Medea

Overview

Medea is seventy pages, it takes place in a single day outside a single door, and almost nothing happens on stage. There is no battle, no chase and no spectacle until the last minute. What there is is argument: five long confrontations, each of which Medea wins, and between them a series of monologues in which she talks herself into and out of the thing she is going to do.

Two pieces of background are doing heavy work before the first line. Medea is not Greek. She is the granddaughter of the sun, a princess of Colchis at the far end of the Black Sea, and a sorceress. When Jason came for the Golden Fleece she betrayed her father, drugged the serpent, and killed her own brother to slow the pursuit. Everything Jason has, he has because of her, and she has nothing except him. That is the situation the play opens on, at the moment he announces he is marrying the king of Corinth’s daughter.

Euripides seems to have invented the version we know. In earlier tellings the children of Medea died at the hands of the Corinthians, or by accident. Making their mother kill them deliberately, on purpose, having thought about it, is his decision, and the whole play is the working out of that decision.

What happens

The Nurse opens with a wish that the Argo had never sailed, and tells us that Medea lies inside refusing food and crying out about oaths. The Tutor brings worse news: Creon intends to expel her and the boys from Corinth. Medea’s voice is heard from inside, cursing.

She comes out composed, and speaks to the chorus of Corinthian women, not about her own case first but about theirs: the dowry that buys a master, the impossibility of leaving, the strangeness of a husband’s house, the lie that women are safe. She asks only for their silence if she finds a way to make her husband pay. They give it, and that promise binds them for the rest of the play.

Creon arrives to banish her in person, afraid of her, and admits he is afraid. She asks for one day to arrange somewhere to go. He knows it is a mistake, says so, and grants it.

Then Jason, and the play’s central argument. He is smooth, aggrieved and entirely reasonable in his own terms: the marriage is a career move that would have secured the children’s future, she is being hysterical, and anyway she owes him, since it was Aphrodite who made her help him and living in Greece is better than living among barbarians. She answers him point by point and he has nothing left but an offer of money, which she refuses.

Aegeus, king of Athens, passes through on his way from the oracle, childless and hoping for a cure. Medea promises him drugs for his childlessness and asks for asylum in return, and makes him swear. The moment the oath is given she has a destination, and the plan becomes possible.

She calls Jason back and performs a reconciliation, weeping, admitting she was foolish, asking that the children at least be allowed to stay. She sends them to the new bride with gifts: a fine robe and a golden crown. A tutor returns with the news that the gifts were accepted and the children may remain, and it is the best news in the play and the worst.

Her last monologue is the hardest scene in Greek tragedy. She holds the boys, looks at their faces and hands, and cannot do it; then can; then cannot. She sends them inside. A messenger describes what the robe and crown did to the princess and to her father when he embraced her. Medea goes in. The children are heard crying out, and the chorus stands at the door and does nothing.

Jason arrives to save his sons from the Corinthians and finds Medea above the house in a chariot drawn by dragons, sent by her grandfather the sun, with the bodies beside her. He is not permitted to touch them or bury them. They argue one last time, and she leaves for Athens.

How to read it

Read the confrontation with Jason twice, and try the second time to make his case as strong as you can. The play is much more disturbing when you notice that his reasoning is ordinary, that most of Athens would have agreed with him, and that Medea’s counter-arguments come from a position nobody in Athens occupied.

Watch the chorus. They agree with her, they promise silence, they beg her not to do it, and then they let it happen. Their position is close to the audience’s, and Euripides knows it.

Read the final monologue slowly, and keep track of how many times she changes her mind. The rhythm of that scene is why the play survives; it is the only place in Greek drama where someone thinks in front of you at that speed.

Do not treat Medea as either a monster or a heroine. The play grants her the argument and refuses to let the argument justify the act. Both halves are the point, and a reading that drops either one makes it a smaller play.

Note the ending. Aristotle disliked it, and the standard complaint is that the chariot is a god from the machine that resolves nothing. But Medea is a granddaughter of Helios and has claimed divine descent from the start, and the device puts her in the place a god occupies at the end of a Euripides play. Whether that is a vindication or the most frightening moment in the text is worth arguing.

Questions it raises

• Medea says she knows the evil she is about to do and does it anyway. Is Socrates simply wrong that nobody errs willingly, or is she describing something other than knowledge?
• Her speech on the condition of women is entirely general and entirely persuasive. Does the play endorse it, or use it to explain a woman it then condemns?
• Jason’s defence is that the new marriage would have secured everyone’s future. Is there anything wrong with his argument other than who is making it?
• Why does she kill the children? She gives several reasons at different moments. Do any of them hold?
• The chorus knows and says nothing. What does the play think about the bystanders who agree with you?
• She escapes unpunished, in a god’s chariot, to a promised refuge. What does it mean for a tragedy to end without the guilty suffering?