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THE VIRTUOUS EMOTIONS OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2021

William Allan
William Allan*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, UK
*
[email protected]
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Extract

The topic of ‘virtuous emotions’ might not seem the most obvious choice for a play featuring an unfaithful husband and a child-killing mother. Nonetheless, what I intend to consider here is how the emotional responses of various characters in the Medea shape our view of their moral character. The moral role of the emotions was clear to the ancient Greeks and, after a long interlude largely dominated by the idea that, as Kant claimed in The Metaphysics of Morals, ‘no moral principle is based…on any feeling whatsoever’, moral philosophy of the past half-century or so has returned to seeing the emotions as a central part of human experience and ethical evaluation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 68 , Special Issue 1: The Emotions of Medea , April 2021 , pp. 27 - 44
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association

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References

1 Kant, I., The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Gregor, M. (Cambridge, 2017), 152Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

2 Hursthouse, R., On Virtue Ethics (Oxford, 1999), 108Google Scholar. For a recent attempt to develop an Aristotelian account of virtuous emotions, see Kristjánsson, K., Virtuous Emotions (Oxford, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See especially Williams, B., Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, CA, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See M. C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness. Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1986), 383: ‘Aristotle, like Plato, believes that emotions are individuated not simply by the way they feel, but, more importantly, by the kinds of judgments or beliefs that are internal to each.’

5 For a detailed survey of current emotion research, see Fox, A. S., Lapate, R. C., Shackman, A. J., and Davidson, R. J. (eds.), The Nature of Emotion. Fundamental Questions, second edition (Oxford, 2018)Google Scholar. On the importance of maintaining ‘a focus on the cognitive and evaluative (“input”) side of emotion’, see D. Cairns and L. Fulkerson, ‘Introduction’, in D. Cairns and L. Fulkerson (eds.), Emotions between Greece and Rome (London, 2015), 3.

6 See C. Gill, Greek Thought (Oxford, 1995), 26–7, discussing in particular the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Bernard Williams.

7 D. Cairns, ‘Review of D. Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks. Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto, 2006)’, JHS 127 (2007), 249.

8 All translations of the Medea are taken from R. Blondell, Women on the Edge. Four Plays by Euripides (London, 1999).

9 Translations of the Nicomachean Ethics are taken from J. A. K. Thomson, Aristotle. Ethics (Harmondsworth, 1976).

10 See D. Cairns, ‘Look Both Ways: Studying Emotion in Ancient Greek’, Critical Quarterly 50 (2008), 58: ‘It matters that we can recognise the scenarios with which ancient Greek terms are associated, just as it matters that the semantic range of many Greek terms differs from that of any English term that we might use to translate them; but no matter how well we understand the usage of the Greek term and the phenomena that it describes, we can never “get inside” the experience of the ancient emotion as such. The best we can do is to use our language to interpret theirs, with the fullest possible attention to the diversity of the data regarding the scenarios to which the terms of both languages refer.’ See also Cairns and Fulkerson (n. 5), 19, on ‘the understanding of multivalence, usage, and contextual significance that is the basis of good translation’.

11 D. Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks. Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto, 2006), 220.

12 Ibid., 233: ‘Jealousy is equally absent in archaic lyric poetry…Nor does it play a significant role in tragedy: no Othello ever stalked the ancient Greek stage.’ For a detailed critique of Konstan's view of jealousy, see E. Sanders, ‘Sexual Jealousy and Erôs in Euripides’ Medea’, in E. Sanders, C. Thumiger, C. Carey, and N. J. Lowe (eds.), Erôs in Ancient Greece (Oxford, 2013), 41–57.

13 Konstan (n. 11), 233.

14 Ibid., 234.

15 Kristjánsson (n. 2), 102, emphasis in original.

16 As it happens, Kristjánsson, ibid., 106, also endorses the surprising idea of Konstan that ‘the concept of jealousy [entered] people's consciousness in the classical world at a distinct point in history, namely during the reign of Augustus’. This stems from Konstan's claim that in Odes 1.13 ‘Horace created a model case of a three-party passion that comes very close to what a later epoch would come to think of as erotic jealousy. We might even credit him with being its inventor’ (Konstan [n. 11], 243). However, as Douglas Cairns has shown, ‘This is neither an accurate reflection of the data nor a plausible account of the genesis of psychological concepts’ (Cairns [n. 10], 56).

17 P. Toohey, Jealousy (New Haven, CT, 2014), 81, 221.

18 Williams (n. 3), 205.

19 Translations of the Rhetoric are taken from R. Waterfield, Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric (Oxford, 2018).

20 On charis as both ‘favour’ and ‘gratitude’, see D. Konstan, In the Orbit of Love. Affection in Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford, 2018), 109.

21 On the role of ‘moral luck’ in modern philosophical debates, see B. Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge, 1981), 20–39; for its importance in ancient thought, see Nussbaum (n. 4).

22 In Greek patriarchal culture, where women depend upon men for so much, female anger is often linked to helplessness, as M. C. Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness. Resentment, Generosity, Justice (Oxford, 2016), 45, observes: ‘One reason why women so often turn out to be the angry ones is that they are disproportionately unable to control the things they need and want to control…Medea is a paradigm of helplessness run amok. Alien, jilted wife, with no rights over her children, she loses everything in one betrayal. Her outsize zeal for payback is related to the size of her loss…Her story tells us that even where norms do not encourage female anger, asymmetrical female helplessness may breed it.’

23 See W. Allan, ‘The Ethics of Retaliatory Violence in Athenian Tragedy’, Mnemosyne 66 (2013), 593–615.

24 This rendering of θυμὸς δὲ κρείσσων τῶν ἐμῶν βουλευμάτων (1079) is preferable to ‘my anger is stronger than my reasonings’, since bouleumata so far has always referred to her revenge plans, and it avoids introducing a simplistic contest between ‘reason’ and ‘passion’: see Williams (n. 3), 205; Gill (n. 6), 10; D. J. Mastronarde, Euripides. Medea (Cambridge, 2002), 22, 393.

25 S. Lawrence, Moral Awareness in Greek Tragedy (Oxford, 2013), 211.

26 On Medea's decision to kill her children, see most recently R. Kamtekar, ‘Explaining Evil in Plato, Euripides, and Seneca’, in A. P. Chignell (ed.), Evil. A History (Oxford, 2019), 104–19.

27 Cairns (n. 10), 52: ‘“putting oneself in the position of another” is a regular feature of ancient Greek eleos’ (with examples in his n. 41).

28 Within Aristotle's system, nemesis (‘righteous indignation’) is favoured as the virtuous mid-point between envy (phthonos) and Schadenfreude (epicharekakia): see Eth. Nic. 2.7.1108b1–6.

29 J. Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford, 2011), 68 n. 4.