Few mythic narratives of the ancient world are more famous than the story of the Colchian princess/sorceress who betrayed her father and family for love of a foreign adventurer and who, when abandoned for another woman, killed in revenge both her rival and her children. Many critics have observed the complexities and contradictions of the Medea figure—naive princess, knowing witch, faithless and devoted daughter, frightened exile, marginalised alien, displaced traitor to family and state, helper-maiden, abandoned wife, vengeful lover, caring and filicidal mother, loving and fratricidal sister, oriental ‘other’, barbarian saviour of Greece, rejuvenator of the bodies of animals and men, killer of kings and princesses, destroyer and restorer of kingdoms, poisonous stepmother, paradigm of beauty and horror, demi-goddess, subhuman monster, priestess of Hecate and granddaughter of the sun, bride of dead Achilles and ancestor of the Medes, rider of a serpent-drawn chariot in the sky—complexities reflected in her story's fragmented and fragmenting history. That history has been much examined, but, though there are distinguished recent exceptions, comparatively little attention has been devoted to the specifically ‘Roman’ Medea—the Medea of the Republican tragedians, of Cicero, Varro Atacinus, Ovid, the younger Seneca, Valerius Flaccus, Hosidius Geta and Dracontius, and, beyond the literary field, the Medea of Roman painting and Roman sculpture. Hence the present volume of Ramus, which aims to draw attention to the complex and fascinating use and abuse of this transcultural heroine in the Roman intellectual and visual world. The present introduction briefly outlines Medea's Greek history before examining in detail her journey through Republican Rome. It concludes with a survey of her imperial configurations and a preliminary framing of the studies which follow.

For Homer's Circe the story of Argo's voyage was already well known. Although we cannot be sure that the Odyssey's first audience was aware of Medea's role in Jason's story, we do know that by the time that Ovid came to write Heroides, she had already appeared in numerous Greek and Latin texts, in epic and lyric poetry and on the tragic stage. Given her complex textual and dramatic history, it seems hardly likely that any Ovidian Medea could actually be ‘a simple girl'. And yet precisely this charge of ‘simplicity’ has been levelled against Heroides 12 and its Active author. I propose to argue that the Medea of Heroides 12 is complex, not simple, and that her complexity derives from the fact that Ovid has positioned his elegiac heroine between past and future, guilt and innocence, epic and tragedy.

Like all of Ovid's heroines, Medea writes at a critical juncture in her mythic life. But Medea's myth differs significantly from those of her fellow authors, for it requires her to play five distinct roles in four separate locations. Thus while Penelope, for example, plays only the part of Ulysses' loyal wife on Ithaca immediately before and during her husband's return, Medea plays the ‘simple girl’ in Colchis, the murderous wife in Iolcus, the abandoned mother in Corinth, the poisonous stepmother in Athens and the potential filicide back in Colchis. She is a heroine with a well-known and extensive history and so it is not surprising that the first line of Heroides 12 invokes the concept of memory: memini (‘I remember’).

It is now widely recognised that Medea's last words in her elegiac letter to Jason, Heroides 12, combine the terrible foreshadowing of infanticide with a telling metapoetic signature:

quo feret ira, sequar! facti fortasse pigebit;

et piget infido consuluisse uiro.

uiderit ista deus, qui nunc mea pectora uersat!

nescioquid certe mens mea maius agit.

(Ov. Her. 12.209-12)

Where my anger leads, I'll follow. Perhaps I'll regret my deed—

as I regret the attention I paid to my faithless husband.

Be that the concern of the god who now goads my breast!

Certainly, something greater is stirring in my mind!

Ovid positions Heroides 12 as ‘a “prequel” to his own Medea-tragedy’, that maius opus which notionally provides Medea with an appropriate generic setting in which to exact her revenge; elegy is too light a medium to bear the weight of so tragic a denouement. Heroides 12 thus concludes by adapting itself to the contours of the larger Ovidian career—a career in which he was to revisit the Medea-theme for the third time in Metamorphoses 7. There, her life-story is selectively told from the beginning of the Argonautic voyage and Medea's first infatuation with Jason to her magical intervention in his gaining of the golden fleece (1-158); from her rejuvenation of Jason's father, Aeson, to the dastardly way in which she induces the daughters of Pelias, Aeson's half-brother, to murder their father (159-349); and from the briefly told murder of her children at Corinth to her marriage to Aegeus and the attempted murder of Theseus, his son, at Athens (394-423). At this point Medea takes flight once more (424; cf. 350-93, in the wake of Pelias' murder) and disappears from the Metamorphoses for good—or, we might imagine, for yet more evil to be worked.

Seneca's Medea is not a rewriting of Euripides' character. At least, Seneca's Medea shares more similarities with Ovidian Medeas (the extant ones, at any rate) than the Euripidean Medea. Rather than focusing on Seneca's departures from the tragic legacy of Euripides (however important they are for an informed reading of the play), I would like to focus on Seneca's Medea as a potentially Ovidian character. Specifically, I would like to posit that the Senecan Medea reads more like a dramatisation of Medea's experience within the ellipsed Corinthian episode of Ovid's Metamorphoses (7.394-97). Seneca's Medea (more so than Euripides' Medea) identifies with a specifically transformative project, and, one might initially suspect, supplies a neat explication of the transformation missing from Medea's narrative in the Metamorphoses. What we find, however, is that, in dramatising her process of metamorphosis, Seneca irreparably alters our relationship with the transformed Medea.

In the Metamorphoses, ‘Ovid does not explain the reason for Medea's transformation into a sorceress and semidivine, evil being…’, but it is clear in the narration that a metamorphosis does occur: ‘Ovid passes abruptly from a sympathetic portrayal of Medea as love-sick maiden to a tragi-comic account of her career as accomplished pharmaceutria (witch) and murderess.’ But the metamorphosis of Medea's character is signalled just as much by her own retreat into silence. The ‘love-sick maiden’, who lays her thoughts out in the open, gives way to the ‘semidivine, evil being’, who speaks only pragmatically (in incantatory language or to the daughters of Pelias) or not at all (e.g., while flying, in Corinth, and in Athens). The loss of Medea's perspective is much of the reason why Ovid's ‘transformed’ Medea seems so unsympathetic. Seneca provides this missing perspective, and in doing so creates a uniquely sympathetic and inhuman result: Seneca's Medea leaves the stage as abruptly as Ovid's Medea leaves Iolcos and Athens (Met. 7.350 and 7.424, respectively), having committed the same crimes as Ovid's Medea, and as ‘supernatural’ as Ovid's Medea (if not more so), yet her newfound system of values is completely comprehensible. In creating a comprehensible account of her motives for transformation, Seneca's Medea, even as the semidivine ‘pharmaceutria’, seems more sympathetic even as she maintains similarities to Ovid's character.

Medea's awakening love for Jason is the great theme of the third book of Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica. At the opening of that book—that is to say, at the very centre of the four-book epic—the Hellenistic poet signals a programmatic redirection, invoking the Muse Erato to inspire his tale of Jason's winning of the golden fleece, aided by the love of the Colchian princess (Мηδείηϛ ὑπ' ἔϱωτι, Ap. Rhod. 3.3). This is the first mention of Medea in the poem. Writing a few centuries later, the Flavian poet Valerius Flaccus for the most part adheres closely to Apollonius' narrative outline. As we shall see, however, he manifests comparatively little interest in the love story between Jason and Medea, and takes a different approach to the problem of integrating Medea into the plot. Though, as with the earlier epic, she will not appear as a dramatis persona until the second half of the epic, she is mentioned at the very outset of the narrative (1.61-63), and a number of times thereafter in the early books. Thus by the time the Argonauts reach Colchis and Medea enters the narrative proper, she has already been presented to the reader in a number of ‘previews’.

This chapter examines the Medea of Roman painting. In some senses, this constitutes a crazy editorial decision: gems and sculpture, sarcophagi in particular, are a crucial part of the visual culture that pulls and pushes against text and theatre. But in other senses, a two-dimensional focus offers peculiar challenges that situate Medea firmly within the domestic sphere, in cubicula and peristyles; and yet also beyond this sphere. Unlike freestanding sculpture, which actively intervenes in the viewer's space, painting affords access to a parallel universe. Its figures are not cold to the touch like Pygmalion's statue. They are intangible, exciting different desires from those elicited by stone, desires which invite viewers to leave their world behind them; or at least to pause and take stock. In these ways, painting provides a commentary on everyday life—closer to performances on stage than to installation.

Ancient writers, Ovid included, recognised this analogy between painting and theatre. In defending his work against charges of immorality, the exiled poet cites the genre of the mime, asking whether it is the stage that makes its adulterous content permissible and reminding Augustus that his poems had often ‘detained his eyes’, accompanied by dancing. He continues:

scilicet in domibus nostris ut prisca uirorum

artificis fulgent corpora picta manu,

sic quae concubitus uarios uenerisque figuras

exprimat, est aliquo parua tabella loco,

utque sedet uultu fassus Telamonius iram,

inque oculis facinus barbara mater habet,

sic madidos siccat digitis Venus uda capillos,

et modo maternis tecta uidetur aquis.

It is one thing to find Medea compelling, another to make her art, let alone funerary art. This article faces this complexity head on by examining Medea's visual identity within a sepulchral context. It interrogates her presence on Roman sarcophagi of the mid to late second century CE. The corpus is not insubstantial—nine intact relief panels plus further fragmentary pieces offer ample testament to Medea's presence in the funerary context. Beyond this sphere, Medea's emotionally charged legacy needs no introduction, and her characterisation—outsider, avenger, semi-divine sorceress, victim and murderer—is fleshed out by her capacity to fascinate and repel. Modern scholarship fans the flames, as she remains a popular subject for scholars of Latin and Greek literature, mythology and gender studies.

In contrast, Medea's visual sphere of interest has attracted less in-depth attention. Recent studies have acknowledged the implications of her presence on pots and in freestanding sculpture, and most notably, wall painting is beginning to receive careful treatment. Yet art-historians have been more reluctant to confront Medea within the enclosed and predisposed funerary context. Traditional approaches to mythological sarcophagi more generally have favoured consolado as the dominant mode of commemoration, in which empathy and pothos are paramount and protagonists like Adonis and Endymion seen as positive exempla worthy of analogy and assimilation. The deceased is elevated by association with these figures (an association which is often underlined by the use of a portrait head) and the bereaved reassured by the implied interaction of mundane and heroic, mortal and divine. In this way, desire becomes a gloss for grief and loss is translated as yearning.

When Seneca's Medea flies off in her serpent-drawn chariot, shedding ruin, heartbreak and death and leaving it all behind her on the stage, we are too stunned to wonder where she might be headed. As it turns out, this enterprising exile continued her career with great success in Roman Africa. This essay considers two remarkable Later Roman Medeas: Hosidius Geta's early third (?) century tragedy Medea and Dracontius' late fifth century epyllion Medea. Both were products of the flourishing, experimental, literary culture of Roman Africa that produced such writers as Apuleius, Tertullian, Augustine, Corippus, Martianus and Fulgentius. Although the two poems present radically different heroines, both exhibit the sophisticated allusivity, wordplay and interest in formal structures and rules that characterise Latin literature from Africa. One Medea makes a lethal intervention in Vergilian poetics; the other Medea channels a distinctively Statian Muse.

Hosidius Geta's Medea is a short tragedy consisting of eight scenes and three choral songs that recounts the familiar events of Medea's vengeance in an unfamiliar form—it is the first extant example from antiquity of a cento. Mystery shrouds the origins of this Medea—we are unlikely ever to know for certain where, when or by whom it was written. It is probably a late second or very early third century text from Roman Africa. It is first mentioned by Tertullian, who brings it up as an example of the kind of improper manipulation of scripture perpetrated by heretical readers—that is, as a perverted form of reading. Tertullian's digressive expostulation is the first account we have both of Hosidius' Medea and of the cento form, i.e., the creation of poems made entirely from lines or half lines of a master-text. Tertullian's wording, however, implies that his readers will immediately recognise what a cento is, suggesting that this art form had been around for a long time. More interestingly, in light of the later Christian adoption of the cento form, he disapproves of the reading practices their composition implies, and finds Scripture especially vulnerable to such abuse. It is not hard to see why the fundamentalist preacher Tertullian would be alarmed by the poetics of the cento, for centos expose the multivalent nature of language, forcing the reader constantly to focus on the protean ability of words to change their meanings depending on context. To one whose goal is to establish truth according to the authoritative rule of faith, such linguistic play is threatening.

Insofar as we can know, Medea has always been multiple, existing in many different versions simultaneously. She is never simply a literary construction, a stratified intertextual ensemble made up of all the other literary Medeas that came before her, but a product of the values and fears of each culture that imagines her, recreates her, and uses her to represent meaning. The Middle Ages were no different: Medea could figure as an alchemist's guide, as in the Pretiosa Margarita Novella (the New Pearl of Great Price); as an allegory of God fighting the Antichrist in the Ovide Moralisé; as wronged wife in Geoffrey Chaucer's Legend of Good Women; or as a nightmare figure that appears like Grendel in Beowulf to destroy Jason's wedding feast in Raoul Lefèvre's History of Jason. The flexibility of the medieval myth of Medea is staggering—even more staggering than that of the Roman period—stretched as it was across a continent of warring kingdoms, with different authors and audiences pressing classical texts to generate new and culturally relevant and acceptable meanings. However, appropriately enough for a volume titled ‘Roman Medea’, there is one multiple of Medea that drops out of the equation as a direct influence: the Greek Medea, the Medea of Euripides and Apollonius. The loss of the Greek tradition did not impede medieval authors, who found more than enough in Latin texts to inspire them. The basic Latin materials upon which the Middle Ages built their Medeas were Ovid's Metamorphoses and Heroides, along with scattered references in other popular authors like Statius, presentations of irrational women in love like Dido in Virgil, descriptions of child murderers such as Procne also taken from the Metamorphoses, and terrifying witches such as Lucan's Erictho. However, some Latin texts which we might have expected to be influential, such as Seneca's Medea, were marginal to the medieval tradition.