8 The theme of sickness and madness in Euripides’ plays is accordingly parodied by Aristophanes in Wasps: see Harvey (1971).
9 See especially Hipp. 698; for teknon, see Hipp. 203, 223, 297, 353, 705; for pai, 212, 288, 473, 521. Admittedly, she addresses Hippolytus in similar terms (609–15) when trying to placate him.
10 So, for example, Allan (2002), 70 states unequivocally that the nurse is a ‘fellow Colchian’; similarly, Mastronarde (2002), 43. The nearest suggestion of such a long relationship is the tutor’s address of her as ‘the old household possession of my mistress’ (49), which is not at all decisive.
11 Mastronarde compares Iliad 9.186–9, Hesiod, Theogony 98–103, and even Demodocus in Homer, Odyssey Book 8.
12 See especially Bakhtin (1984).
13 For Euripides challenging or questioning social norms, see, for example, Gregory (2002) and Hall (1989). The language of Frogs 952, peripatos (literally a ‘walking and talking’) will later be used of Plato’s and then Aristotle’s philosophical practice.
14 The originality of Euripides in making Medea murder her children depends upon the date of Neophron’s Medea, which is probably (but not certainly) fourth century. Earlier stories of Medea included death of the children, whether by accident or at the hands of others. For discussion of the mythical background, see Mastronarde (2002), 44–64.
15 See especially Bongie (1977).
16 Page (1938) on 820–1 argues that 821 and 823 point unequivocally to the nurse; Allan (2002), 63 also has the nurse as a silent character after 214. Mastronarde (2002), 43 argues that it is a mute attendant and not the nurse.
17 Accordingly, such direct intervention against an owner’s actions is rare in either tragedy or comedy, major exceptions being the unnamed servant of Helen 1629–33 and the shenanigans of Xanthias in Frogs. For tragedy, see Gregory (2002), 157–60.The Nurse’s Tale
6
Re-evaluating Jason
James Morwood
Some ten years ago, in the Medea chapter of a book on Euripides,1 I unhesitatingly joined the ranks of those who view Jason as the villain of the piece, but I none the less accorded him some audience sympathy as the orphaned father of the final scene. The structure of the play, I argued, lends ballast to this reading, with the transformation of Medea from wronged woman to horrific demon finding an echo in Jason’s progress from love rat to conclusively fallen hero. A further decade of living with the tragedy has not caused any fundamental shift in my opinion; and I cannot go along with Judith’s Mossman’s view, advanced in her brilliant 2011 edition of the tragedy, that Jason’s ‘lack of self-perception militates against any profound feeling of pity’ for him in the concluding scene. On the contrary, I now feel that Euripides’ concentration on the ordinary alongside the monstrous, his treatment of human beings ‘as they are’ (to quote Sophocles’ reported dictum), can lead us to a greater understanding of his Jason. I shall certainly not be proposing, however, that to understand all is to forgive all.
While it is probably true that the most plainly ‘ordinary’ character in Greek tragedy is the nurse Cilissa in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, who talks, for example, about having to clean the baby Orestes’ nappies (759–60), the opening of Medea surely has the greatest claim to be ushering us into an uncompromisingly below-stairs domestic world. One slave, the Nurse, launches the play, soon to be joined by another, the Tutor, who escorts Medea’s two children. The normalcy of it all is rendered the more emphatic in that they are the slaves not of a royal palace, which is the backdrop to many Greek tragedies, but of a more down-to-earth aristocratic house. The children have been taking exercise (either running or playing with hoops, 46), and the Tutor conjures up the routine of city life when he tells us of the old men of Corinth playing draughts by the spring of Peirene (68–9), on whom he has been unheroically eavesdropping (67). The sympathy shown by these two slaves towards their mistress Medea, as has often been noted, leads the audience into a ready acceptance that she has been vilely wronged. When the Nurse discovers that the children are to be exiled with their mother, she finds her loyalty to her master Jason severely tested:
Children, do you hear how your father is towards you? I don’t wish him dead, for he is my master; but he has been caught being bad to his loved ones.
82–4
Almost halfway through the play, the king of Athens will give royal endorsement to the slaves’ view of Jason’s behaviour, dubbing it ‘most shameful’ (695).
Yet the tragedy’s striking of this note of normal life, of people ‘as they are’ – not for nothing did the comic poets dub Euripides a greengrocer’s son! – may in fact work in Jason’s favour as well as Medea’s. After all, he has already been stripped of his heroic carapace, the surpassing glamour with which the poet Pindar endowed him (Pythian 4.78–92). The glory days of the epic voyage of the Argo, so memorably evoked in the play’s opening lines, and the winning of the Golden Fleece, are now firmly in the past. According to one ancient scholar writing on line 1387, the ship’s figurehead was now in a temple of Hera, the goddess to whom it had been dedicated. Because of Medea’s murderous activity in Jason’s home town of Iolcus, the couple have had to flee to the harbour-city of Corinth (9–12). Here he is now adrift. His barbarian wife is no longer of any use to him; indeed, her behaviour at Iolcus has shown her to be a liability, to put it mildly. To adapt her image at line 770, he has no doubt been looking for a boat to attach his stern-cable to. Marrying the Corinthian princess, presumably with an eye on succeeding Creon as king, could provide a splendid solution (553–4). While this is not of course the actual Corinth of Euripides’ lifetime, we surely find ourselves in a real world of family problems, with the go-getting husband moving on from the first wife who has seen him through the difficult times, to a new model, a dumb blonde (980) from the top family. The great hero has been transmogrified into an eminently recognizable man on the make. To acknowledge this does not, of course, render him any less contemptible, but we know the type. Some of us may well be the type. Certainly he is one of us.
As we find that we share our humanity with the appalling Jason, so we may grasp more fully how very different from us is the wife he is in the process of dumping. Modern readings of the play have benefited greatly from the perception that the sorceress-like elements in Medea’s character are downplayed in the earlier part of the tragedy; and the Chorus of Corinthian women express solidarity with her and are only conclusively alienated late in the play when she goes off at line 1251 to kill her children. However, as early as lines 9–10, the Nurse has referred to her tricking of the daughters of Pelias into killing their father; and this devoted slave has observed that there is something animalistic about her (92, 187–8) and feels that the children should be kept clear of their mother (90–1).
When Medea first appears on stage, she is eminently reasonable, her analysis of a woman’s lot, however revolutionary in its famous conclusion, proving most movingly sympathetic. Indeed, she contributes to the play’s undertow of down-to-earth human experience by discussing the strains of married life and raising the subject of divorce (235–47). However, her commitment to the revenge ethic shows an uncompromisingly murderous spirit (265–6). In her determination to eliminate Jason, his new bride and her father, she wonders whether to burn down the bridal home or ‘push a sharpened sword through their vitals, going in silently to the house where the bed is made for them’, or – ‘the way in which we women are particularly clever’ – to kill them with poison (378–85). (Are we really supposed to approve of the Chorus’ endorsement of her plans for triple murder in their celebrated first song, so beloved of the suffragette movement [410–45]?) ‘We are women,’ Medea alarmingly declares, ‘most useless for good, but the cleverest contrivers of all evils’ (407–9; cf. 265–6).
The figure of the woman scorned is of course as recognizable in life as in literature: hell proverbially has no fury like her. But Medea is surely parting company with humankind: she becomes something more – or less �
� than a woman, the fury of the proverb, in fact (1260). If it appears unreasonable to refer to the end of the play when most commentators would, I take it, agree that she has developed into a nakedly demonic force, we should remember that, when Jason at line 1342 calls her not a woman but a lioness, he is using the same word as her loyal Nurse had at line 187. From the outset we have felt with her as a victim at the same time as being aware of frightening undercurrents.
Euripides has masterfully given us an initially sympathetic figure who has the potential to grow into something monstrous – a Scylla as Jason calls her, and she does not demur (1343, 1359). In 2011 a woman called Theresa Riggi, who stabbed her three children to death for fear of losing them after her estranged husband applied for access, was said to suffer from narcissistic, paranoid and histrionic personality disorders (The Times, 8 March 2011). Her defending counsel asserted that ‘Theresa Riggi is not evil. She is not wicked. She is not a …monster’. In a word, she is human. Compare and contrast Medea, whose understandably human feelings at the start of the play are accompanied by a deeply sinister sense of threat.
So, despite the nasty impression that we have received of Jason, we may yet feel some nervous apprehension for him when he enters at line 446. No doubt we shall be alienated further by the smugness which he projects. His dismissal of Medea’s vital assistance in his epic adventures as due to Cypris (Aphrodite), goddess of love, may make more sense to an ancient Greek than it does to us. Helen uses exactly the same argument in Euripides’ Trojan Women (946–50), and in the Iliad Agamemnon blames his disastrous treatment of Achilles on Atē, the force that blinds gods and men (19.86–138). However, Jason’s words come across as a decidedly perfunctory acknowledgement of her (or even Cypris’) role in the construction of his heroic identity (526–33). He may genuinely believe that his new marriage will prove of benefit to the children (562–7) (though he would be wrong to do so: stepchildren get a raw deal in Greek life as well as literature).
When he tells Medea that, in leaving a barbarian land and coming to Greece, she has encountered a legal system free from the influence of force (536–8), we may feel with Mossman that ‘her experience of laws and customs has not been encouraging, since Jason has broken his oaths to her and she has in fact been exposed to force, or the threat of force, in the Creon-scene (335)’ (n.536–41). However, whatever substratum of irony may be mined in Jason’s words here – and at least one ancient Greek scholar was alert to it – Euripides’ largely or exclusively male audience would have felt an instinctive sympathy with Jason’s insistence on the superiority of Greek over barbarian civilization. Thus, when he goes on to say the following, he is surely speaking the truth:
All the Greeks perceived you to be wise and you had a reputation; but if you were dwelling on the furthest boundaries of the world, there would not be a tale about you.
539–41
King Aegeus of Athens has heard of her wisdom and values it (677); and at this moment she has a glorious place in Greek mythology as the woman who enabled the success of the quest for the Golden Fleece. (It is she who will ensure by her later terrible actions in the tragedy that those are what she is chiefly remembered for, in large measure, of course, owing to this very play.) Without doubt Jason’s behaviour is shabby, but he does not altogether disown his responsibilities. He offers Medea and her children financial support and letters of introduction to guest-friends in their exile (460–62, 610–13). Perhaps one can conclude at the end of this scene that, if Medea is not totally sympathetic, Jason is not entirely hateful.
Their second scene together is stage-managed by Medea with dazzling virtuosity. A metatheatrical dimension here shows her creating her own play and taking one of the leading roles. She knows her former husband well and can exploit his weaknesses. Like Orestes vis-à-vis Iphigenia in Iphigenia among the Taurians or Menelaus in dialogue with the eponymous heroine of Helen elsewhere in Euripides, he is not too bright. He oozes the complacent vanity of an (up till now) successful ladies’ man (944–5, 1149–57), which keeps him off his guard. (Even the limited Creon realized that he was making a mistake in going along with her [316–20, 350].) Yet as he walks off, blindly trusting, to his doom, we can sympathize both with his deluded belief that a potentially horrific divorce has been amicably negotiated, and with his willingness, in letting Medea send her fatal presents, to allow her more than is wise (959–75): he even escorts the children, who carry them.
By their third scene the play has swung round. The excited feminist assertion of the Chorus’ opening song has, after Medea’s decision to kill her children, given way to the bleak desolation of lines 1081–115, in which they conclude that it is better not to have children at all. Medea, now appearing aloft in her crane-supported (and possibly dragon-drawn) chariot and thus usurping the elevated position conventionally reserved for the gods, has shed her humanity and hardened into a demon. The rituals she proposes to establish for her children offer little consolation (1381–3).
Jason meanwhile has lost everything. Confronted with the demonic Medea, the former epic hero now shrinks to entirely human proportions, specifically to a father whose dead children droop out of his reach from the chariot above him. In this chapter I have tried to make the best possible case for him, but the fact is that he never denies that he has broken his oaths to Medea, thus offending the Oath-god Zeus; and the most common divinely-inflicted punishment for oath-breaking was childlessness.2 Thus Jason has suffered the appropriate penalty (802–5), and the audience may feel a sense of satisfaction that condign justice has been meted out (1352–3; cf. 1231–2). However, we also have to react to a man who challenges this sense of justice through his naked emotional agony. In the vast shipwreck of his life’s esteems, he has been reduced to nothingness. It may affect our attitude that Medea has taken vengeance on Jason’s impiety through what she herself freely admits is an impious murder (796, 1383). Through the totality of his defeat at the hands of this demonic creature, some glimmers of genuine audience sympathy for her victim may surely be ignited.
Notes
1 The Plays of Euripides, Morwood (2002).
2 See e.g. Herodotus 6.86, Andocides 1.98.
7
The Final Scene
Richard Rutherford
After infanticide, what do you do for an encore? Euripides may not have posed the question in quite these terms, but he must certainly have been conscious of the problem of how to avoid anticlimax at the end of Medea. In the preceding scenes the audience have witnessed Medea’s agonised soliloquy, listened to the messenger recounting the horrific end of the princess and her father, and waited in suspense for the death-cries of the children within the house. A brief choral lyric precedes the concluding part of the play. How will the dramatist avoid making it a mere afterthought? His solution was bold, outrageous, theatrically stunning. Aristotle disapproved of it, but in general audiences are impressed. It is a tour-de-force, but what does it mean?
As the choral interlude ends, Jason comes dashing on, questioning the women as to the whereabouts of Medea and the children. His main concern is to protect them: he fears that the Corinthians may take revenge on them as retaliation for the deaths of their king and his daughter, destroyed by the poisoned garments the children conveyed. Jason’s anxiety already shows Euripides self-consciously playing with the mythical tradition. It is clear that another version of the legend did indeed have the children die in this way. Jason does not realize the full horror of the Euripidean version: the chorus have to break the news to him that the children are already dead, and by their mother’s hand. A moment later he is crying out for the doors of their house to be opened: ‘Unbar the doors, slaves, now! As quickly as you can! Unlock the bolts that I might see the horror of my children’s death and take my vengeance on their murderess!’ (1314–16). Again the dramatist is exploiting the audience’s expectations, this time with regard to theatrical convention. Demands of this kind often precede the opening of an entrance and the use of the so-called ekkuklēma,
the ‘rolling-out machine’. This was a platform or trolley device which the tragedians used in order to present events indoors to the audience: the platform was ‘rolled out’ with one or more actors upon it, simulating the effect of entry into the building. It was often used when the plot required the revelation of corpses or unconscious characters. Aeschylus and Sophocles had both employed it in famous episodes. Although it seems a cumbersome and artificial device to modern audiences, it was a standard feature of the Athenian theatre by the time of Medea.
In this play, of course, expectations are frustrated: the ekkuklēma is not used. Instead the doors remain closed and a voice is heard above. Medea appears on a higher level. She cannot simply have ascended to the roof of the stage building, since she refers to a vehicle, in which she is riding, together with the bodies of the children. ‘My father’s very father, Helios, the Sun, has given me his chariot, my tower and my defence against my enemies’ (1321–2). The chariot needs to depart at the end of the scene, removing Medea and the corpses not only from Jason’s view but from the audience’s. This means that she can only have been moved into view of the audience on the mēchanē, the ‘crane’, which the dramatists sometimes used when they needed to represent a character in flight or descending from Olympus. Here a human character, previously earthbound, has been elevated to a higher realm, where Jason cannot touch her (1320).
This startling denouement raises a variety of questions, some of them unanswerable. Did Medea change her attire before departure: does her appearance alter as well as her position on stage? Did she, for instance, assume a more exotic or Oriental ‘Colchian’ dress? How much was the ‘crane’ adapted to its function as a chariot of the gods? Was there any attempt to represent it as drawn by flying snakes or dragons? These questions arise from the remarkable representation on the Cleveland vase, which is probably inspired by the original production of the drama. Even so, however, the goal of some critics, to recover the experience of the first presentation to an audience, is unachievable. Every director has to make decisions afresh. Still more does this apply to the shifting tones of voice and styles of delivery at each stage. Granted that the text imposes some restrictions, there is still wide scope for variation. Jason can be made more pathetic or more contemptible, Medea more vindictive or more wretched in her triumph.
Looking at Medea Page 12