not show their emotions in the naive and unguarded way that is so touchingly, so pathetically, common with men. They do not speak their minds, which are more complex, more emotional, and much more unpredictable, than the minds of those simpler creatures: the male persons who, whether they like it or not, have no choice but to trust and to depend on them. The typical tyrannical father only finds out about his daughter’s passions when it is already too late. Ariadne’s father, King Minos, was one such father; Scylla’s father, King Nisus, was a second; Medea’s father, King Aeëtes, was just one more.

  Yes, it is only too true: females are emotional, and they are also secretive! That, of course, is a very dangerous combination. Women store mysterious things in their cupboards, and in their chests, and in their trunks: things, which may include not only the medicines and cosmetics, that rightly and properly belong there, but also both love-charms and poisons – two categories, indeed, which are very closely related, and which alarmingly overlap. (In Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Heracles himself falls victim to that grey area.) Above all, as the stories tell us over and over again: a young woman may suddenly fall in love with the wrong man, and her passions may mislead her, inducing her to oppose, and to frustrate, the well-laid pl
ans of her papa, who is tyrannical and oppressive, certainly, but who is also – and fatally – masculine, short-sighted, credulous, and obtuse.

  In the stories, that opposition to the father is, on the whole, a good thing, and all turns out, in the end, for the best. It is the hero – young, glamorous, and adventurous – who is the natural focus of our attention and our sympathy. Nobody wants to identify with the grumpy elders: with the tyrannical old fathers and the wicked uncles, who exist, as they do in the fairy stories, only to be defied, and frustrated, and (in the end) defeated; but there is, inevitably, a dangerous ambiguity about such tales. When we are not under the spell of the storyteller, we observe, with a colder and more analytic eye, that such passionate unions rarely turn out well in the end.

  Why, the girl has, after all, deceived her father, and betrayed him, and injured him: she is capable, then, both of inscrutable emotions and, in action, of dangerous and unpredictable secretiveness and deceit. What else may she not be capable of, before her ambiguous career is over? What deeds, and what deceptions, may her powerful, unpredictable, and inscrutable emotions not lead her to commit, or to condone? As Desdemona’s father says to the all too credulous Othello: