Medea (Criticism)

Criticism

Carole L. Hamilton

In this essay Hamilton contrasts modern audience reaction to Euripides’s play with fifth-century Greek perceptions of the drama.

Euripides’s psychologically realistic portrayal of Medea, who indulges in an excessive form of revenge-the murder of her own children. This is a fascinating study of motivation, yet it is a topic safely distant to modern audiences. The people and society in Medea are part of ancient history. Today’s audiences can consider and understand Medea’s motivation while simultaneously dismissing it as both a work of fiction and as part of a past culture. However, to Euripides’s fifth-century Athenian audience, Medea’s act would, under the circumstances, make perfect sense. These Athenians, congregated in the temple of Dionysus to celebrate an annual ritual of dramatic performances, would give no more than a moment’s thought to Medea’s motivations. Instead, the significance of Medea’s act would lie in the consequences to her society and in the larger philosophical question “is revenge effective?” The fifth-century Greeks would not see Medea as an isolated fictional character but as part of a grander scheme that was part of their everyday lives. According to historian Edith Hamilton in The Greek Way,“Greeks always saw things as parts of a whole.” Medea’s story was not an isolated act of uncontrolled passion but a reminder that things are not always what they seem and that contact with someone tainted with evil represents danger to the whole society.

A fifth-century Greek citizen was only important insofar as his or her connection to society. The ancient Greeks thought of the individual not as a unique entity but as a component in the larger organism of society. The Greek view of the individual differed from the modern view, as Hamilton wrote: “To the Greeks [character] was a man’s share in qualities all men partake of; it united each one to the rest. We are interested in people’s special characteristics, the things in this or that person which are different from the general. The Greeks, on the contrary, thought what was important in a man were precisely the qualities he shared with all mankind.” Thus the Athenian audience would consider Medea’s resemblance to themselves, her place in society, and her effect upon it. Furthermore, the citizen wholly belonged to the city, sharing in the city’s well-being, beliefs, and laws. Religion especially was, according to E. R. Dodds in The Greeks and the Irrational, a “collective responsibility.” If one person committed an act of sacrilege, the gods might punish the whole city. Therefore, each citizen had a moral obligation and civic duty to obey the religious customs and honor its gods. To do otherwise was dangerous: during the final thirty years of the fifth century B.C., intellectuals whose ideas threatened tradition were successfully prosecuted on the grounds of disbelieving in the gods. At the same time, there was no separation between religion, law, and customs — rites, prayers, recipes, and legislature peacefully coexisted. All were civic obligations to which the citizens submitted willingly. “The citizen was subordinate in everything, and without any reserve, to the city; he belonged to it body and soul,” wrote Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges in The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.

Rather than feeling bound by confines of a restrictive society, the ancient Greeks valued their membership in a society; it was critical to them. That is why Jason’s comment, that Medea had found favor among her new neighbors, was not as trivial as it sounds to the modern ear, and why Medea shows so much dismay at having nowhere to go after Creon banishes her. The fact that Medea left her own city to run off with Jason was, to ancient Greek audiences, evidence of a flaw in Medea’s ability to remain connected to her society. The chorus’ reminder, “there is no sorrow above the loss of a native land,” would only confirm what the audience already knew.

Beyond the perimeter of the city or community, humans were connected in other ways. The emotions and drives that lie behind actions and feelings were not simply common sensations but palpable forces that flowed through all humankind. Fate both surrounded the individual and society and also ran through them, moving individuals to act in a prescribed manner. The impulses which tempted humans to misdeeds were considered outside of human control, and “endowed with a life and energy of their own,” according to Dodds. Epidemics and famines were “demons” just as were urges toward sinful acts. Fate was fused with the will of the gods; Dodds quoted Pindar, who put it this way: “the great purpose of Zeus directs the daemon [demon] of the men he loves.” Medea realizes, “The gods and I, I in a kind of madness, have contrived all this.” Against these forces, humans were helpless to defend themselves; they would be foolish to defy the gods. The ancient Greeks had no concept of “will” in the sense of “freedom of choice” but rather felt at the mercy of sensations moving through them. Passions could overwhelm mem and obscure their ability to make rational decisions. These passions might come from the gods, from inherited guilt, or from hubris — excessive arrogance. When Medea argues with herself, she confronts her demon, the irrational force demanding the deaths of her two sons. She acknowledges the wickedness of this act but finds no power to escape the emotions that will force her to act: “Stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury, fury that brings upon mortals the greatest of evils.” The chorus acknowledges Medea’s powerlessness to free herself from the grip of such a force: “Medea, a god has thrown suffering upon you in waves of despair.” Fate possesses Medea, and it becomes Medea’s fate to murder her own children. The concept of Medea having a “motive” or “choosing” to kill her sons would not have made sense to Euripides’s audience.

The Greek rationalists Aristotle and Plato argued that humans did not have to fall prey to the demons of passion but could, with training and resolution, endeavor to maintain their rationality in the face of these demons. Euripides pits the rationalists against the fatalists in Medea in the form of the chorus who consistently represent the voice of quiet rationalism. The Corinthian women sympathize with Medea’s grief and outrage, but they counsel moderation in seeking revenge:“I both wish to help you and support the normal ways of mankind, and tell you not to do this thing.” However, their counsel proves impotent in the face of the forces driving Medea. She tells them that no compromise is possible and turns her attention to calling Jason back. Euripides’s audience would have pondered the question whether Medea had the capacity for rational behavior under the circumstances of Jason’s betrayal and Creon’s decree of banishment. Yet, the question would not have been cast in terms of the conflict between Medea and Jason, two individuals, but of the conflict within Medea, between her rational mind and the fates driving her.

To complicate matters, the Greeks considered guilt a kind of contamination that spread through contact or through inheritance. The Corinthians might indeed have killed Medea’s children to eliminate the danger they represented. Although innocent in their youth, Medea’s offspring would surely manifest her evilness when they grew up because they were polluted through inheritance. All of Medea’s descendants would carry her curse. In a way, her murdering the children and ending her lineage saves Corinth the trouble of either killing them or suffering the consequences of harboring them, for any contact with them was potentially dangerous. The city that hosted them would bring down upon itself the wrath of the gods. Medea’s killing the children while they are still innocent, then, serves as a kind of sacrificial act that purifies the city of Corinth.

The chorus recognizes that Medea, already banished from Corinth, will make herself an outcast by committing her horrendous crime. The women tell Medea that she “is not pure with the rest” and ask her what city could accept a woman who murdered of her own children. The pollution of guilt can result from contact as well as inheritance. Corinth may unwittingly have brought disaster upon itself for welcoming Medea into their society in the first place, falling prey to her charm in spite of knowing that she had abandoned her family and city and had killed her own brother to facilitate Jason’s escape. Or perhaps Jason brought on the disaster by his ambition to marry the King’s daughter and secure a place in Corinthian society; his hubris put his adopted city into danger. Either or both of these contaminating factors led to the disaster of Medea murdering the King and Princess of Corinth. Jason and Medea sinned against each other, but they also sinned against the city of Corinth — their sin was that of profane contact. Jason and Medea are foreigners who entered the city and covertly brought pollution in their wake.

The year that Euripides presented his play, the devastating Peloponnesian War was being waged. This was the first major war the Greeks had fought against people of their own ethnic background, introducing a new difficulty in identifying the enemy. Medea contains a sub-theme concerning the danger of mistaken appearances. When Medea’s sons deliver her gifts to Creon’s daughter, she at first is irritated by their presence — she mistakenly takes them for enemies. Ironically, her first reaction was the more accurate one. But seeing the bright gifts, she welcomes them and completely accepts the pretext of their visit, as Medea hoped she would. The young princess is tricked by appearances, just as were the Trojans when the Greeks presented a “gift” horse that secretly harbored Odysseus and his best warriors. That night the Greek warriors burst out of the horse’s belly and slaughtered the sleeping Trojans. Likewise, the poison in Medea’s gifts takes effect the moment Jason’s new wife innocently dons the robe and crown. Euripides plays on the anxieties of his audience over their ability to recognize enemies and to know when and when not to trust others. Effectively, the King’s daughter was polluted through unknown and dangerous contact with Medea via poisoned gifts. Nor does the cycle end with the young princess. Creon becomes enmeshed in his daughter’s poisoned embrace and dies with her, despite his efforts to disentangle himself. This gruesome detail, related by the messenger in almost lyrical prose, demonstrates how even the desire for contact with a known loved one can bring about disaster.

Creon’s fate most aptly fulfills the closing lines of the chorus: “What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not god contrives.” This is the Euripidean version of “expect the unexpected,” a stock phrase with which a number of his plays abruptly end. Euripides suggests that ironically, passion — the same force that drives humans to desire contact with others — has the capacity to destroy. Jason is guilty of misdirected passion on several counts. He initially brought his fate upon himself by marrying a foreign wife, a known sorceress, and then betraying her. He also allowed his ambitious desire for connection with Corinthian society to turn him away from a faithful, loving wife and their two sons. Medea’s culpability is thus compromised by Jason’s. Medea herself has a passionate, reckless nature, which makes her a perfect medium for the expression of the forces of passion orchestrated by the gods. Whether Medea or the gods are to blame for the infanticide she commits, her act, as far as Euripides’s Athenian audience would have been concerned, would generate a civic disaster. She became a danger for Corinth, and banishing her made her all the more dangerous. Euripides’s deeply pessimistic and fatalistic play would have been disturbing to his Athenian audience; perhaps that is why his tetralogy-which include Medea — failed to win the festival prize.

Source: Carole L. Hamilton, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• Euripides’s Phaedra and Jean Racine’s seventeenth-century version of it, Phedre, portray a woman who immorally falls in love with her step-son and in retaliation against his rebuff claims that he tried to dishonor her. The works examine similar moral ground to that examined in Medea.
• Toni Morrison’s moving novel Beloved (1987) revolves around a historical incident of infanticide performed by a slave mother who is moved to this tragic act by the horrors of slavery — she murders her child to remove it from the life of toil, shame, and pain that she has led. Her act haunts characters through several generations of her family.
• In Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c. 1605) Lady Macbeth pushes her husband to commit murder and then goes mad from the guilty thoughts that plague her. Indirectly, her ambition is responsible for a series of murders, including some innocent children, that Macbeth commissions in his vain efforts to obscure their crime.
• George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) centers on the relationship between Adam Bede and Hetty Sorrel, who becomes pregnant by a local nobleman and abandons her baby to die.
• The Lion in Winter, a 1968 film directed by Anthony Harvey and starring Katherine Hepburn as the powerful Eleanor of Acquitaine, concerns the tense interplay between her and Henry II as he chooses between her and his lover’s brother for a successor to the throne. Eleanor and Henry’s three sons side with her in rebelling against the unfaithful king.