Looking at Medea

by David Stuttard

  Notwithstanding perhaps, an element of humour in the juxtaposition of bodily functions with the grander plot in which it is embedded, this physical care is at the heart of the nurse’s loyalty and the concomitant disgust for the current rulers of Argos. This description of a more unified oikos, when husband and wife were likewise concerned for their child’s welfare, also sets up the immediately following confrontations, both Aegisthus’ arrival to enter the palace and die and Orestes’ killing of Clytemnestra. Although in both we see crucial steps towards the restoration of the household (oikos), the nurse’s reminder of the physical experience of child-rearing sets up the physical mother-son relationship that Clytemnestra will seek to exploit at the death: baring her breast in a direct evocation of the physicality of childcare.

  In both cases, the nurse is loyal to the restoration and preservation of the male oikos and thence the broader social order, which depends on this royal household. The distinction is that Eurycleia’s interests are aligned with those of Penelope, whereas Cilissa is antipathetic to Clytemnestra. The nurse in Medea is operating in this tradition of the preservation of the patriarchal oikos and its travails, and calling attention to an even more dysfunctional household than even these two accounts. Whereas, for these other nurses, domestic considerations had political implications, the nurse in Medea explicitly adopts broader political language to emphasize that the oikos only stands where there is no dispute between husband and wife: ‘this is the greatest security [sōtēria], when a wife does not stand in dispute with her husband’ (14–15).3 The irony, of course, is that Medea and Jason’s oikos is far from political power: indeed, it is in order to join the royal oikos that Jason is in the process of dissolving his own household. The nurse’s loyalties are also in conflict. Although she speaks initially of her mistress and regards Jason’s acts as those of betrayal (17), she nonetheless acknowledges that he is her master (83–4), and that her loyalty is to the oikos as well as to her mistress, a point that the paidagōgos emphasizes in their dialogue (49).

  The element of pathos, that can be seen particularly in Cilissa’s reminiscences, but also (somewhat more grimly) in Eurycleia’s meeting with the disguised Odysseus, is not lacking from the nurse in Medea either, but it changes focus over the course of the prologue and into the parodos. Initially, her concern is with Medea. The children are mentioned with her as the victims of Jason’s betrayal (17), but in Medea’s rage she has turned on her children: ‘She detests her children and she takes no pleasure even in seeing them. I am afraid that she may devise something unprecedented’ (36–7).4 The text from this point on is contested: as transmitted, it suggests the nurse has an inkling of Medea’s future actions against Jason’s new bride and in-laws; what is not contested are the nurse’s comments on Medea’s feelings for her children and the proximity of these to the nurse’s nameless fear.

  As the scene progresses, attention shifts much more towards Medea’s boys, who enter with their tutor. In the dialogue between the two slaves, they are mute and innocent witnesses to the situation. They are oblivious to Medea’s troubles (or misdeeds: kakōn, 48). Whereas Cilissa was worried about young bowels (nea nēdys, Libation Bearers 757), Medea’s nurse is worried about the young mind (nea phrontis, 48), that does not enjoy pain. The tutor reveals that he has overheard more news: that Creon plans to exile the children along with Medea (67–72). The nurse denounces Jason to his children, but hustles them inside with reassuring words. To the tutor, however, she suggests that he keep them isolated from Medea in her savage mood (80–2). Medea is clearly planning something; the nurse hopes that it will be enemies, not friends or family (philous) that she targets (95). As Medea is heard from the inside, the nurse reiterates both the urgency and the anxiety she feels in relation to the children. And not without reason, as Medea’s focus on herself turns (as the nurse has predicted) towards others (111–18):

  Medea (Screaming) Look what they’ve done to me! Look what he’s done to me! Misery! Pain! Oh! I curse you, my children! Yes! May you die with my hatred, your mother’s, you and your father! And let all the household crash down to ruin!

  Nurse Oh, my mistress, so ill-used and yet so cruel! What have your boys to do with the sins of their father? Why do you hate them? My poor, poor children! I am so worried something will happen to you.

  For the moment, however, further thoughts in this direction are cut off by the arrival of the chorus. Medea’s exclamations, too, turn in yet another direction, towards suicide and then to the oaths that supposedly bound her and Jason, and the gods’ supposed guarantee of such things.

  Sexual passion

  From a post-classical and modern perspective, however, stories of loss (and return) are not the kind of role for which nurses in Greek tragedy are most well-known, and the responsibility for this alternative perspective and role can largely be laid at the door of Euripides. It is all too easy to think of the nurse as something of a stock character in ancient drama, as the confidante of and go-between for women of royal rank, rather than as a slave involved in childcare (or indeed wet-nursing). To be sure, both Eurycleia and Cilissa have something of this role, too, but it is in Euripides that the nurse’s ubiquity and role as a confidante and conspirator become paramount. The nurse in such a role featured also in later Sophocles (Women of Trachis) and then on into Senecan drama (Medea, Phaedra, Hercules Oetaeus and even Octavia).5 It was largely from Euripides, too, that the nurse entered into the comic tradition. From there, the nurse continued into the drama of the early modern period, notably in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The nurse of Euripides’ Medea is clearly related to this character type and even contributed to it. Yet to see the nurse in this company is to miss the specific connotations of the nurse in 432/1 BC.

  The most obvious points of comparison for the nurse in Medea are the parallel characters in the series of plays that were picked upon by Aristophanes as examples of Euripides’ unhealthy interest in women and in sexual morality – or immorality. In Frogs, the Aristophanic Aeschylus claims that Euripides’ women, who explored sexual desire, such as Stheneboea and Phaedra, were notorious (1043–4). These scandalous women all belong to plays of roughly the same time as Medea, and all seem to have been accompanied by a nurse, who was a speaking and very active character, and deeply implicated in the psychosexual problems of their mistresses. The nurse of Medea, I suggest, is not only parallel to these but actively draws upon their example. Or, to put it another way, audience expectations would have been framed by this cluster of Euripidean interest – much more recent, indeed, than Cilissa.6

  Thus in Euripides’ Stheneboea, which probably dates to the 430s and is most likely earlier than Medea, the eponymous queen propositions her guest, the Corinthian prince, Bellerophon, and on being spurned she accuses Bellerophon of rape. Her husband, Proitos, sends Bellerophon to Lycia with a letter that urges the king of Lycia, Iobates, to have the bearer killed. Iobates does so creatively, by sending Bellerophon to hunt the Chimaera, but Bellerophon survives and returns to confront and gain revenge on Proitos and Stheneboea. The nurse’s involvement comes at the beginning of the play. Bellerophon describes how the nurse is acting as a go-between, secretly urging him to accept the queen’s advances, and suggesting he will gain the kingdom (fr. 661.10–14). In two fragments, the nurse describes the queen’s passion for Bellerophon (frr. 664–5); in another she offers abstract reflection on the nature of sexual passion (erōs, fr. 663). At some point, Bellerophon seems to be attacking the nurse as pankakistē (‘utterly wicked in every way’, fr. 666) for her role in propositioning him. Euripides’ Cretans, a play of uncertain date, but probably belonging to the earlier part of his career, presented the passion of Pasiphaë, the queen of Crete, for a bull, and her giving birth to the Minotaur (and the aftermath). The nurse here is deeply implicated in Pasiphaë’s schemes, and especially in covering up the birth of the monster. She it is who is interrogated by Minos about the birth, and she is condemned to being walled up in a dungeon with her mistress, as her accomp
lice (synergon, fr. 472e.47–50).7

  The only fully surviving (extant) play of this type is Euripides’ Hippolytus, where the nurse plays the pivotal role. This is the second of Euripides’ Hippolytus plays, the so-called Hippolytus Garland-Wearer (Hippolytos Stephanēphoros). It was the earlier play that was particularly notorious, as it was there that Phaedra apparently propositioned Hippolytus directly, leading her stepson to cover his head in shame – leading in turn to the play’s title, Hippolytus Veiling Himself (Hippolytos Kalyptomenos). In the later play Phaedra is represented more as the innocent victim of divine disfavour (just as, in fact, Pasiphaë presented herself in Cretans), and the nurse must have played a correspondingly different role in the surviving Hippolytus, where her actions precipitate the crisis. When Phaedra is wasting away, it is the nurse who wheedles the truth of Phaedra’s condition out of her, who promises certain remedies, and who betrays her mistress by approaching Hippolytus herself. In prompting Hippolytus’ disgust (like Bellerophon earlier) and his tirade against women, the nurse is culpable for Phaedra’s decision to hang herself. Unlike her counterpart in Cretans, however, she does not obviously suffer any punishment in the play.

  Somewhat similar functions are offered by other female characters of a similar social status. In terms of plays earlier than Medea, the female slave of Euripides’ Alcestis (438 BC) is likewise used to bring a report, like a messenger, on the state of mind and actions of her mistress, who has chosen to die on behalf of her husband (Alcestis 141–212). The choice of a female servant clearly plays upon the separate male and female social spheres, and the flip-side of the idealized presumption that women should be inside the house (alluded to by the tutor in his opening words to the nurse at Medea 50–1) is that women share secret talk to which men are generally not privy. Yet, in the case of the anonymous servant of Alcestis, the events she describes are private, in the sense that they are happening indoors, but they quite explicitly involve the entire household (Alcestis 192–3) and are no secret. The nurses in these plays of adultery and sexual transgression, however, play upon male anxieties much more strongly and can be distinguished from other anonymous servants. They take a much more prominent and active role as an agent in the plot and have a much closer, more intimate and private relationship with their mistresses, which allow for discussion and advancement of transgressive sexual relationships. It is just that sort of intimacy to which the tutor sarcastically refers (52).

  Of course, any female retainer could do the job, but the choice of a nurse to fulfil this role points to a particular intimacy, whether by virtue of being the noble character’s nurse in childhood, or through sharing childcare duties (as in the instance of Cilissa, earlier). The connection between the one type of intimacy, care of the product of sexual relationships, and the negotiation of another, in the managing of illicit sexual relationships, should not need spelling out, and is at a fundamentally physical level. In the nurses of these plays, it is not always clear which type of nurse is being meant. In Hippolytus, at least, the nurse is clearly that of Phaedra’s own childhood. In other instances, the nurse may be that of the queen’s children. Certainly, this latter kind of role was evoked in Cretans, where the nurse is interrogated by Minos as to the nature, circumstances and care of Pasiphaë’s monstrous offspring. The nurse replies to him that the ones who bore it are raising it (trephousi, fr. 472bc.39, cf. trophos, ‘nurse’).

  The nurses of this strand of Euripidean dramaturgy are clearly drawn upon in Medea, particularly in the prologue speech, where the nurse describes Medea’s passionate relationship with Jason – being struck senseless with love (8) – and her equally passionate response to being spurned by Jason in favour of the king’s daughter. These emotional responses are clearly related, and the symptoms of her loss or rejection are expressed in terms very similar to the nurse’s account of Stheneboea’s passion for Bellerophon. The ineffectiveness of any sensible advice in Medea 28–9 echoes the counterproductive attempts to gainsay erōs in Stheneboea (fr. 665), using the same verb (nouthetoumenē). In both cases, an obsessed gaze reflects loss (27–8, fr. 664). Both nurses relate erōs to poetry, albeit with different emphases: in Stheneboea to talk of the power of erōs as a teacher of poets (fr. 663), in Medea to comment on the lack of power of song and celebration to counter erōs (190–203). The characterization of sexual passion and the loss that is moved by it, as a form of sickness or illness or pain, is common to these plays (Medea 16, cf. 24–5; Stheneboea fr. 661.6; Hippolytus 176–361 passim), including the motif of self-starvation (Medea 24, cf. Hipp. 274–5).8

  The nurse thus combines elements of both types of elderly servant, the personal confidante and the carer for infants. This combination of role reflects a certain lack of definition over the nurse’s actual status and household function. Although she is routinely described as a nurse, going back as far as the ancient scholars (she is listed as a nurse in the hypothesis to the play), nowhere is this explicitly said by any character in the play. Although the tenderness she shows for the children would support a suggestion that she was their nurse earlier in their lives, this is not categorically stated (nor indeed would costume and mask have been decisive here). Even less supported in the text is the suggestion that she was Medea’s own childhood nurse. She certainly regards Medea as her mistress, but unlike, for example, the nurse of Phaedra in Hippolytus, she never addresses Medea as teknon or pai, ‘child’, or refers to any experience of bringing up the younger woman.9 Nor indeed is it ever suggested that Medea has brought the nurse with her from Colchis, as scholars have often supposed.10 Although her loyalty is in the first instance to Medea, and she is able to comment on her feelings from a position of proximity, and while she is condemnatory of Jason, she articulates a broader loyalty to the household, and she articulates feelings that, if anything, are more for the children than for her mistress. Although she has privileged access to and sympathy for Medea, it becomes increasingly clear that she is no unthinking partisan of her mistress’ interests. Rather, her intimacy with Medea is sufficiently close to gain a clear idea of her character, but sufficiently distanced to articulate anxieties about that character, and sufficiently close to others (the children) to express concern about the impact of Medea’s reactions on the rest of the household.

  Class and realism

  Thus far, then, the nurse can be seen to be exhibiting multiple loyalties, which are potentially or actually at odds with each other. This reflects the dysfunctional (indeed, terminal) nature of the Jason–Medea household (oikos), but the nurse goes beyond simply expressing alternative loyalties (and sympathies). However complex these might be, such a servant would still largely be in the mould of a Cilissa from Libation Bearers, whose loyalty is to Agamemnon and Orestes, or Eurycleia from the Odyssey, whose attempts to show a certain ruthless initiative in restoring the household herself are brusquely slapped down by her returning master (Odyssey 19.495–502). Euripides’ technique, in giving such a prominent role at the beginning of his play to a female slave, is not only to have her reflect upon the nature of her mistress, the behaviour of her master and her anxieties about the dangers that might befall the children, but also to reflect upon the nature of servitude and mastery themselves.

  Indeed, Euripides presents not only one servant’s reflections on these matters, but a dialogue and debate between two servants, the nurse and the tutor (paidagōgos). On being challenged by the tutor, the nurse argues that a good slave should feel for and give thought to the (mis)fortunes of her masters, something that is implicit in much of the earlier representations of slaves. Even when the tutor callously lets slip the news that Creon intends to exile both mother and children, the nurse refuses to wish Jason dead, even though she sees him clearly in the wrong (84); the tutor is, however, entirely cynical about human relationships. Self-interest will always triumph over concern for one’s neighbour (85–8). The tutor’s words question the implicit alignment of slave and master in the ideal household, but in his pragmatism he prefigures the cynicism
of Jason.

  While the nurse, as I have suggested, draws upon more idealizing figures, such as Eurycleia, she also questions the nature of masters and mistresses. Before the chorus’ arrival and after hearing Medea’s anguished cries from within the stage-building, the nurse expresses fear for the children’s future. She then opens out the nature of the problem beyond the individuals and the household (119–24):

  The tempers of lords (tyrannoi) are terrible, and, perhaps because

  they are controlled in few ways but exercise power in many,

  they are quick to anger, with grievous results.

  Being accustomed to live on an equal basis

  is better. At any rate, I wish to

  grow old securely in humble circumstances.

  The nurse here presents Medea’s emotional responses to her predicament and indeed her psychological disposition as socially determined rather than being essential or natural. Medea’s class position, the nurse argues, renders her liable to extreme swings of mood or behaviour. The fragility of the temperament of the individual ruler (tyrannos) is something that we find elsewhere in Greek tragedy, as notably already in Sophocles’ Ajax and Antigone, and again in the near-contemporary Oedipus Tyrannos (Oedipus the King). And while the term tyrannos earlier on in Greek history is more neutral, it is a term which is heavily ideologically loaded under the Athenian democracy, which defined itself against the earlier tyranny of Peisistratus and his sons. Antigone (probably late 440s) is a particularly interesting parallel, as Creon’s increasingly despotic behaviour is indicated in large part through the trepidation of a low-status character, the guard, and the response from the king to the news that he brings. Yet it is a mark of how Sophocles presents such a character that modern directors are frequently inclined to play that character for laughs.

  There is no such humour or potential for humour in the nurse’s comments or the style in which she offers her reflections on her masters, which is no different from those of a much higher social status in tragedy. Her language makes the political connotations explicit, however, by opposing the psychology of tyrannoi to living on equal terms (ep’ isois). Although she goes on to make more conventional observations about moderation and not overstepping the mark (125–30), the application of this political language to the social and personal predicament is striking, the characteristic of an individual of royal extraction generalized to the class of tyrannoi, who are in turn associated with those who mark themselves out from the crowd. The fact that this is coming from a slave only makes it even more pointed.