Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(75)

The chorus realize that they are too late to save the boys now. They react by singing an ode about Ino, the only other mother they can think of who killed her own offspring, and that was when she was mad, cursed by Hera. After killing them, Ino leapt over a cliff. The chorus are not suggesting that Medea is mad: they know that she is perfectly sane. But the act she has chosen to commit is so extreme that their only paradigm is a woman driven mad by a malevolent divinity.

Now Jason arrives from the palace, raging about Medea. She cannot expect to go unpunished for her killing of the king. But then he clarifies his feelings: I don’t care about her, I’m here to save my children’s lives, from those who want vengeance for their mother’s murderous acts.40 We might have been sceptical of Medea in the previous scene, when she said she must kill her sons so a stranger didn’t do it instead. But it turns out that she was right: Jason also believes an avenging mob are coming to kill his children.

You don’t know the half of it, the chorus tell him. What is it, he says: I suppose she wants to kill me too? Even now, he is underestimating Medea. Knowing her as well as he does, as well as anyone does, he still cannot imagine the extremes to which she will go. The chorus break the news to him: Your sons are dead, by their mother’s hand.

Jason can scarcely believe it. He demands that someone opens the doors of the house so he can see for himself. But he is too late, because Medea appears high above him, above the house itself, on a chariot provided by her grandfather, Helios. She has the bodies of their children with her.

In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle would criticize this plot point in his Poetics:41 he disliked the ‘mechanical’ element of Medea being flown off the stage on a high platform. It is a stage technique that is usually reserved for a god or goddess at the end of a play (hence the phrase deus ex machina – ‘a god from a machine’, mekhanē in Greek). I cannot emphasize enough how significant this is in the context of this play. We may find Medea’s behaviour horrific and unforgivable, but Euripides is showing us that the gods have endorsed it. They have provided her with a literal means of escape from Corinth’s angry mob.

Jason is unable to accept what he sees. He calls her ‘most hated by gods, by me, by mortals’. And yet, there she is, in her chariot provided by the gods. He stands helpless on the ground, a broken man: his fiancée, his king, his sons all dead. Objectively – if we can be objective about such an emotive subject – who does it look like the gods despise? Jason and Medea’s final exchanges are sadly familiar to anyone who has watched a divorcing couple tear each other apart, and weaponize their children against one another (even though the children usually – happily – survive the process). He calls her names, she gloats over his futile rage. He tells her she has caused herself the same pain that he is experiencing, she tells him it was worth it. He blames her villainy, she blames his treachery. The gods know who started it, she says. He demands the return of his sons’ bodies for burial. She refuses: she will bury them herself in the temple of Hera. With one final twist of anger, she prophesies his death: Jason will receive a blow to the head from a piece of the Argo, his own ship. It is not how a hero would wish to go. It only adds to her apparent apotheosis: she can even see the future now.

One last flurry of insults passes between them: he calls her a child-killer, she tells him to go and bury his wife. He wails over his lost children, she reminds him that he will be a childless old man. He yearns to hold them and love them, she remembers that he was perfectly content to see them sent into exile. His belated affection does not move her at all. Jason cries out to Zeus, but he is far too late; Medea is leaving Corinth for good. The chorus are left to make one final observation: the gods make many unexpected things happen. No kidding.

So, given that this play is an undeniable masterpiece, why might it have proved so controversial when it was first performed? Remember that it came third in competition at the Dionysia in 431 BCE. Surely the audience can’t have been shocked by the story, which they must have known very well? In fact, though, it is all too likely they did not. We know of two rival traditions in which Medea’s children die in completely different ways. Were they both well known to Euripides’ audience? It’s impossible to say for sure, but it would go some way to explaining why his play was, apparently, so shocking when it was first performed, although it would soon go on to become extremely popular. The first of these traditions is one that both Medea and Jason raise in the Euripides play: the children are killed by vengeful Corinthians. According to the scholia who write about Euripides,42 the Corinthians then start the rumour that Medea had killed her own sons. In a lovely twist (which is almost certainly apocryphal), the scholia also tell us that Euripides was paid five talents by fifth-century BCE Corinthians to place the blame on Medea and let them off the hook. The second tradition is that Medea kills her children by accident: she takes them to Hera’s sanctuary as soon as they are born, believing the goddess will make them immortal.43 But instead, the children die.

So while we can’t be certain that Euripides was the first writer to make Medea’s infanticide deliberate, it is probable. In which case, no wonder his audience was appalled. They must have turned out expecting a bit of light Corinth-bashing, or perhaps a hapless woman being thwarted by the cruel goddess Hera. And instead they got the terrifying prospect of a clever, violent, rage-fuelled woman: the wife of their collective nightmares.