Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(67)

In 431 BCE, Euripides’ Medea was performed for the first time at the Dionysia festival in Athens. The story of a woman who asks herself the same question – jealous or crazy – and comes up with a horrifying answer must have sent shockwaves through the city. The set of tragedies to which it belonged came third in competition, out of three. Were the audience shocked by the story of a woman who committed the iciest revenge on her cheating husband? We tend to think that tragedy audiences knew roughly what they were getting when one of the big playwrights tackled a story everyone already knew. But – as we have already seen many times in this book – myths change, and it is rarely possible to say that one story is definitively original and all other versions deviate from that. There is every chance that Euripides made a crucial change to the plot of Medea’s story and that is what caused such consternation among its earliest audience. We’ll come back to this shortly.

As we saw with Clytemnestra, there were few things more alarming to ancient Greek men than the machinations of a clever woman, and Medea is the cleverest of them all. If Clytemnestra is the worst wife in Greek myth, Medea can lay a strong claim to being its worst mother. But before she becomes that (in the second half of the fifth century BCE), she is already a dangerous figure: clever, female, foreign and magical.

Medea is a barbarian woman, as the Greeks considered her: barbarian meant anyone not Greek. She grows up in Colchis, on the Black Sea (in modern-day Georgia). She is the daughter of Idyia (a daughter of Ocean) and Ae?tes, who is a son of Helios and brother to Circe, the goddess who turns Odysseus’ men into temporary pigs. So Medea is, at the very least, a powerful witch, capable of working dark magic for her friends and against her enemies. But Hesiod includes her in his Theogony3 – his account of how the gods were born and the world began – which suggests that he sees her as more divine than mortal. Medea occupies a liminal state between goddess and woman, depending on who tells the story.

Like Ariadne, Medea is a valuable ally for a man on a mission. In this case, it is Jason whom she assists on his quest to win (or steal) the golden fleece from her father. Jason’s story is a classic adventure yarn, told by everyone from Homer (in Book Twelve of the Odyssey, Circe recommends a sailing route to Odysseus that avoids the Wandering Rocks, because only Jason had ever made it through them safely) to the 1963 Ray Harryhausen movie, Jason and the Argonauts. As is so often the case with these stories, the relatively recent versions often diminish the role played by female characters more than their ancient counterparts. That is certainly true for Medea in the Harryhausen film, which – like everyone of my generation, I suspect – I have probably seen a hundred times.

The goddess Hera (Honor Blackman, proving that even when she was playing someone made of actual wood – Hera is the figurehead on the Argo – she could make them sexy) has an interventionist role in this version of Jason’s adventures, as she does in Homer.4 Unfortunately, the film follows the unspoken rule of so many Hollywood movies, and can only expand its focus to include one woman at any given time. Multiple Argonauts can be on-screen at once, and multiple skeleton warriors. But Medea takes a back seat among these Argonauts, because Hera is their protector and aide.

This is a pity, because it means the version of the story that so many of us grew up with marginalizes its most interesting character. It also allows us to believe that men on quests do everything for themselves, when that’s rarely the way the story was once told. Every telling of a myth is as valid as any other, of course, but women are lifted out of the equation with a monotonous frequency. And this provides ammunition for those who choose to believe that that’s how stories always were and are.

We might remember one of the stand-out moments in the film comes when the Argonauts encounter the bronze giant, Talos. The automaton is roused when Hercules pilfers a brooch pin the size of a javelin from a stash of treasure on the Isle of Bronze (this is Crete, according to Apollonius of Rhodes).5 Talos attacks the Argonauts and they are helpless to defend themselves against a bronze man with no weak spot. Jason consults his trusty helper goddess, Hera, and she tells him to aim for a plug on the giant’s foot. Talos has, it seems, an Achilles heel. Jason does as she says, works open the plug, and lives to fight another day when the giant crashes to the ground, defeated. This puts him way ahead of Hercules’ friend Hylas, who is squashed beneath Talos when he falls.

Read the same part of the Argonauts’ quest in the Argonautica, an epic poem written in the third century BCE by Apollonius, and we see that this Talos is defeated by someone else: Medea. For Apollonius, the bronze man circles the island three times a day.6 Talos is invulnerable, except for a vein at his ankle. He lobs rocks at the Argonauts, and they are terrified of him. But Medea is not. Listen to me, she says. Only I can overpower this man, whoever he is . . . Keep the ship out of range of his rocks until I have beaten him. Medea is calm when the Argonauts are panicking, she is brave when they are fearful, and most of all, she is powerful. She uses her magic to put the whammy on Talos (I paraphrase Apollonius very slightly – he says ‘by the force of her knowledge of potions’)7 and the bronze man grazes his ankle with a sharp rock he is holding. The ichor – which gods have instead of blood – runs out of him like molten lead and he crashes to the ground. This is Medea at her most impressive: using magic to forge a connection to Hades and cause the downfall of this bronze figure that has terrorized a shipful of male heroes. There is something extra-sinister about the way she does it, too. Had she used wit or guile to overthrow their enemy, she would still be impressive. But to make him destroy himself, to have him home in on his only weak point? This is a woman to be reckoned with.