The Greek Plays

by The Greek Plays- Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles

  *44 Medea displays her confidence that the gods will support her plans to “make Jason weep” for his betrayal of her and their children.

  *45 Delphi was the site of the oracle of Apollo (Phoebus); it was thought to stand at the very center, or navel, of the earth.

  *46 A container made from the skin of a goat or sheep was used to carry wine. The skin of one of the animal’s legs formed a spout out of which one could drink. The oracle seems to be a riddling reference to the sexual act.

  *47 Troezen is on the northeast coast of the Peloponnese; Aegeus would have had to travel through Corinth to get there. Pittheus was Aegeus’ father-in-law; his reputation for good counsel is derived in part from his tutoring of Aegeus’ son, the famously wise Theseus.

  *48 It is impossible to tell whether Medea performs an actual or a symbolic supplication here. If it is an actual supplication, she would probably remain kneeling and clutching Aegeus’ knees until line 731.

  *49 Some editors delete the next two lines (725–26) because of the repetition of Aegeus’ statement that he will not help Medea escape. However, his insistence on this point seems perfectly within character.

  *50 The god Hermes, born of the goddess Maia, is the protector of travelers.

  *51 Pallas Athena.

  *52 Some editors omit this line because of its similarity to line 1061.

  *53 The following line, “carrying them to the bride, to escape exile,” has been deleted for stylistic and grammatical reasons.

  *54 It is unclear in the Greek whether Medea means that no one will save the children from death or that no one will save her from killing them.

  *55 This and the next line are omitted by some editors because they perceive problems with grammar and tone. The preceding assertion, typical of the male heroic determination that an enemy’s mockery is not to be endured, seems at odds with the despair of these lines.

  *56 The Chorus address the Athenians as sons of Erechtheus, the mythological founder of Athens, and refer to the Athenians’ belief that their race sprang from the earth of Athens rather than coming there from elsewhere.

  *57 Pieria is the region in northern Greece where the Muses lived. Harmony in the following line is most likely a personification of aesthetic beauty, as in mythology Harmony is the daughter of Aphrodite (see Mastronarde, 309).

  *58 The stream called Cephisus runs just to the west of Athens.

  *59 Kovacs has emended the text here to read “gods” instead of “friends,” given the emphasis in the previous stanzas on divine presence in Athens.

  *60 Kovacs has emended the text, which is corrupt here; the general sense is clear despite the corruption.

  *61 The text has been slightly emended to get this meaning. Without the emendation, the line would mean “and take pleasure in caring for your bride.”

  *62 Kovacs’s text here reads “but you should not be like us,” implying that Jason is in fact like women and shouldn’t be. A variant of the text allows the translation I’ve given, which, as Mastronarde (315) says, is “more suited to Medea’s tone here.”

  *63 These words reveal to the audience Medea’s distress at her secret plan to kill the children but also allow Jason to imagine she is referring to his secret marriage.

  *64 The text is corrupt here. I follow Mastronarde’s emendation and translation of this line.

  *65 I do not follow Kovacs’s transposition of lines 929–31 to follow this line.

  *66 Some editors attribute this line to Jason: “I’m sure I will if she’s like other women.”

  *67 Line 949 is identical to line 786 and is more suited to the context there; it is therefore omitted here.

  *68 See Mastronarde (39) for a discussion of whether the gifts are carried in a closed chest or on a tray so they may be seen.

  *69 Kovacs deletes this line, unnecessarily I believe.

  *70 The tutor’s surprise is expressed in the Greek by a cry, translated here into “What’s this?” After the following line, two lines have been deleted: “Why have you turned your face away? / Why do you receive my news without pleasure?” on the assumption that they are an actor’s interpolation to give the explicit physical cause of the tutor’s surprise.

  *71 In the Greek, the tutor clearly states that the sons will bring Medea back from exile. Medea in her response uses a verb that can be understood as either “bring back from exile” or “send to the Underworld.” In order to capture Medea’s play on the tutor’s words, I have translated the tutor’s line as “turn your fortune” instead of “bring you back from exile.”

  *72 Medea’s monologue has been revised in many different ways, depending on how much uncertainty an editor feels is appropriate for Medea to express at this point in the play about the killing of the children. Various suggestions have also been made for the stage action that accompanies the speech. For two extensive discussions of the emendations and their strengths and weaknesses, see Mastronarde, lines 388–97, and Burnett, 273–87. I have deleted only two lines in my translation, as I think the repetitions, swerves of thinking, and uncertainty are a powerful representation of the difficulty Medea has in bringing herself to kill her children.

  *73 Two lines—“They must die. And since they must / I who gave them life will kill them”—have been omitted, as they are identical to lines 1240–42 and seem more important to that passage than here.

  *74 Modern critics have debated the meaning of these final three lines. Some see Medea reneging on her plan to murder her children; others see her finally resolving to carry it out. In my view, the final lines cannot be resolved in either of these directions; rather, they show that Medea is still in doubt.

  *75 A line before this one has been deleted—“Woman, you who’ve acted terribly, unlawfully”—on the assumption that it is a later addition to introduce clear moral censure of Medea.

  *76 When a person fell into a fit or an inexplicable illness, the god Pan was often posited as the cause.

  *77 About 200 yards. See Mastronarde (356) for an explanation of the measurement.

  *78 The text of this line is uncertain. Many editors, including Kovacs, omit it.

  *79 This translation depends on an emendation of one word. Without the emendation, the lines would read “You’ll know for yourself / an escape from punishment.”

  *80 Three lines have been deleted, on the grounds that conventionally the Chorus speak only two lines at the end of a long speech like the Messenger’s. The lines are “Wretched girl, how we pity your misfortune, / daughter of Creon. You go to the house of Death / because of your marriage to Jason.” It would seem out of place for the Chorus to comment on the death of the princess, whom they elsewhere are not concerned with.

  *81 The meter of this song is predominantly dochmiacs, a meter unique to tragedy and expressing intense emotion.

  *82 The text here is corrupt. The Chorus describe Medea as a Fury, a spirit of vengeance, but as the text stands, they go on to say that she herself is being driven by avenging spirits.

  *83 See note to line 2.

  *84 The order of the lines has been slightly altered from the manuscript tradition. The Chorus’s song continues in the same rhythm as the previous two stanzas; the strophe is interspersed with lines spoken by the children from within the house.

  *85 In the strophe, the Chorus are singing and the children are speaking. In the antistrophe, the Chorus by themselves maintain the same alternation between singing and speaking.

  *86 Ino’s story parallels Medea’s in a number of ways. She was a sister of Semele, the mother of Dionysus; after Semele’s death, Ino raised Dionysus and earned Hera’s enmity, since Dionysus was Zeus’ son by Semele. In one version of the story, Hera maddens Ino, who kills at least one of her two sons by boiling him in a cauldron and then jumps into the sea with the cauldron. (The other son, in most versions of the story, was killed by Athamas, Ino’s husband; here she is said to have killed both of them.) Zeus took pity on Ino and transformed her into the sea goddess Leucothea. She is also t
he stepmother of Phrixus and Helle, whom she hated and plotted to kill but who were saved by a golden ram whose fleece is the Golden Fleece that Jason recovers from Colchis.

  *87 It is impossible to tell whether Jason is ordering slaves outside the house with him or inside the house to open the doors. I think it is preferable to have him enter the stage at this point unattended and therefore have him ordering slaves inside the house.

  *88 The roof of the skēnē is used in Greek tragedy for the appearance of gods, in this case represented by the Sun-god’s chariot.

  *89 Scylla is a sea monster (depicted with several heads and feet by Homer and by vase painters) who grabs sailors as they pass by her cave. The Tyrrhenian sea, where Scylla is imagined to have her home, is the area of the Mediterranean off the western coast of Italy.

  *90 Later use of the word translated here as “foul acts” (literally, “doer of ugly things”) suggests a tone of almost sexual disgust in Jason’s speech. The word is found nowhere else in surviving tragedy.

  *91 See note to line 405.

  *92 Euripides often ends his plays with a god, or occasionally a human, explaining how a rite known to his audience is connected to the events the play has enacted. The temple of Hera Akraia was in or near Corinth. Since another version of the Medea story has the Corinthians killing the children, there may have been a rite in Corinth established to atone for their death. Pausanias locates the tomb of Medea’s sons in Corinth.

  *93 Athens.

  *94 The Greek word translated here as “foul” describes Medea as a polluted being whom no one will approach or touch. All murderers were considered polluted and in need of a ritual of purification, but murderers of family members especially so.

  *95 The final lines spoken by the Chorus are a variant of a conventional ending that Euripides uses for several of his plays, including the Alcestis, the Helen, and the Bacchae.

  INTRODUCTION TO EURIPIDES’ HIPPOLYTUS

  Hippolytus, written in 428 B.C., has much in common with Euripides’ last surviving play, the Bacchae, composed perhaps twenty years later. Both plays concern the price paid by mortals who fail to honor particular gods: Aphrodite wreaks vengeance on Hippolytus in the earlier play, Dionysus on Pentheus in the later one. In both, Euripides stares straight into the face of the moral problems raised by traditional Greek religion, with its tales of jealous, proud, and vengeful deities who often do great harm. Gods who use punishment to extract devotion are no better than despots, yet their divine nature, rising far above the mortal plane (and, thanks to the mēchanē, above the stage trodden by ordinary mortals) demands that we worship them nonetheless.

  Unlike Dionysus in the Bacchae, who oversees in person every step of his revenge, Aphrodite here merely discloses in a prologue speech the plan she has set in motion, then departs the scene. Her target is Hippolytus, son of the Athenian king Theseus by an Amazon queen (not named here, elsewhere called either Antiope or Hippolyta) who has since died. The young man is now in Troezen, across the Saronic Gulf from Athens; his father has been exiled here to expiate the crime of kin-murder, after killing some of his cousins in battle. Here he devotes himself to hunting and to the worship of Artemis, goddess of the hunt and, importantly for him, a committed virgin. For Hippolytus scorns Aphrodite, and the sexuality she represents, with a kind of puritanical disgust: “No god worshipped in the dark can please me,” he tells a disapproving servant (line 106). To pay him back for his renunciation, Aphrodite has made Hippolytus the object of an illicit passion: the desperate love of Phaedra, Theseus’ new wife, a princess of Crete. As the play opens, Hippolytus and Phaedra, stepson and stepmother, have been left in Troezen by Theseus, who has gone to consult the oracle at Delphi.

  It’s worth noting that Aphrodite’s appearance for this prologue speech is not crucial to the play’s development; neither Seneca nor Racine, in later reworkings of this play, included her among their cast. (It’s also noteworthy that both Seneca and Racine titled their versions of this play Phaedra rather than Hippolytus, placing her sufferings rather than his at the center of the story.) Powerful sexual passion, like Phaedra’s for Hippolytus, was understood by the Greeks, in and of itself, as a divine force; they gave the name erōs both to this feeling and to a deity, the son of Aphrodite. By having Aphrodite lay claim to the kindling of this passion, Euripides gave special stress to the role of the gods in engineering the downfall of his human characters. It’s also likely, based on surviving evidence, that he wrote this prologue in response to Athenian displeasure with an earlier version of his play, in which the incestuous passion of Phaedra was portrayed, scandalously for that era, as arising purely from her own impulses.

  Unaware of the trap that has been set, Hippolytus comes onstage with a band of fellow huntsmen, singing a pious hymn to Artemis. We see him lay a wreath of wildflowers before the statue of his patroness and describe how he, alone among mortals, is able to converse with her (though without seeing her). The bond between god and mortal is here portrayed, like that of Odysseus and Athena in Homer’s Odyssey, as a pairing of kindred spirits. The love of hunting, a sport pursued in the Greek world with dogs, spears, and nets, is deeply ingrained in both their natures; it takes both of them outside the ordered space of the polis and into wild glens and mountain ridges. Their shared violations of gender norms also transcends the order of the polis: Artemis, who resembles a barbarian Amazon in dress and behavior, adopts a role normally reserved for Greek males, while Hippolytus, the son of an Amazon, preserves a virginal purity that Greeks associated with females.

  With deft psychological insight, Euripides also gives to Phaedra, as she raves in the throes of her lovesickness, a longing for the mountains, the glades, and the hunt. The Amazon way of life, as constructed in Greek myth and legend, was linked to extremes of sexual passion and chastity at the same time; both are seen as escapes from the sanctions of licit pair-bonding and marriage. Incestuous longing has put Phaedra, too, outside the bounds of society and connected her to the primal forces of the wilderness. Parallels with Euripides’ Bacchae are again illustrative. Mount Cithaeron is configured in that later play as the site of animal energies that include both sexual desire and the aggression of the hunt, and above all the frenzy of Bacchic dance. Such energies, in both plays, are set profoundly at odds with those on which the polis relies.

  As Phaedra struggles between conflicting impulses and contemplates suicide, she is counseled by the Nurse, one of many Euripidean characters whose pragmatism and quotidian concerns stand in contrast to the tragic world around them—the kind of figure who, in Shakespeare’s plays, typically speaks in prose rather than verse. Though the Nurse at first feels shock and outrage at Phaedra’s forbidden passion, she ultimately abets it on the grounds that life, even a life lived in shame and disgrace, is better than self-destruction. The question posed by her actions—whether the benefit of being alive is worth any price—is one that Euripides frequently contemplated (the Alcestis is a prominent example in this volume, the Heracles is another outside it), and his audiences were troubled by his willingness to do so. Aristophanes, in the comedy the Frogs, made the depiction of Phaedra’s passion here a focal point in a debate between Euripides and Aeschylus, prompting Aeschylus’ famous assertion that the tragic poet is the moral instructor of the city and should show more inspiring models. Though Phaedra herself is the primary target of this attack—Aeschylus claims she teaches decent women to become whores—the Nurse, too, with her antiheroic doctrine that nothing in the end is worth dying for, lurks in the background.

  The Nurse’s intervention in Phaedra’s plight leads to disaster. Though she tries to protect her mistress by swearing Hippolytus to secrecy, the young man’s outrage overwhelms his fidelity to his oath: “My tongue swore, my mind did not,” he proclaims (line 612), another inversion of popular morality for which Aristophanes bitterly lampooned Euripides. With her secret out, Phaedra refuses to go on living, but, with anachronistic use of a written message—reading and writing are usually absent from
the mythic world—she blames Hippolytus for her downfall. Her motive is not, as might be supposed, to get back at the man who scorned her, but to protect her reputation and the rights of her own children by Theseus (mentioned briefly at line 717).

  As Phaedra enters the palace to put her plan into effect, the Chorus of Troezenian women sing one of Euripides’ loveliest odes, evoking the peaceful shores of the river Eridanus in western Europe and, beyond that, the balmy island, somewhere in the Atlantic perhaps, where grow the golden apples of the Hesperides. As often in Euripides, a wistful vision of escape, set to what was no doubt haunting music, provides a serene interlude before disaster strikes. While satirists like Aristophanes might carp over the moral dimensions of Euripides’ plots, no one contested the beauty of his lyrics. After the Athenian defeat in Sicily in 413 B.C., prisoners of war reportedly earned lenient treatment by singing snatches of odes from Euripidean plays.

  Theseus now returns from Delphi to find his wife dead; he reads the mendacious note as the Chorus members look on in silence, preserving with too-great fidelity their oath not to reveal Phaedra’s sorrows. In an instant, Theseus, portrayed in other tragedies as the soul of self-restraint (see Oedipus at Colonus in this volume), becomes as enraged and vengeful as any Creon. He calls on Poseidon—here portrayed as his father, though other legends made Theseus the son of Aegeus, a mortal—to fulfill one of three promised wishes, and the fate of Hippolytus, later described in a harrowing messenger speech, is sealed.

  A final scene, counterpart to the prologue, brings on the goddess Artemis ex machina to reveal the full horror of what has taken place. She gives comfort when she decrees that hereafter, ritual offerings will be left for Hippolytus by the maidens of Troezen, and she tries gamely to reconcile father and son. But when she leaves the stage before Hippolytus dies, lest the taint of mortality stain her, we are reminded that gods such as these cannot truly befriend human beings or even understand their suffering. Euripides also makes clear that Artemis goes off to wreak destruction on some other innocent victim, merely for the sake of getting even with Aphrodite. The gods do not kill us for their sport, but they also make no great effort to prevent us from becoming their collateral damage.