Looking at Medea

by David Stuttard

  While it is typically the role of a chorus to be reactive to the protagonists rather than primary players in the action of the play, in the face of the horrific act that Medea is about to commit, the Chorus here seem relatively passive in their resistance and therefore complicit: while it is true that they have promised Medea to keep quiet about her plans, it is striking that they continue to be silent in the face of such horrible intentions. The chorus of Hippolytus, in a similar position, do at least hint to Theseus that the situation is not what he thinks it is (Hippolytus 891–92). After a brief expression of sorrow and general hope that the trouble go no further (Medea 906), the Chorus very quickly become completely pessimistic about the children’s chances of survival (976–77). Such a stance has the effect of aligning them with Medea’s spurious claims that she has no choice but to commit the infanticide (1013–14, cf. 814–15.)

  Even when the Chorus do go on to express sympathy for Jason and the princess in the fourth stasimon, it is equivocal. First they prophesy what will happen to the princess in a relatively factual account, imagined with less horrific details than the messenger will provide later (1167ff.), though they do call her ‘poor girl’ and emphasize the deadliness of her new finery. However, they give a great deal of attention to the way in which the princess will be lured by the glittering, pretty items to take up her own destruction: ‘The beauty of the shimmering dress, taboo in its perfection, the golden-twining coronet will so seduce her and she hug them to her.’ Here they are surely representing Medea’s own strategy for destroying the princess: it is the princess’ beauty and charm that have captivated Jason (whatever he may claim), and Medea destroys her by using her desire to enhance that beauty with beautiful adornment. It is disturbing that the Chorus seem to echo Medea’s macabre thought processes here. They address Jason as ‘bridegroom of sorrows, standing proudly at the altar of the king’ (990), hinting that, though he might be pitiable, his choice to abandon Medea in favour of membership of the royal house of Corinth must never be forgotten as the cause of his suffering. Lastly they turn to Medea: ‘most of all, I mourn your suffering, your pain, Medea’, and while they agree here with Jason’s claim that sexual jealousy is leading Medea to do an unspeakable act, one of the last words in their song describes Jason as having acted ‘beyond all laws of justice’ (1000), throwing the blame back on him.

  After the intensity of Medea’s monologue of 1019–80, the Chorus’ interlude from 1081–115 seems oddly calm. Whereas she is wrestling with conflict and second thoughts, they are now pondering the whole concept of parenthood. They begin by invoking female wisdom and then asserting their own claims to the Muse: in this, they are glancing back at the claims first expressed in the first stasimon, that women have been underestimated in the past. This is certainly true for Medea, and apparently also for them, since they claim, apparently as a result of their wisdom, that childless people are better off than those who have children, because children demand continual care, they can turn out good or bad, and sometimes they can be taken by the gods and sent to Hades (1096–111). Their attitude here is remarkable as they avoid any further engagement with the wrongs of what Medea is about to do and in effect support her position, albeit indirectly, since the ‘helplessness and resignation’ of what they say here is ultimately in tune with Medea’s claims that the children simply must die (e.g. 1236 dedoktai, ‘the die is cast’, expressing fixity and finality). The Chorus invoke cases of gods killing children (1109–111), but these are just a smokescreen, since Medea is making a deliberate human choice to kill hers. In this passage, then, it seems as though the Chorus do at some level indirectly endorse the infanticide, if only by implication. For, if the trouble of having children outweighs its benefits, how essential is it after all to make sure that they live? Although many commentators are troubled by the meditation of the Chorus in this passage, considering their words irrelevant or inappropriate, if, in fact, the Chorus are a little less hostile to Medea’s infanticidal plans than scholars generally prefer to think, their words at 1081–115 are all too relevant.

  The moral ambivalence of the Chorus resembles that of another female Chorus several decades later, in Bacchae, another play of maternal infanticide, where again the Chorus are both outside the violent action of the play (which is carried out by the unseen Chorus of Theban Maenads), yet also, as strong supporters of Dionysus against the male authority figure of Pentheus, implicated in that violence, but only up to a certain point. When Agave brings in the head of her dead son and invites them to share a feast (Bacchae 1184), they do finally repudiate what she represents. But both choruses, in their block of female solidarity against the interests of male authority figures and their willingness to be implicated in a certain level of violence, are deeply unsettling.

  Of course, the Chorus must make some attempt to avert the death of the children. In the fifth stasimon, they invoke the help of Earth and Sun to prevent Medea from carrying out her plan, and certainly at this point they express entirely appropriate horror:

  Was it all empty, then, the loving care you gave them? And all the love that they returned, was that all nothing, too? Why did you ever cross the Clashing Rocks, slate-grey Symplegades, the boundary that separates the ordered world from chaos? How can your mind be so consumed by such a holocaust of hatred, such a lust for blood? When we spill the blood of our own blood, a terrifying miasma settles, seeping from the ground, and from the sky-gods comes the curse of their anathema.

  And yet … As Medea breaks through the bonds which typically subjugate women, so Euripides pushes at the boundaries of dramatic convention in this scene, and his remarkable twist of theatrical convention here emphasizes the ambivalence of the Chorus’ ultimate response to Medea’s infanticide. Though I cannot discuss it in any detail in this chapter, a metatheatrical element is present here: the conventional constraints on the Chorus imposed by tragedy, in which it has limited powers of action, reflect the constraints on women’s action detailed by Medea in her early monologue. Victims murdered off-stage typically cry out as they are being killed, whether uttering inarticulate cries (e.g. Aeschylus, Choephoroi 869) or making brief factual statements that they are being killed (e.g. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1343, 1345; Euripides, Hercules Furens 750–54; Sophocles, Electra 1405–18). Because of the convention of the Chorus’ continuous presence on-stage, the Chorus must both respond to these, yet be unable actually to intervene to stop the course of events. Thus in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, we hear cries and a simple statement from Agamemnon that he is being killed, followed by a long and impassioned set of responses from the Chorus wondering what they should do (1348–71). While it is somewhat lacking in naturalism, there is a vigour and engagement about their attempts to divine the best course of action: of course, they have also had no prior knowledge of Clytemnestra’s plans.

  By contrast, in Medea, the cries of the murdered children are unusually incorporated metrically into the Chorus’ poetic utterances. This connection paradoxically has the effect of emphasizing their inaction, because the children, with whom they are in a horrific dialogue, unique in tragedy, are so clear about what is going on. The convention of the absence of violence on stage is almost broken by their explicit ‘running commentary’, and the children here act as their own messengers, showing almost as much as the preceding messenger speech does, a horrifying vision of Medea’s capabilities. When the Chorus wonder whether to enter the palace to aid the children, the children respond directly:

  Child A Yes! By the gods, protect us!

  Child B The sword-snare closes tight.

  1275–76

  But the idea is abandoned at once with little motivation for its abandonment, even though they have known for some time what Medea plans to do and the children are directly begging them to intervene. While, of course, the terms of their genre mean that they cannot do so, the way that Euripides has constructed the scene draws deliberate attention to their inaction and not only underlines that they cannot intervene but may also hint that they wil
l not, rendering the conventional ineffectiveness of the Chorus unusually painful to witness and horrifying in the context of their deep bond with Medea.

  At the end of the play, Medea is adamant in the face of Jason’s entreaties, while the Chorus watch their exchange silently. Their last words of substance come at 1290–92 as they lament, ‘a woman’s sexuality can bring many pains; it has already reaped its swathe of suffering for men’, but now they have nothing to add and certainly no real comfort for Jason. Medea continues to ascribe ultimate authority for her actions to Zeus (1352), who, like the Chorus down below, makes no intervention to foil her plans.

  Medea is an unusual tragic heroine in that so many of her plots come to fruition without being frustrated, and it is tempting to attribute her remarkable success to a strange and unsettling connection between heroine, Chorus and the shadowy gods. Right at the start of the play (148), the Chorus invoke Zeus, Earth and the light, while at 155ff. they assure Medea that Zeus will be on her side and punish Jason for the wrong he has done her. At 1252, again they pray to Earth and the Sun that Medea will not carry out the infanticide. While, of course, their prayer is not fulfilled, from the vantage-point of some sixty lines later, it is as though they have invoked the god whose chariot will ultimately save Medea from retribution and bring her complete triumph over Jason.

  And so Medea stands at the apex of a sinister triangle with the gods and the Chorus as accessories at various levels to her murderous deeds. The motivations of the gods must remain obscure, but those of the Chorus are perhaps a little less so. Above all, they are motivated by passionate loyalty to Medea but also perhaps, in the light of the claims of the first stasimon and 1081ff., they follow their mistress’ lead in seeking recompense for the way in which women are so often underestimated by men.

  9

  Medea’s Vengeance

  Hanna M. Roisman

  Judging by its prominence in the extant Greek tragedies, the subject of vengeance greatly engaged the ancient playwrights and their audiences. The determination to avenge the murder of Agamemnon drives the plot of the plays on the House of Atreus (Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electras), and the consequences of Ajax’s aborted attempt to avenge an affront by Odysseus and the Atreidae drives the plot of Sophocles’ eponymous play. Vengeance figures in Euripides’ Bacchae, is an important motif in his Hecuba, and is the central concern of his Medea. The strong emotions – anger, sense of injury, and sense of righteousness – that drive acts of revenge and the intrigues and tensions involved in accomplishing them make for riveting theatre, as does the gratification of getting one’s own back for an injury.

  Medea differs from most of the extant revenge plays. With the exception of Bacchae and Ajax, these dramatize revenge for the murder of a family member by means of the reciprocal murder of the killer and others involved in the deed. In Euripides’ Medea, as in the myth, the revenge is for a husband’s abandonment of his wife for another woman, and the punishment is not the murder of the husband but of his prospective bride and father-in-law and of his children. There is a huge and disconcerting dys-fit between the rather banal and hardly uncommon offence and the dire punishment that is meted out. In this chapter, I will try to show how Euripides’ play highlights this dys-fit in a way that forces the audience to reconsider their attitudes towards revenge.

  As Burnett points out, among early Greeks, revenge ‘was not a problem but a solution’.1 It was presented in the revenge plays as a direct means of righting wrongs and obtaining justice (e.g. Aeschylus, Eumenides 459–69, 739–43; Sophocles, Electra 528–33, 580–3; Euripides, Electra 87–9, 1147–61). In Euripides’ Medea, it was underpinned by the generally accepted ethos of reciprocity: of returning good for good, and harm for harm, or, as it is usually put, of helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies (cf. 809). Yet revenge may also be extremely disruptive. Thus, Sophocles’ Ajax depicts the hero’s attempted vengeance as an act of madness; his Electra compares the avengers to the inescapable hounds who hunt down evil crimes (1385–8). In Medea, Euripides confronts the audience with the implications of their ethos of revenge. His strategy is first to dramatize the allure of revenge, then to dramatize its horror (764–1316), and finally to end the play on a note of uncertainty and irresolution (1317–419).

  The first part of the play (1–763) leads the audience to share Medea’s compelling desire for revenge and her view of it as necessary and right. To do this, Euripides made Medea a figure of identification, whose feelings and desires the audience could share. This was no simple matter. The Medea of myth was a dangerous sorceress and foreign princess from the East, whose origins alone marked her for many of the audience as a lawless, uncivilized barbarian. In her love for Jason, she deceived her father, murdered her brother, and tricked Jason’s nieces into killing their father, Pelias, and cutting him into pieces. For the audience, who knew her history of family violence, her outsized revenge would have been a natural sequel in her bloody course. Yet Euripides did not depict Medea as a barbarian and evil sorceress. He made her a human woman who nonetheless inflicted a most terrible revenge that far exceeded the offence that elicited it. He turned her foreignness and her gruesome, unconstrained violence in the past in her favour; backgrounded her violent inclinations and deceitfulness to her suffering; and depicted Jason as a cad, who abandoned both her and his children, and Medea as the undisputed victim.

  The play opens with the Nurse’s account of all that Medea had done in her love for Jason. The Nurse frames Medea’s deception of her father and grisly murder of Jason’s uncle as acts motivated by love, and Jason’s decision to take a new wife as an act of ingratitude for the many sacrifices Medea had made for him. She describes Medea as a good wife, who followed Jason to Iolcus and then to Corinth, and lived as a stranger in a foreign land for his sake. For this, the Nurse relates, Medea has been dishonoured and betrayed, and suffers the wrenching symptoms of unrequited love, as she refuses food, lies practically inert, and cries incessantly. The Tutor further tilts audience sympathy towards Medea by bringing the news that Creon plans to exile her and her children, and by emphasizing Jason’s neglect of his house and children, whose exile he did not oppose (74–7, 84–8).

  There are also ample indications in the prologue of the terrible retribution that Medea will exact. The Nurse repeatedly describes Medea as violent (e.g. 38–43) and dangerous (44) and observes that, unlike ordinary women, she will not quietly accept her mistreatment. She also voices dark forebodings about what Medea may do to her children (36–7), advises the Tutor to keep them away from her (89–95), and tells the children to beware their mother’s ‘savage temper and single-minded all-consuming hatred’ (103–4); and we hear Medea cursing her children and declaring that she hates them (112–14). Yet, for the time being, these dark presentiments are secondary to the descriptions of Medea’s suffering and the wrongs done to her. The Chorus’ statement that they heard Medea’s shriek from the palace gives concrete expression to her sufferings and makes them salient (131–3).

  A similar foregrounding of Medea’s sufferings and the wrong done her occurs in her first exchange with the Chorus. In this speech, Euripides addresses the issue of her foreign origins (214–66). The purpose of the speech is to win over the Chorus – and the outer audience – to Medea’s side. In the first part, Medea lays out the affinities between herself and the Chorus of Corinthian women. As women, she tells them, they are at the same disadvantage as she in marriage, where the power resides with the man and from which women, unlike men, lack a ready escape if it doesn’t work out. But, as soon as she establishes their common subjugation to men, she reminds the Chorus of their difference. While they have a country, family, and friends, she tells them, she is not only a deserted wife, spurned by her husband, but also a foreigner, without father, brother, or any relation with whom to take refuge. In ancient Athens, as the audience would have known, divorced women were returned to the protection of their father’s home.2 Since this possibility was
closed to Medea, the description is designed to elicit pity for her and to bring home Jason’s callousness in leaving a wife whose foreign status makes her totally dependent on him.

  The speech may also be seen as a feat of rhetorical persuasion by a clever woman. In fifth-century Athens, rhetorical ability was viewed as a dangerous skill, which enabled persons to dissemble and mislead. Medea was in the company of tragic heroines such as Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra and Euripides’ Phaedra, whose rhetorical powers and scheming led to the violent and untimely deaths of others.3 For the time being, though, what stands out is the Chorus’ concurrence with Medea. They not only agree to her request to keep silent, should she find a way to retaliate. More importantly, they declare: ‘Medea, you are right to seek your vengeance on your husband’ (267–8). This statement at the close of the scene simultaneously expresses the Chorus’ attitude and justifies the attitude held by the audience.

  In her next encounter (271–356), Medea persuades Creon, who has just banished her and her children, to give her an extra day in Corinth – the time she will need to carry out her vengeance. We see her pretending that she hates only Jason and not Creon or his daughter, minimizing her formidable intelligence, and bending down on her knees to Creon in supplication. We hear her acquiescing to the new marriage, wishing it luck, and asserting that, although wronged, she will submit to her betters – in other words, telling Creon exactly what he wants to hear, although the sentiments are utterly unnatural under the circumstances. But even if we see her here as a manipulative woman, who abuses the ritual of supplication and exploits Creon’s kindness, the primary impression is still of a badly wronged but resourceful woman, who has been forced to humiliate herself before a powerful ruler so as to obtain justice.