Medea

Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art

James J. Clauss, Sarah Iles Johnston, James J. Clauss, Sarah Iles Johnston

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691043760, 9780691043777
• eBook ISBN: 9780691215082
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Religion

From the dawn of European literature, the figure of Medea--best known as the helpmate of Jason and murderer of her own children--has inspired artists in all fields throughout all centuries. Euripides, Seneca, Corneille, Delacroix, Anouilh, Pasolini, Maria Callas, Martha Graham, Samuel Barber, and Diana Rigg are among the many who have given Medea life on stage, film, and canvas, through music and dance, from ancient Greek drama to Broadway. In seeking to understand the powerful hold Medea has had on our imaginations for nearly three millennia, a group of renowned scholars here examines the major representations of Medea in myth, art, and ancient and contemporary literature, as well as the philosophical, psychological, and cultural questions these portrayals raise. The result is a comprehensive and nuanced look at one of the most captivating mythic figures of all time.


Unlike most mythic figures, whose attributes remain constant throughout mythology, Medea is continually changing in the wide variety of stories that circulated during antiquity. She appears as enchantress, helper-maiden, infanticide, fratricide, kidnapper, founder of cities, and foreigner. Not only does Medea's checkered career illuminate the opposing concepts of self and other, it also suggests the disturbing possibility of otherness within self. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Fritz Graf, Nita Krevans, Jan Bremmer, Dolores M. O'Higgins, Deborah Boedeker, Carole E. Newlands, John M. Dillon, Martha C. Nussbaum, Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, and Marianne McDonald.

PART I

MYTHIC REPRESENTATIONS

1

MEDEA, THE ENCHANTRESS FROM AFAR

REMARKS ON A WELL-KNOWN MYTH

Fritz Graf

TO THOSE OF US who have grown up with it, Greek myth seems to consist of stories about individual, noninterchangeable figures—Odysseus, Orestes, or indeed Medea—each of whom seems to have been shaped by a single, authoritative literary work: Homer’s Odyssey, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Euripides’ Medea. We tend to forget that, in reality, each of these works is just a single link in a chain of narrative transmission: on either side of the version that is authoritative for us, there stands a long line of other versions. Moreover, many of these versions not only refer to the episode treated in the authoritative literary work but also include other details, which help to round out a mythic biography. The first phenomenon—the fact that there exist different versions of the same mythic episode—might be called the vertical tradition. The other phenomenon—the fact that the different versions yield a running biography of the mythic figure—might be called the horizontal tradition. (I am aware that the boundaries between the two phenomena are far from precise.) Tensions exist between individual narratives of the same episode, as well as between each of these existing narratives and what might be called the imaginary core narrative, although whether there really ever was such a thing is one question that must be considered. How severe the tensions and differences are between this “core” narrative and existing narratives is another important question: how great is the plasticity of myth?¹

One character who presents herself as the subject of such questions is Medea. Her mythic biography was elaborated enthusiastically by ancient authors. Already in the fifth century, she was portrayed fully by Pindar and Euripides. Five individual episodes, each of which is tied closely to a specific locale, construct the horizontal tradition:²

a.The Colchian story: Medea helps Jason, who has arrived with the Argonauts, obtain the Golden Fleece; she then must flee with him.

b.The Iolcan story: Medea helps Jason to avenge himself on Pelias; they then must flee from the Peliades, who seek revenge.

c.The Corinthian story: Medea avenges herself on Jason, who has abandoned her, by killing the Corinthian king, his daughter, and the children whom Medea has borne to Jason; she then must flee.

d.The Athenian story: Medea becomes the companion of King Aegeus and almost kills his son Theseus; she then must flee.

e.The Median story: after fleeing from Athens, Medea settles among the Arioi in the Iranian highlands, who since that time have been called “Medes" (Hdt. 7.62).³

Not all of these episodes are documented in equal detail by ancient sources. In the next section of this paper, I will turn my attention to the one for which we have the greatest number of narratives from different time periods—the episode in Colchis—and examine their diversity. In the sections that follow, I will examine the remaining episodes individually and offer some suggestions as to what links all these stories about Medea—about all of Medea’s personae—together.

Medea in Colchis: The Course of the Narrative

“Would that the Argo had never reached the land of Colchis, sailing through the dark Symplegades, and that the spruce had never fallen in the glades of Pelion.” With this famous example of hysteron proteron—reformulated in ordinary word order by Ennius as recorded by Cicero (Tusc. 3.63), and exploited by Cicero against the femme fatale Clodia, the sister of Clodius Pulcher (Cael. 18)⁴—begins Euripides’ Medea. It was the Argo that fetched Medea to Greece, and it is during the narration of that first sea voyage that she makes her debut in Greek myth. Our detailed accounts of the story are all from later sources; with them we will begin.

Apollonius of Rhodes

Central to a working history of the Argonautica theme is the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, a learned (and, in its literary surroundings, somewhat idiosyncratic) epic of the third century B.C.⁵ This work not only defined the story of the Argonautica for later authors,⁶ but it also left its stamp on the Aeneid. The relevant episodes of the well-known plot might be summarized as follows. Even before Jason arrived in Colchis, the goddesses Hera and Athena had prepared the ground by securing the help of Aphrodite on his behalf. Later, when Jason asked for the Golden Fleece during an audience with King Aeëtes, Eros was present as well; by means of a well-aimed shot, he ensured that the king’s daughter, Medea, would fall in love with the newly arrived stranger. Aeëtes demanded that Jason win the fleece by completing a series of tasks that Jason rightly feared would kill him: he was to yoke fire-breathing bulls and use them to plow a field; following this, he was to sow the field with dragon’s teeth. After a long inner battle, and at the urging of her sister Chalciope (the widow of Phrixus and thereby a woman well disposed toward the Greeks), Medea yielded to her love for Jason and betrayed her father and homeland: she gave Jason a magical salve that would protect him against the steers’ breath and she taught him a trick by which he could deflect the soldiers that sprang up when the dragon’s teeth were sown. Later, she gave him a sleeping potion that would render harmless the dragon who guarded the fleece (which, of course, Aeëtes would not hand over to Jason even after the tasks had been successfully completed).

Apollonius builds the tale of Jason, Medea, and her father upon a story type that was already familiar in Hellenistic literature: the “Tarpeia-type,” named after a well-known Roman myth.⁷ This type centers on a triangle comprising a father, who usually is the king of a city, his daughter, and a foreign enemy The enemy attacks the city but cannot conquer it because the father protects it, sometimes by supernatural means. The daughter, however, who has fallen in love with the foreigner, betrays her father, in hopes that her treachery will be rewarded by the fulfillment of her love. Usually, she finds she has deceived herself in this expectation. In itself, this story type is pre-Hellenistic; we first find it in Aeschylus’ reference to the fate of Scylla of Megara, who betrayed her father for the sake of vile gold (Cho. 612). Later narrators (including Prop. 4.4 and Ovid in Met. 8.6–151) changed both the girl’s motivation and the narrator’s point of view: Tarpeia is driven by love, not gold,⁸ and her feelings are focused upon by the narrator. Apollonius’ portrayal of Medea aligns with both tendencies, which are, of course, overtly Hellenistic: his Medea acts out of love, and we are asked to see the situation through her eyes.

In three respects, however, Apollonius’ story differs from most other examples of this type. First, it is the only one to take place at the limits of the known world; all others take place in a Greek state or in Rome, never in foreign parts. Second, Jason does not go to Colchis with the same intentions as his homologues: he does not want to conquer Colchis, he wants merely to take home the fleece. Apollonius emphasizes this point by making Jason first ask for the fleece and then offer to perform some service in return for it (3.177–93,351–53, 393–95). Third, Medea’s character as a priestess of Hecate and an enchantress is unusual: typically, the maiden in this story type is young, beautiful, and somewhat dumb (consider, for example, Ovid’s Scylla). If supernatural powers are brought into the story, they usually belong to the maiden’s father, the king of the city: Scylla’s father, Nisus, has a purple lock of hair, for example, on which Megara’s fate depends.

Closer to Apollonius’ version of the story of Jason, Aeëtes, and Medea is the tale of Theseus, Minos, and Ariadne. It also plays upon the father-daughter-stranger triangle, but, like Apollonius’ Medea-story, it does not align fully with the Tarpeia-type: Theseus arrives not as a conqueror and enemy of Crete, but rather as a rescuer of his countrymen. Moreover, Ariadne’s love finds fulfillment (at least at first), for Theseus takes her with him and rescues her from the fury of her father. In later versions, the story is told so as to put Ariadne at the center (e.g., Catullus 64; Ovid Met. 8.169–82).

The tensions between Apollonius’ version of Medea’s story and more-or-less contemporary narrations of the Tarpeia-type suggest that Medea’s story originally ran somewhat differently: Medea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Mythic Representations
• Part II: Literary Portraits
• Part III: Under Philosophical Investigation
• Part IV: Beyond the Euripidean Stage
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index Locorum
• General Index