Looking at Medea Page 3

  Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:

  She hath deceived her father, and may thee.

  Shakespeare, Othello, I ii 292–3

  In that particular case, of course, such suspicions were notably unjust; but we see that they were not unnatural. We cannot doubt that many wiseacres in Shakespeare’s audience, at that point in the play, nodded their heads in sympathy and in general approval.

  What is the original colouring of the Jason-and-Medea story as a whole? Clearly, it is romantic, and also upbeat. The two nasty old men, Jason’s wicked uncle and Medea’s tyrannical father, are both defeated – as we, in the audience, naturally want them to be. They are frustrated, and they fail, quite properly; while the glamorous young lovers sail away in triumph, carrying with them the marvellous Golden Fleece, into a life of love and happiness. We see the story ending, naturally, with a romantic fade-out, as the victorious young couple advance, hand in hand, into that golden future. ‘And they lived happily ever after’: such is the natural and satisfying conclusion that such a tale seems to demand, and that such a romantic pair of lovers certainly seem to deserve. It is, indeed, much the way in which the Argonautica, the third-century epic on their adventure, does fade out.

  But someone, sooner or later, insists on pressing the story and its characters a little further. Jason, the dashing prince, who carried off the wonderful Golden Fleece and the beautiful princess, and who brought them home in triumph from the distant edge of the world: is he, really, quite satisfactory as a hero? After all, when you come to reflect on the story, it was Medea who made it all possible for Jason. It was she who put to sleep the fearsome and ever watchful dragon which guarded the Fleece; and it was she again, by her uncanny medications and her powerful interventions, who enabled Jason to yoke the fire-breathing bulls, to plough the fatal field, and to cope with the armed men who arose from the sowing of the dragon’s teeth. It was even she who threw the pursuing Aeëtes off the track of the fleeing lovers by chopping up, and sprinkling in their wake, the body of her young brother, Apsyrtus. In fact, it was she, really, who did all the crucial things!

  So – what kind of hero, after all, can this Jason have been? A little further reflection, a little more meditation, and we come up, very soon, with a rather unflattering result. He was very good looking; that is clear – why, Medea fell passionately in love with him at very first sight; fell so deeply in love, that she betrayed her father for the ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger’ (Othello again), and so made his heroic exploits quite easy! He was, in all probability, just the sort of young man who is handsome and charming, and who is perfectly conscious of his own good looks and powerful charm; who is well aware of his own success with women (those dear trusting creatures!), and who thinks he will always get away with it, whatever it may be, because he always has got away with it, and because he is – after all – so handsome and so charming. His career – when you came to think of it – had not really shown much heroism at all! The original tale had presented the journey of the good ship Argo as the first of all sea voyages, and her entry into the Euxine, the dreaded northern sea, with its euphemistic and all too hopeful name (‘friendly to travellers’ is its actual meaning), as an action of epoch-making daring and resolution. Euripides turns the focus right away from all of that; and the daring journey, with all its perilous adventures en route, is now kept far from our minds.

  Medea has betrayed her father and stolen his cherished treasure; she has killed her brother Apsyrtus; and she has run away to a foreign land with a handsome foreigner, her father’s hated enemy. She did it for love: yes, all for love! What sort of person, then, must she be? Obviously, she is – clearly, she must be – a passionate and headstrong woman, who follows her passions, wherever they lead; and who, unreflectively and rather naturally, imagines that other people are, essentially, just like herself. Yes, no doubt they are passionate and headstrong, too! Jason, of course, is a hero, and he, especially, must be just like that! Yes, of course: he must be just like her!

  On that point, unfortunately, she is badly wrong. Jason, we soon see, is very different from Medea: very different indeed. Through the lines of his self-defence (522–75), his history clearly emerges. Cool and calculating, he accepted her advances, when he was in distant Colchis, far from home, because he found himself in a very tight corner. At that moment, he desperately needed her help. Now, though, he doesn’t need it any longer. Now, in fact, she has become a nuisance: yes, now she is a positive burden. But for her tiresomely persistent presence, he would be free to marry the Corinthian princess, who has been so conveniently offered to him by her father, and then he would be at perfect liberty to settle down in Corinth: no longer a glamorous but slightly disreputable middle-aged adventurer, married to an exotic and formidable wife, with kindred blood on her hands, who can never revisit her fatherland. On the contrary, he would be quite safely, quite comfortably, and very advantageously placed: in a middle age of well earned dignity, respect, ease, opulence, and comfort. There would be no more hardships; no more knocking about the world. And his children – their children – would be much better placed. The Athenian audience of the play, sitting in the theatre of Athens, will have taken for granted the current Athenian law, which restricted full citizenship to the offspring of two full citizens. Under such a law, the children of Jason and Medea – offspring of a foreign mother – would not be eligible to be full citizens. They must remain for ever dubiously legitimate and not fully accepted.

  So: why can’t Medea understand? It’s all so straightforward; it’s all so childishly simple! Why must she persist in being so absurdly and tiresomely unreasonable? There will be some provision, there will be a nice comfortable granny flat, for her; while as for him, he will be absolutely in clover, for the rest of his life! Her whole career has shown that Medea simply is not, and never was, that sort of character; but Jason has never understood anything at all about Medea. He cannot imagine that she is not, really, someone exactly like himself. Given a little time, and some careful explanation, she will, surely, see and accept the obvious advantages of this new marriage of Jason’s. That estimate is, of course, just as wrong as her estimate of him. It is, in fact, his disastrous mistake.

  The story of Jason and Medea is set in a distant and exotic past, of dragons and the marvellous Golden Fleece; but Euripides has chosen to play down the supernatural elements in the story, and to present his Jason and Medea as two perfectly intelligible human characters, whose marital squabbles, and wrongdoings, and grievances, and mutual reproaches, are rather uncomfortably lifelike: are all too close, in fact, to our own. We are confirmed in this view by remembering Aristophanes. He bitterly complains, in Frogs in particular, that the characters who appear in Euripides’ tragedies are just too ordinary; that they are too like us, and that they are altogether too deficient in the good old tragic distance, and remoteness, and glamour. Aristophanes could have pointed to Euripides’ Jason as a perfect example of his point.

  It is quite important, I think, to realize that Jason is perfectly sincere in what he says, and in what he offers Medea in their first confrontation (lines 446–626). In her place, we can assume, he would be perfectly content – would, indeed, be only too happy – to accept such an offer. After all, one wife, and one princess – either Medea or this Corinthian young lady – is, if we are honest about it, very much like another; while comfort and security are very, very different from insecurity and dependence. Jason tries, quite conscientiously, to explain all of that to Medea. Surely she must see it! But no: she insists on refusing to understand what is, to Jason, perfectly obvious and, really, quite self-explanatory. After all, sex can’t matter that much – not to a woman, or to the sort of woman he thinks he knows.

  Of course, we can see that Jason is not, in truth, being nearly as sensible as he thinks. Under the pressure of urgent and perilous events, he has incurred great obligations to a woman of a nature radically different from his own. He has, indeed, fatally entangled himself with her
. He has failed to understand his own position or his own story. To put it in another way: what was originally, perhaps, a Märchen, a fairy story – ‘so the beautiful princess saved the dashing prince from his imminent peril, and they defeated her wicked father, and they sailed away together, to live happily ever after’ – is developed and transformed, into a darker, grittier, more realistic tale: into a story, in fact, of actions eminently unromantic and unheroic: of ageing and bitterness, of ingratitude, of cold-heartedness, and of disastrous misunderstandings.

  Medea paidoktonos (child-killer)

  So: are we saying that the audience are wholly on Medea’s side: that they endorse her actions, in this dark situation, faced with such monstrous ingratitude and with such coldness of heart? The answer to that question must be an emphatic ‘No’. The killing by a mother of her own children is a monstrous action, and the Athenians felt that no less strongly than we do. Consider here the reactions of the chorus – women, like Medea, and on her side from the start. In her first bitter altercation with Jason, the chorus makes it clear where its sympathies lie: What you say may sound convincing, they tell him; but in my opinion, you are betraying your wife (lines 576–7). But when she announces her change of plan – I won’t kill him: I’ll make him suffer, forever, by killing my children – the chorus is unequivocal: I oppose this plan! (line 813). The playwright, in fact, has arranged his action in such a way that we are suddenly brought up short: that we, like the chorus, are suddenly forced to stop, to change gear, and to reconsider.

  Medea was, indeed, a victim, shamefully mistreated and betrayed by Jason, after saving his life and giving him her love. We had entered into that situation, and we had accepted her point of view. But we cannot, we will not, accept as justifiable, and even as laudable, the murder of the innocent children. ‘But we didn’t realize!’, we want to shout, ‘that you meant to do THAT!’ The killing of young children by their own mother is an action of ultimate horror and shock: it is the brutal denial of everything that we take to be implied by the very conception, by the very words, of mother and motherhood.

  The story of Medea was not, it seems, a very familiar one at Athens, and it is not even clear that the version in which she is a deliberate infanticide was known to the Athenians at all, before this play: in earlier versions, as it seems, the children were killed by Corinthians, after Medea’s murder of their princess – or by Medea herself, but by mistake. Euripides has so written his tragedy that we have no hint of this horrid action until the middle of the drama. It comes then as an appalling shock. The children are innocent; they have done nothing wrong; and (above all) she is their mother – a word that implied for the Athenians, as it continues to imply for us, emotions and actions of love and protection and, even, of self-sacrifice. It implied the absolute opposite, in fact, of the unnatural and horrendous, of the absolutely unheard-of, action of their murder. And even if we failed to remember this, Medea herself, steeling herself to the deed, will remind us: Do not remember how dear they are, how you gave them birth … (line 1247).

  One should, perhaps, emphasize at this point that Euripides plays absolutely fair here. At the very opening of the play, we heard the Nurse and the Tutor express great anxiety about the safety of the children, and about the intentions of their mother. Medea is a character capable – evidently capable – of violence. After all, Jason might have reflected that she abandoned her own country, and her family, too; and that she accepted her brother’s killing, in her flight with Jason from her home, when he stole the Golden Fleece and sailed away with it, and with her, for Hellas. She is no quiet, gentle, helpless, home-loving woman, as Jason has very good reason to know, from her past performances. If she is injured, she is capable of hitting back, and to powerful effect. But the poet has taken pleasure in presenting – emphasizing, indeed – her feminine side. She knows how to wheedle and to beg, when her urgent needs, and her final plans, demand that course of action; and she easily deceives and makes fools both of the Corinthian king and of her own unfaithful husband, when we see her succeed in wheedling them, to allow her the extra day of residence: the vital time, which she needs for her revenge, and for their ruin, and for their reduction to final and irremediable misery.

  The poet here, of course, allows himself, and also allows us, the pleasure of seeing a plausible woman using her apparent feminine weakness to entrap and destroy the strength of the men who oppose and menace her: the men, of course, who seem to hold all the power, and who seem able to decide exactly what to do with her and with her children. In fact, they did have that power: they could have expelled Medea at once, without giving her the vital time to organize and prepare her revenge. Doomed King Creon even knows, at some level, that he is making a mistake (line 350). This human weakness – the decent reluctance of the king to exert his full power, and so to get Medea out of Corinth, and out of the way of doing harm, at once and completely – that is what makes it possible for her to destroy both him and his family, before leaving his city of Corinth in her final and shocking triumph.

  Medea and the world of fifth-century Athens

  Allow me, now, to make a little polemical point. Corinth, the scene of these terrible events, was an implacable and long-standing enemy of Athens. Now, some of our own contemporaries, when they interpret the literature of the fifth century BC, want to read into it some politics and antagonisms that all too closely resemble those of our own day, in places where they are not, in my opinion, really to be found. We do not, I think, detect any pleasure here at the thought of Corinthian sufferings and horrors: pleasure which could, quite easily, have been invoked and inserted, had the tragic poet wished to display it, and to enjoy it, in company with his Athenian audience. Politics, I think, are not meant, here, to be anywhere near the forefront of the audience’s minds.

  There will be some plays, composed in the last desperate years of the Peloponnesian War, in which hostility to Sparta, and to Spartans, is expressed with a ferocity, and indeed (sometimes) with a hatred, that are not called for by the dramatic events or situation. Such passages are included, no doubt, in order to cater to, and to gratify, contemporary feelings, outside the theatre and outside the plays, of hostility and hatred for Athens’ great antagonist, now increasingly menacing, in the endless War. It may be that we should be right to imagine, in those places, outbursts of patriotic rage and of passionate applause in the theatre; but feelings in Athens have not yet, we infer, reached such a pitch of hatred, and such frankly hostile sentiments are not yet present, and are not to be intruded, in this passage.

  What we can, perhaps, allow ourselves to see, is the almost magnetic attraction of a setting in Athens, and in Attica, for more and more of the mythical stories, and for the great and famous persons, for the kings and queens and heroes, who figured in them.

  Every year, in Athens, fresh tragedies were produced. It followed that more and more stories were constantly being drawn into the circle of those which one or another poet had treated and developed in this, the newest and most exciting of poetical and musical forms. It followed from that process, of course, and from its Athenocentric focus, that more and more of the great men and women of the myth, and more and more of their stories, were brought into close connection, and into lasting relations, with Attica and with the people of Athens.

  Why, both Oedipus the Theban and Orestes the Mycenean, or possibly the Argive, came to Attica! In fact, it was there that both of them had the culminating and crowning experiences of their fascinating careers – experiences which delivered them from supernatural sufferings and from apparently insoluble chains of disaster. Orestes was finally acquitted of the intolerable guilt of matricide by an Athenian jury – no other jury could do it, and even the prophetic god Apollo of Delphi had declared himself to be helpless in the matter; while Oedipus underwent his final supernatural cleansing, and his eventual deliverance and his passing from this world, nowhere else but (of course!) right here, among us, in Attica: in the Attic deme of Colonus. And it was Athens, not Boeot
ia, that produced the great poets whose works would be read, and read universally, by boys at school; so that these Athenocentric versions tended to become the standard ones, universally known, for the later world. So it was that Cicero, proud of his Roman citizenship, but a man of very high Hellenic culture, found it natural and inevitable, when he happened to be at Colonus, to be mindful of Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles’ final play, and to recite a noble chorus from it.

  In the tragic theatre, in fact, we hear both those heroes as they devote their last words to thanking and blessing the city and democracy of Athens, ever generous and ever god-fearing. Oedipus even promises his posthumous assistance to the Athenians, against any future attack from his own ancestral city of Thebes. So close, so very close, was the link between politics, and poetry, and myth. It would be Athens, too, that offered its shelter and its protection to Medea, the exotic and sinister enchantress from the distant edge of the world. She abused it, of course, attempting to murder the young prince Theseus, who was fated to be the supreme Athenian hero. She was unmasked in the nick of time, fortunately, and had to mount her dragon chariot and go off again on her travels. But this play ends with the magical departure of Medea for Athens – the home of the audience.

  It may be tempting to speculate about a different but not entirely dissimilar kind of contemporary relevance: about foreign erotic entanglements, lightly entered into, but not so lightly escaped from, by Athenian men, both soldiers and merchants, in the real, contemporary, fifth-century world. There must, surely, have been plenty of them. Men of Athens were travelling, nowadays, all over the Aegean and beyond; their adventures might bring them into contact with native rulers and potentates and families, half Hellenized or wholly barbaric; but we are not well informed about their vie passionelle and about any such unfortunate, or scandalous, entanglements and affairs.