Looking at Medea

by David Stuttard

  The Chorus continue to affirm the rightness of her revenge even after its grisly contours begin to emerge. After Creon exits, Medea chillingly tells the Chorus, and the outer audience, that she will use the day Creon granted her ‘to make corpses’ of Creon, Jason, and his bride (374–5), considers in detail the means she will employ and her need for an exit strategy, and vaunts her ability to do ‘every form of harm’. Nonetheless, the Chorus’ song at the end of this speech reiterates, in lyric form, their earlier approval. They sing of an inverted natural order, in which the springs and rivers flow backwards to their sources, men’s minds breed deceit, and their oaths by the gods ‘do not hold fast’ (412–13).4 The message is that revenge is needed to restore the right order. This message is reinforced in the last stanza of their song (439–41) where the Chorus tell that the sanctity of oaths has gone and shame (aidōs) fled to heaven. The implication is that revenge is needed to restore the power of the oath, which Jason has violated, and to return shame to its erstwhile position as a force for human morality (cf. Hesiod, Works and Days 180–201).

  Medea’s next encounter, with Jason, wins sympathy for her by showing Jason as a selfish and insensitive social climber and cad (446–626). As soon as he comes on stage, Jason blames Medea for her exile, berating her for her fierce temper and refusal quietly to accept his marriage arrangements. His expectations of more accommodating behaviour from her reflect his total lack of understanding of what he has done. So does his rejoinder to her indictment of him, in which she reminds him – and the outer audience – that she abandoned her father and had Pelias murdered by his own daughters for his sake, lets it be known that he violated the sacred oath he made when he married her, and points out that he has left her alone with nowhere to turn – even though she had two children by him, thereby fulfilling her obligations as a wife. In his reply, Jason tries to slough off his obligation of gratitude to Medea, claiming that Medea did not help him of her own accord but was forced to do so by Aphrodite, who made her fall in love with him; and, that in any case, she got back more than she gave: she lives now among Greeks and not barbarians. And she is famous amongst them. He extols his upcoming marriage as a sensible means of ensuring a good standard of living for himself, Medea, and their children, who, he claims, would have grown up on the same footing as the children of his new wife. This claim is spurious. Stepmothers were notorious in the tragedies for mistreating their stepchildren (e.g. Euripides, Alcestis 313–14) – an assumption reinforced by the irritation with which Jason’s bride later receives his young sons (1145–9). The weight that should be given to Jason’s rebuttal is indicated by the Chorus’ observations that, although he marshalled his arguments skilfully, ‘I think you have betrayed your wife and acted unjustly’ (578).

  The first movement ends with the visit of Aegeus, the king of Athens, from whom Medea obtains a firm pledge to provide her with refuge and protection when she goes into exile. She obtains this pledge with her usual craft: by enlisting his sympathy for her plight, while hiding from him her violent intentions. The visit sets the stage for the upcoming vengeance by providing Medea with the safe exit she needs to do the deed, and by providing the outer audience with yet another affirmation, by a generous and moral ruler, that Jason and Creon behaved very badly towards Medea (695–707).

  Up until this point in the play, the Chorus are solidly on Medea’s side and keep her victimization firmly in the audience’s awareness. They pronounce that Jason has betrayed her (205–7, 578), reiterate the sufferings she will endure in exile (357–63), and recite the sacrifices she has made for Jason and her loss of her husband and marriage (432–8). By not letting the audience forget Medea’s sufferings, the Chorus, and Euripides, make sure that the audience continue to sympathize with Medea even as less commendable aspects of her character reveal themselves and the violence of her intentions becomes increasingly clear. Up until this point, the play has thus fostered the audience’s belief that Medea’s revenge is imperative, the right and just thing to do, and, in so doing, has made them complicit in it.

  The perspective shifts radically in lines 764–1316. Up until Aegeus’ exit, the revenge remains largely abstract. Although Medea tells that she will turn her victims into corpses and that she will use poison to kill Jason’s bride, the details remain vague. The audience could become caught up in the rightness of the revenge, because they didn’t see it in all its terrible details. In the second part of the play, the revenge is brutally concrete and graphic. In keeping with the dramatic conventions discouraging the showing of violence on stage, its fearsome brutality is conveyed in the characters’ words.

  The shift begins with the long speech, in which Medea reveals her plans in their entirety (764–810). In the first part of the speech, she tells of the agonizing death she plans for Jason’s bride; in the second part, she reveals her intention to kill her children. Her murder of her children is not integral to the myth. Scholars debate whether it was introduced by Euripides or by the tragic poet Neophron.5 But even if Euripides did not introduce it, he chose to make it the culmination of Medea’s scheme. Why? Why did he not stop with her murder of Jason’s bride and her father?

  In her long justification for killing her children, Medea emphasizes her unwillingness to be laughed at by her enemies (797). To the modern Western reader, this is a barely comprehensible motive for any violent act, to say nothing of killing one’s own children. For Medea, however, it is a compelling motive, which she had stated earlier (398, 404–5) and repeats subsequently (1049–50, 1354–7, 1362). It would also have resonated with Euripides’ audience. The abhorrence of being laughed at was anchored in Homeric values, which, though undergoing reconsideration at the time, were still held in esteem when the play was produced. In this value system, being mocked was tantamount to being dishonoured.

  In her speech, Medea presents killing the children as the only way she can ensure that neither she nor they will suffer the dishonour of being laughed at. She presents it as essential to completing her revenge and, to the Chorus a few lines later, as ‘what will hurt my husband most’ (817). If she does not do it, she implies, she will be viewed as weak and pliable: ‘Let no-one under-rate me, think me weak, a woman pliable and tamed, but rather know me to be otherwise, a terrifying scourge to lash my enemies, a gentle balm for family and friends’ (807–9). It is the way, she goes on to say, to ‘live a life of greatest glory’ (810). Although Medea decides to kill the children only after her meeting with Aegeus brings home the great importance of children to a man, their murder becomes in the play the logical culmination of the principle of returning harm for harm, the means by which the individual wins respect. By adding infanticide to Medea’s retaliation, Euripides thus takes the logic of revenge to its extremity, forcing the audience to see the full implications of their conviction that revenge is the right response to an affront.

  Yet infanticide is a horrific deed. Children are innocent and vulnerable and should be protected. It is even worse when the killer is the parent. For the first time in the play, the Chorus withdraw their support of Medea’s vengeance, urging her to abide by ‘the laws of men’ and ‘not do’ this thing (811–13). Their phrasing recalls their earlier branding of Jason’s conduct as an inversion of the laws of nature. Now it is Medea, whom they present as violating a basic law, thereby suggesting that she is no better than those who victimize her. In their next song (824–65), they go on to tell her she will be polluted (850) by killing her children and once again beg her not to do so. The audience, for their part, do not need the Chorus’ signal to recoil in horror as Medea unfolds her plan or to cringe as she remains adamant in face of the Chorus’ pleadings (811–18).

  The knowledge that Medea is planning to kill her children leads to a shift in perspective both on her and on the rightness of vengeance. To be sure, the play continues to depict Medea as a human and suffering figure. The Chorus express pity for her in the same breath as they tell that she will murder her children (996–7). In what is known as her ‘
great monologue’ before the deed (1021–80), Medea’s planned infanticide is presented as a wrenching decision which will cause her tremendous pain and deprivation. Medea, the human mother, is painfully aware that in depriving Jason of his children, she too will suffer: she will not see them grow up or wed, she will not have them to care for her in her old age or to perform her burial rites. These thoughts, along with the realization of how much she will miss the children – the sweetness of their smiles, the brightness of their eyes – almost bring her to renounce her plans (1048). In the end, though, her abhorrence of being laughed at and her fear that she will be seen as weak if she does not exact the maximum punishment, overcome her motherly feelings (1049–50) and she decides to go ahead with the infanticide. In its depiction of Medea’s agonized inner conflict, the play refuses to present her as a monster from whom the audience – who, too, hold honour a core value – can readily distance themselves.

  At the same time, with Medea’s announcement of her plans to kill her children, the Nurse’s dark forebodings in the prologue become imminent, and background becomes foreground. The Nurse had spoken of Medea’s inordinate rage. Now Medea herself admits, at the end of the speech in which she struggles with conflicting impulses: ‘but my wrath overbears my calculation, wrath that brings mortal men their gravest hurt’ (1079–80).6 By foregrounding her anger, the play points to the destructive passion which overrides all other emotions and drives Medea’s vengeance, any vengeance, at least as much as her fear of being laughed at.

  There is also a reappraisal of Medea’s guile. In the scene in which Medea persuades Jason to enable her to send their children to his bride with the ‘peace offering’ of the deadly robe (866–975), her guile may be seen as considerably more sinister than it had been in the earlier scene with Creon. Much as she had tricked Creon, Medea tricks Jason into abetting her revenge by telling him what he wants to hear. She pretends to regret her previous anger and declares that she now sees the wisdom of his new marriage and the foolishness of her initial rejection of it. But now that the audience have heard her plans for her children, will they still judge her deceit as a legitimate instrument used by a wronged and powerless woman to obtain justice? Or will they see it as hard-hearted, immoral behaviour towards her innocent and vulnerable boys?

  Most of all, the dramatization of her vengeance prevents the audience from being as sanguine about it as they had been in the first part of the play. Since violence was not usually shown on stage in the ancient Greek tragedies, the dramatization is effected verbally. It begins with the Messenger’s detailed and vivid description of the deaths of Jason’s bride and her father. For the first time in the play, Jason’s bride is described at some length. The Messenger begins by telling how she is irritated with the children but greedy for their gift. He describes her donning the robe and golden crown, arranging her hair and admiring herself in the mirror, and walking about the room overjoyed with the gift. The description is not a flattering one. It shows her as vain and self-absorbed. But it also gives her a dimension, which she had not previously had, and makes her visible to the mind’s eye, which she had not previously been. Thus, when the Messenger goes on to relate the details of her excruciating death, we see the revenge not as an abstract act done to an unknown person, but as a concrete act of horrendous violence inflicted on a human being with her own personality. Against this background, the detailed description of the poison taking its effect – the colour of her face changing, her staggering backwards, running with trembling legs, her falling onto a chair, her blinking and groaning, the fire devouring her hair and skin, her futile efforts to tear off the garments, her falling to the ground, the oozing of her blood intermingled with the fire, and the melting of the flesh from her bones – is truly appalling. The horror is further accentuated by the shrieking of her servant who witnessed the event and the terror that those present feel of touching her corpse. The Messenger continues with a description of the death of Creon, who had been summoned to the aid of his daughter. He, too, becomes a person with whom one can sympathize. He is shown not as the exiling ruler, but as a loving father who throws himself on his daughter’s corpse, eager to die along with her. Although at the end of the description the Chorus state that Jason deserved the evils that befell him, they voice pity for the ‘poor princess, poor Creon’s child’ (1233–5),7 who, they imply, did not deserve the horrible death, that was meted out to her. By humanizing Medea’s victims, the Messenger’s speech and the hair-raising account of their deaths make the audience rethink the rightness of revenge.

  Medea’s murder of her children is dramatized in a less graphic and more succinct manner. Yet it is also presented so as to arouse the maximum horror. It is preceded by Medea’s statement of her intention to kill her children by her own hand, her injunction to herself to arm her heart in steel, and her entrance into the house, where they are staying. While Medea is in the house, the Chorus pray, to no avail, to Earth and Helios to prevent her from killing her own flesh and blood and sing of her cruel and bloody mind and of the price of spilling kindred blood. It is then, at the end of the song, that a cry is heard from inside the house. The audience hear one child asking what he can do to escape his mother’s hands and the other answering that he cannot tell him. The Chorus consider going inside to defend the children from murder, but do not. One of the children poignantly cries out for help, which will not come. The cry presages their ending, trapped by their mother’s sword. With the children’s deaths, the Chorus cease to express any sympathy whatsoever. Instead they censure Medea for her hard-heartedness in planning to kill with her own hand ‘the children you gave birth to’ (1280–1).8 The audience cannot but concur.

  By the end of the second section, the view of revenge as right and necessary has been eroded. In its place, we are asked to consider whether the destruction wrought by Medea was really fitting. It may be appropriate that Jason is left alive to suffer the ruin of his house and the isolation and desolation that come with it. As Burnett points out,9 these are much the same deprivations that his abandonment of Medea and his complicity in her exile caused her. But the children certainly did not deserve to die. And did Creon’s vain and silly daughter deserve the excruciating death she suffered? And what about Creon? For all the wrong he had done to Medea, he had also shown her some kindness in allowing her to stay in Corinth for an extra day. Should his kindness have been repaid by such brutal harm? These questions remain unanswered. Instead of bringing closure, the last part of the play, the exodos (1293–419), is profoundly unsettling.

  It begins with Jason’s breathless arrival to try to save his children from the wrath of Creon’s relatives, only to learn that Medea has killed them. For the first time in the play, Jason is not presented in an entirely negative light, but shown caring about his children and depicted as the victim of Medea’s violence.

  Also for the first time in the play, Medea is shown not only, or primarily, as a human woman but as the supernatural descendant of a god. She emerges in a chariot on the mēchanē (a sort of a crane which could hoist an actor, an object, or both up to a raised structure atop the stage-building). She is shown with the corpses of her children aloft on the winged chariot of her grandfather Helios, ready to ride across the skies to Athens. Helios, the Titan god of oaths, had not responded to the Chorus’ earlier plea to prevent Medea murdering her children, but now makes his chariot available to rescue her from certain punishment in Corinth.10 His assistance implies his approval of the vengeance in all its horror and lends divine endorsement to the revenge.

  But does the play endorse it? In Helios’ chariot, Medea is shown in her divine, non-human aspect riding above the audience. If we interpret her position figuratively, the scene shows her riding above human cares and regrets and underscores the role of the non-human in her revenge. By extension, it suggests that revenge of the sort she commits is inhuman, in the sense of lacking in the softer feelings and compassion that human beings are supposed to possess. Moreover, there is something galling
in seeing Medea riding high, beyond punishment, even by her own conscience. Although she had earlier predicted a sad and lonely future for herself, the play closes with her in the ascendancy. Even if one does not support the principle of harming those who harmed one, seeing murder and infanticide go unpunished goes against our most fundamental notions of justice.

  The scene also shows Medea in her human aspect, in an unbecoming and somewhat comic domestic squabble, trading stichomythic accusations with Jason, she from on high, he from stage level, as to who is at fault for her infanticide. In their exchange of words, both she and Jason show themselves deficient. Medea reveals no more understanding of the heinousness of her infanticide than she had before she committed it. She reiterates her refusal to be laughed at and points out, yet again, Jason’s lack of gratitude and violation of his oath. She will not allow him to bury the children, as he requests, or even to kiss them a final goodbye. Justifying her refusal of his request to bury them, she informs him that she plans to bury the children in Hera’s temple and to establish an annual feast and sacrifice. But do these gestures ameliorate her blood-guilt or compensate the children for their premature deaths? Jason, too, shows no more understanding of the wrong he had done than he had earlier in the play. He hypocritically blames Medea for the violence she had committed in her love for him and again wrongly accuses her of acting out of sexual jealousy.